The Great Exhibition

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in 1851 was a key point in Victorian history. It was organised as a celebration the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce as a celebration of modern industrial technology and design. Henry Cole, the driving force behind the project, was amongst many other things, instrumental in founding the National Archives (Henry’s rat was key…)

Hyde Park was agreed as a site but only for a temporary structure. Of the many designs submitted, none was deemed suitable, until Joseph Paxton published a design, inspired by his work on giant greenhouses.

Paxton also had experience in large scale parks, such as the Birkenhead Park, laid out in 1847, which would also turn out to be important.

This could, and would, be fabricated from iron and wood on site, using concrete footings and a vast number of identical panes of glass.

There is more on Paxton, and his Crystal Palace on our Crystal Palace page. 

The Exhibition took place in from 1 May to 15 October 1851, and featured 13,000 exhibits of every conceivable kind, including huge industrial textile and printing machines. See also our blog post.

Six million people—equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time—visited the Great Exhibition. The average daily attendance was 42,831 with a peak attendance of 109,915 on 7 October. Schweppes sold a million bottles of soft drinks, a relatively new innovation – it included the ginger beer and mineral water mentioned elsewhere. Charles Dickens found it exhausting and apparently dispiriting. Charlotte Brontë has a way with words:

Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance. 

Charlotte Brontë

There is a new virtual tour available from the Royal Parks. Nothing else is left: Paxton met his remit, and the building was removed entirely. Three great elm trees which had been enclosed by the building lasted until around the end of the century.

However, the event’s surplus was used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Albert Hall all of which are located close to the site of the Exhibition. The remaining surplus was used to set up an educational trust to provide grants and scholarships for industrial research; it continues to do so today.