The Glass Building the Victorians Built in Six Months and Burned Down in Six Hours

The Crystal Palace was the most photographed building in the world for the second half of the 19th century. It was 1,851 feet long (the year of construction, deliberately so), 108 feet high in the central transept, and built almost entirely of cast iron and plate glass — 293,655 panes, manufactured by the Chance Brothers of Birmingham and delivered to Hyde Park over the winter of 1850–51 in seventeen weeks. The architect was Joseph Paxton, head gardener of Chatsworth House, who had designed a similar but much smaller glass house for the Duke of Devonshire’s giant water lily and had submitted his Crystal Palace design as a back-of-an-envelope sketch after the Great Exhibition’s official architectural competition had produced 245 entries the committee did not like. Paxton’s design was approved in two weeks. The building went up in six months.

It housed the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the first international industrial exhibition in history, organized by Prince Albert and Henry Cole. The exhibition ran from 1 May to 11 October 1851. Six million people visited — roughly a third of the population of the United Kingdom at the time. The accumulated profits funded the construction of the South Kensington museum complex (the Victoria and Albert, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum) and the early endowment of the Imperial College of Science.

Relocation

The Hyde Park location was always temporary. The Great Exhibition Commission had committed to clear the site by 1852. A separate private company — the Crystal Palace Company — purchased the building, dismantled it, and moved it three years later to a low ridge in the south London suburb of Sydenham, where it was reassembled at substantially larger scale (an additional transept was added; the building grew by about a third). The Sydenham Crystal Palace opened in 1854 with reduced admission charges and a new function as a permanent public exhibition hall and concert venue.

The Sydenham building was the cultural fact of late Victorian and Edwardian south London. It hosted the original international cat shows. It hosted the world’s first dog show in 1873. It hosted, in 1925, the first public television demonstration by John Logie Baird, who had a workshop in the building’s south tower from 1933. (Baird’s workshop and most of his early television equipment were destroyed in the 1936 fire — a substantial loss for early television history.) It hosted the British end of the 1908 Olympic Games. It was one of the largest reinforced-glass structures ever built and remained, for eight decades, a substantially defining presence on the south London skyline.

The fire

On the evening of 30 November 1936, the manager Henry Buckland and his daughter Crystal (named for the building) were walking their dog in the central transept around 7 PM when they noticed a small fire in a staff lavatory in the south wing. The lavatory wall was timber. Buckland called the Penge fire brigade immediately. The first fire engine arrived within fifteen minutes.

The fire was not extinguished. The combination of dry timber panelling on the interior, the massive ventilation provided by the building’s hundreds of opening glass panels, and a brisk easterly wind that picked up during the evening produced conditions in which the fire travelled across the entire 1,800-foot length of the building within two hours. By 9 PM the central transept was burning at temperatures that began to melt the cast iron of the structural frame. By 10 PM the central transept had collapsed inward. By midnight the building was substantially destroyed.

The fire was visible from eight counties. Winston Churchill, then in political wilderness, watched the glow from his car on the road from his estate at Chartwell and reportedly said: “This is the end of an age.” The next morning’s Times ran the fire as a banner front-page story; the Manchester Guardian ran two full pages of photographs. The fire was estimated by the responding brigades at 89 fire engines (an interwar London record) and 438 firefighters. None were killed; about a dozen were injured by falling glass.

The cause

The Buckland family’s account remained the standard narrative until the early 21st century: a small electrical fault in the staff lavatory had ignited a wooden wall. Modern reconstruction by London fire-history scholars has converged on a slightly different account. The lavatory fire was probably real but had been smouldering inside the wall cavity for several hours; the timber framing of the lavatory passage was unusually dry from the previous summer; the brisk easterly wind that picked up around 8 PM produced sudden draft conditions through the building’s ventilation system that pushed the smouldering fire into rapid combustion almost everywhere simultaneously.

The legal-financial consequences for the Crystal Palace Company were severe. The company was substantially under-insured (the building had been declared a national monument and the company had assumed government replacement compensation in the event of catastrophe; no such compensation was forthcoming). The company filed for liquidation in 1937. The site sat empty through the Second World War.

What survives

The towering twin water towers at the south end of the building survived the fire (they were too tall to collapse inward and stood for another four years; they were demolished in 1941 to prevent their use as Luftwaffe navigation landmarks during the Blitz). The terraced foundation walls of the central transept survive in Crystal Palace Park in modern London. The pedestrian paths through the park follow the original transverse axes of the building. The 20th-century replicas of Victorian dinosaurs that Paxton had installed at the southeast corner of the park — the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in 1854 — survive in good condition and are the oldest dinosaur sculptures anywhere in the world.

The Crystal Palace station on the London Overground is still called by the name. The cultural-civic identity of the surrounding south London neighborhood — Crystal Palace, with its football club, its triangular high street, and its substantial Victorian housing stock — survives the destruction of the building itself by eighty-eight years and counting. The visible material monument of the Victorian industrial-cultural project lives on substantially as an absence on a south London hilltop.