The Crystal Palace

The commission mounting the Great Exhibition was formed in January 1850 and funded by public subscription. Its building committee, chaired by William Cubitt and including Isambard Kingdom Brunel, invited submissions on 15 March for a temporary building, cheap and quick to raise before the opening set for 1 May 1851. Some 245 entries arrived within three weeks, and all were rejected.

Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, entered with the backing of the commissioner Henry Cole. He made his first concept drawing on 11 June 1850, on a sheet of pink blotting paper during a Midland Railway board meeting. His scheme was budgeted at £85,800, and in July 1850 the commission endorsed it, with Fox, Henderson and Co as contractor.

The geometry followed the largest panes Chance Brothers of Smethwick could make, 10 inches by 49: a 24-foot cube of cast iron and ridge-and-furrow roofing formed the module, repeated across a plan of 1,848 feet by 456. More than 5,000 navvies raised over 1,000 iron columns and 2,224 girders, 4,000 tons of iron in all.

Before building began Paxton added a barrel-vaulted transept across the centre, 168 feet high at the crown, enclosing elms that would otherwise have been felled. Eighty men could fix more than 18,000 panes in a week, and the largest glass structure yet built was ready for exhibits in five months.

Queen Victoria opened the exhibition on 1 May 1851, the first world's fair of culture and industry. Some 100,000 objects were shown along more than ten miles of stands, and Britain and its empire took half the space.

Admission was £1 in the first week and five shillings for the next three; from 26 May weekday tickets fell to a shilling. More than six million admissions were counted at the toll-gates, and 827,280 visitors paid a penny to use George Jennings's flushing lavatories. The exhibition closed on 15 October with a surplus of £186,000, which founded the Victoria and Albert, Science and Natural History Museums.

Against parliamentary opposition, a consortium of eight businessmen, among them the railway directors Samuel Laing and Leo Schuster, had the structure taken down and re-erected from 1852 at Penge Place on Sydenham Hill. Most of the old parts were reused, but the new building was so altered as to count as a different structure, 1,608 feet long by 384 across the transepts. Queen Victoria opened it again on 10 June 1854 before 40,000 guests.

Owen Jones and Matthew Digby Wyatt were among the experts hired to create courts of Egyptian, Alhambra, Roman and Grecian art, and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins modelled 33 life-sized dinosaurs and other extinct animals for the park. August Manns's Crystal Palace Concerts ran from 1855 to 1901, and the FA Cup Final was played on the grounds from 1895 to 1914. The 1895 African Exhibition put African animals, birds and reptiles on show together with a group of eighty Somalis.

The move had cost £1,300,000 against £150,000 for the original building, leaving a debt the company never repaid; Sunday closing, lifted by 1860, was part of the reason. Bankruptcy was declared in 1911, and the Earl of Plymouth bought the site for £230,000 to keep it from developers.

In the First World War the Palace became a naval training establishment, HMS Victory VI, where more than 125,000 men were trained; from 1 April 1918 it passed to the new Royal Air Force as RAF Crystal Palace. It housed the first Imperial War Museum until 1924. In the 1920s trustees under Sir Henry Buckland restored the building, and it made a small profit again.

On the evening of 30 November 1936 Buckland, walking his dog with his daughter Crystal, saw a red glow inside; two employees were fighting an office fire that had begun after an explosion in the women's cloakroom. Eighty-nine engines and more than 400 firemen could not put it out, and within hours the Palace was destroyed, the glow visible across eight counties. Some 100,000 people came to watch, Winston Churchill among them: "This is the end of an age". As in 1866, when the north transept burned, it was not insured for the cost of rebuilding.

Thos. W. Ward of Sheffield dismantled what was left; the south tower came down soon after the fire, its base and foundations given historic status in 2020, and the north tower was demolished with explosives in 1941 — no reason was given, and rumour held that it was to deny German aircraft a landmark, though Luftwaffe crews navigated to central London by tracking the Thames.