Joseph Paxton

The Prince wanted to have a pretty building, and no one could think of anything except ugly brick sheds.

At last, a gentleman called Sir Joseph Paxton said, Why not use glass and iron? And he sat down and drew a sketch of what he thought the building ought to be.

This idea of a glass house was quite as new as the idea of having an exhibition at all, and the Prince was delighted with it.

Very soon a palace of glass began to rise in Hyde Park, and it seemed so beautiful that the people called it the Crystal Palace.

After its move from Hyde Park, the huge wrought iron and glass edifice wound up being about 560 metres in length and around 50 metres high.

It was created by Joseph Paxton, who received a knighthood for his efforts.

For many years, the palace was a great attraction, with its exhibitions of arts and crafts or dinosaurs, its firework displays, balloon launches, its fountains and trees, and grand events such as a three-day festival of Handel's music.

Queen Victoria herself called the place enchanting.

It was sort of more to do with if you were interested in somewhere and you wanted to work, uh, on something in depth.

Then I know George Chadwick, who was my mentor really there, who wrote A Systems View of Planning, he'd written a book on Joseph Paxton, for example, for his PhD, um, you know, uh, um, the engineer, uh, architect, Paxton.

And, uh, and basically, that was the sort of, that was the notion.

So there was no sense of you needed a PhD to actually do anything, right? To actually become a proper-

Who was the title aimed at, and what was it called, and how did it start?

Okay, well, the first title was simply The Gardener's Chronicle, and that was started by Joseph Paxton, Charles Wentworth-Delk, and John Lindley.

And, yeah, they got together, produced this newspaper, if you like, and it was very much aimed at rural life.

It contains an enormous amount of, well, a diversity of things.

In the Victorian days we sneer at, when our fathers could not see that there was any quarrel between knowledge and beauty, both of whom they loved, they built the Crystal Palace as a temple vowed to these twin deities of their worship.

Think what the Crystal Palace was then! Think what its authors intended it to be! Think what, for a little time, it was! A place of beauty! A place where beauty and knowledge went hand in hand! it is quite true that a brobdingnagian conservatory does not seem so beautiful to us as it did to the prince consort and sir joseph paxton it is true that even in the palmiest days of the crystal palace you barked your shins over iron girders painted a light blue my memory assures me and that the boards of the flooring were so far apart that you could lose, down the cracks of them, not only your weekly sixpence or your birthday shilling, but even the sudden unexpected cart-wheel—do they still call a crown that?—contributed by an uncle almost more than a human.

It is true that the gravel of the paths in the grounds tired your feet and tried your temper, and that the adventure ended in a clinging to bony fingers, and admonitions from Nurse not drag so.

but on the other hand think of the imagination the feeling for romance that went to the furnishing of the old crystal palace there was a lake in the grounds of penge park how would our twentieth-century entrepreneurs deal with a lake we need not pause to invent an answer we know it would be something new and nasty how did these despised mid-victorians deal with it They set up, amid the rocks and reeds and trees of the island in that lake, life-sized images of the wonders of a dead world.