Stephen Brindle (5:15)

Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one.

Dan Snow (5:25)

Another at a gate and lift off.

Stephen Brindle (5:27)

And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Dan Snow (5:34)

Stephen, great to have you back on the podcast.

Stephen Brindle (5:35)

Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Snow (5:37)

Everywhere you go at the moment, every time I land in any city, anywhere around the world, there's a. There's an expo or a this and a that and a this and that. Now is that a new phenomenon? What in 1851, was that something people be familiar with?

Stephen Brindle (5:49)

No, not at all, Dan. Britain was the first industrial society and we were producing mass produced manufactured goods at scale, but imported goods were relatively rare and were restricted to certain categories. You know, rugs from the east, porcelain from France. And there were. And there were issues about getting British goods exported overseas and about people wanting to see the range of foreign Sort of manufactures there might be and there were concerns about the quality of British design, how good is it really? And so people were starting to think about industrial design and export, but there were no big exhibitions at that stage and the idea had to be invented.

Dan Snow (6:32)

So what was the genesis? It was trade, was it? Because, I mean, you hear about Prince Albert being involved, it's a royal do. It all seems a bit grubby just to try and flog a few bits of old iron. I mean, it feels quite modern that.

Stephen Brindle (6:43)

The Society of Arts got involved, but they held modest exhibitions of manufactured goods because they wanted to help British manufacturers give them somewhere to show off their goods in London. But they were really quite small and their secretary was man called Henry Cole, keeper of the public records, one of those extraordinary workaholic Victorians. He was the inventor of the Christmas card, amongst many other things, and he came up with the idea of having a really big exhibition. Part of the problem here was that the French had similar manufacture exhibitions in Paris and theirs were better. So Cole thought we should do something about this, we need to scale up. And he got the Prince Consort involved, Prince Albert, serious minded, intelligent, looking for a role. Queen Victoria wouldn't let him in on the meetings with the Prime Minister, as we know. And so Prince Albert and Cole formed an unlikely but very powerful alliance. And the Prince's support above all guaranteed that doors would open for Cole with this crazy idea for a really big exhibition of manufactures. And without him, something like this would probably been kicked in for long grass by the government.

Dan Snow (7:51)

I never cease to be amazed by the fact that when you're digging around in some strange bit of British life, you quite rapidly you discover the root cause of it all, which is the Anglo French competition. It's fascinating, isn't it? So it's an exhibition, you're showing off British goods. That's great. It's an age of industry. Everyone's wowed at these new gizmos and devices and widgets. Who's the audience? Is it a British internal audience? Are you hoping to attract foreigners?

Stephen Brindle (8:17)

You are hoping for a world audience? Dan, bit more background here. On the one hand, Britain has just built 5,000 miles of railway. The railway mania has happened and so there is internal transport of a kind which only. Which has only existed very recently. And the idea that millions of people might come to an event in London rather than a few thousands has suddenly become a reality. And there are now steam packets going to France, so overseas visitors can come too. So that's one thing. Another thing is that Harvests have improved and the decade called the hungry 40s are over and Europe is feeling prosperous again. And another is that an era of great political instability from 1846 to the year of revolutions, 1848. And so there's a sense that Britain and Europe feel that they've moved past a whole series of great crises. And those, and the feeling of optimism and economies in Britain, throughout Europe are growing again. And I think that's quite an important part of the background because this couldn't have happened in the late 1840s because they were convulsed with political crisis. And Britain is able to welcome foreign visitors on a scale that could never been visited before because of the railways. And it is looking to increase its export markets. And so it is definitely looking for overseas people to come and see what we can do. Yes, all of that.

Dan Snow (9:46)

Wow. So they're going to get steamships over from the continent, they're going to get whizzed up from Dover to London on the train. It's just, it's just a, it's a new world. We think we've been lived through technological change. I mean, the people organizing this were born in an era of horse and carriage and sail powered ships.

Stephen Brindle (10:02)

Well, indeed. And the Prince Consort's interest, I think, was really what generated the step change and meant the government had to take it seriously. And so when a Royal Commission was established in January 1850, it included the Prince, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell and Lord Derby, that is past president, future Prime Ministers were all on the Royal Commission. And there was an executive committee which included Henry Cole and Sir William Cubitt, who was probably London's biggest builder developer, and Robert Stevenson, who was the greatest engineer of the age. So because of the Prince, it had very good representation. But where was it going to be? Had to be in London. They needed a really big building. And so the, almost the only site for it was Hyde Park.

Dan Snow (10:47)

Straight away they're thinking this is going to be, we're going to do a big scale. Why can't they just have it in sort of Burlington Arcade or something? This is from the beginning going to be massive.

Stephen Brindle (10:54)

Is it because from the beginning, beginning that they were thinking really, really big. And this is an aspect I don't quite understand. How do you work out how big an exhibition of the manufactures of all nations is going to be? But what they ended up with was a building that covered 18 acres. So they must have got there quite quickly between the beginning of 1850 and the summer, by which time they'd have had expressions of interest, you know, via British consulates around Europe and actually around the world. They would have had an idea of how many square feet of exhibition everyone wanted. And so half of this was going to be Britain and the British Empire, and half was going to be the rest of the world. And the answer that they ended up with, apparently, was 18 acres of enclosed space. So it would merely involve the largest enclosed structure ever built in history.

Dan Snow (11:43)

That is swaggering confidence as well. It's like, invite the rest of the world. So you're not. You're not just trying to show off British manufacturing, You're like, hey, listen, you got good stuff, bring it along. We're at the absolute zenith of Britain's industrial lead at this point, aren't we? And the Corn Laws have been repealed. There's a confidence around free trade. Anything anyone can make, we can compete with them.

Stephen Brindle (12:00)

Yeah, absolutely. That is how they felt. And a measure of their confidence is that although they realized they're going to need this gigantic building, they didn't really know at first how they were going to build the gigantic building or what it would cost or whether they could do it within their budget, which was about £100,000. Mind you, 100,000 went a lot further in those days.

Dan Snow (12:21)

They had a great British institution. They had a competition.

Stephen Brindle (12:25)

Yeah, yeah, they had a competition. There were 250 entries, but none of them seemed to be buildable for anything like £100,000. And most of them looked pretty permanent, really, like, massive, great new building in.

Dan Snow (12:38)

Hyde park made of iron and brick. I mean, it's a proper. Proper building.

Stephen Brindle (12:42)

Yeah, a proper building, because they thought to be that big, it would have to be. And so their own building committee, which included Robert Stevenson and Isabel Kingdom Brunel and William Cubitt, produced their own design which still had a massive outer shell and a great big iron and glass dome, which seems to have been Brunel's contribution. He would fake in over 10 million BR bricks, and it was vehemently criticised. And it was still rather unclear whether you could build a structure involving 10 million bricks in under a year, which is what they had by then. So by the summer, the whole idea was looking like it might fold, because they suddenly couldn't build a big enough structure in time and to their budget.

Dan Snow (13:24)

Just to dwell on one point here, the idea of having Cubitt, Stephenson and Brunel on the committee together, I mean, three of the greatest engineers in world history is just extraordinary. And I love the idea of the three prime Ministers taking the political heat for as well. I mean this is a serious. I guess this is why the job got done because this was a very, very serious, you know, application and team behind it.

Stephen Brindle (13:48)

They had really set themselves up potentially for one massive failure was the thing.

Dan Snow (13:53)

I guess at this point we announced.

Stephen Brindle (13:54)

This thing, you can't have it called tabastine flop or go pear shaped.

Dan Snow (13:59)

You've announced the date have you as well.

Stephen Brindle (14:01)

I think they'd announced May 1851 for the opening by then.

Dan Snow (14:05)

Right. So you've got a problem, you've got to get a building and you know, for people not listening to this in the uk, the weather in May, it can be very nice but it's, it's. You wouldn't want to have an outdoor festival with lots of delicate bits of engineering and technology necessarily under the, under the blue skies of London in May.

Stephen Brindle (14:19)

So at any rate by the summer of the year before 1850 there was no realistic affordable design. Even Brunel Stephenson and Sir William Cubitt had not been able to produce one. And the idea was in jeopardy. And so it was saved by another of those extraordinary Victorians who's a man called Joseph Paxton. He was self educated and he began his career as a gardener's boy. But he was a gardener's boy at Chatsworth the great home of the Duke of Devonshire and he rose to be the head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire and he was a self taught engineer and architect. He was self taught everything Paxton really and he designed glass houses for the Duke who liked to grow rare species. There was a lily house and then there was a really huge one called the Great stove. And Paxton, who remember this completely self educated man, worked with Midlands manufacturers to devise a new system of glazing which could be manufactured at scale for these huge greenhouses he was building at Chatsworth which had been some time before the great stone was about 1836-40. So Paxton became the Duke of Devonshire's right hand man. He was such a brilliant, hard working, 16 hour day Victorian kind of guy and he represented the Duke's interest on the board of the Midland Railway. And because he read the papers and he'd heard about The Troubles the 1851 exhibition was having and he was at a boring board meeting of the Midland Railway and he did a doodle on his blotting pad. And so Paxton had an idea that what he needed was the world's biggest greenhouse. And he went to London and he got someone to induce him to Henry Cole and he paced the site and he went back to North Wales, where he attended the floating of one of the trusses for Robert Stephenson's Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait. And then he went back to Chatsworth and he spent nine days with his staff there making designs. And on the 20th of June, he set out for London with his design. And Paxton met Robert Stephenson by chance at Derby Station. They both attended the floating of the trusses for Stevenson's Bridge and Paxton shows some designs and said, just. I just knocked this together, thought you might be interested. And Stevenson took him Seaco, and they said, this is a thousand times better than anything which has been brought before us. And so a month later, on 26 July, the design was adopted by the commission.

Dan Snow (16:47)

That's a streamlined commissioning process.

Stephen Brindle (16:50)

A streamlined commissioning process is just the way to put it. Yeah. The design was published in the Illustrated London News and Punch christened it the Crystal palace. And the name stock.

Dan Snow (17:00)

This is untested technology on the most enormous scale at the heart of the imperial capital. Having invited the rest of the world to come and check it out. I mean, this could not be more risky.

Stephen Brindle (17:11)

It was certainly kind of risky.

Dan Snow (17:13)

It.

Stephen Brindle (17:13)

It, in a way, wasn't as risky as all that, because it was built on very solid technical, technological foundations, which Paxton understood as well as anyone because of his specific experience. And there were two companies in the picture without whom it wouldn't have been possible. And one was a firm of glass makers called Chance Brothers, who were based at Smethwick, and they'd invented a new means of making cylinder glass at scale. Now, as you and your listeners probably know, historically, the way in which you made sheets of glass was to blow sheets on the end of a long tube and you'd hope to blow quite a big sheet. You might be able to cut some little panes off it. But the other newer method was to make a cylinder of glass. Please don't ask me to explain how they do that. You cut the cylinder on one side and while the glass is still in a ductile state, you flatten it out. And Chance Brothers invented a new means of doing this at much larger scale. And they could make pains, which up to about 2ft wide, I think, but in quite long strips. So that's how the Duke of Devonshire had been able to glaze his enormous green clouds at Chatsworth. And the other company were iron founders and they were called Fox, Henderson & Co. And they're really one of the most remarkable companies in all history because they had works also, as it happened, at Smethwick in the East Midlands, where about 2,000 of their workforce made iron castings and forgings. And in particular what they made was prefabricated buildings.

Dan Snow (18:51)

And those buildings, just to interrupt there, those buildings, what they would be structures to erect in gardens or used for the military or industrial.

Stephen Brindle (19:00)

These were mainly more industrial things because the railways generated a large need for quite wide span roofs. Good sheds, engine sheds, locomotive repair sheds, carriage sheds, needed to rebuilt to move really large buildings quite quickly. And so what Fox Henderson did was they made prefabricated roof trusses and roof frames and sometimes framed buildings. And the other thing they'd learned how to do was to build wide span roof that is about 100ft wide to span the slipways in Royal naval dockyards. Because if you could build a ship or repair a ship under cover so it wasn't getting rained on the whole time, the whole thing went much better. And Fox Henderson were one of two companies that knew how to make wide span prefabricated roofs in naval yards. And there are a couple of places where they remain. I think there's one in Pembroke and there's one of their. One or two of theirs in what was the naval dockyard at Deptford, the place now called Convoy's Wharf. And so they had really unparalleled expertise in large scale prefabricated iron construction. And the only reason that Paxton could say I can deliver this is because he knew Fox Henderson & Co. And Chance Brothers very well indeed.

Dan Snow (20:20)

So there's just a coming together, not only. I mean, at every point of this story, there's a coalescing, there's a coming together of different technologies that just make this possible at exactly this moment in time.

Stephen Brindle (20:31)

Yeah, absolutely. What Paxton had devised with his staff at Chatsworth in nine days was designed for a vast glass house three storeys high. And he could do this because these two companies, he knew they could make it, but it still had to be a new design. It was based on a module which was based on the biggest pane of glass that he knew Trans Brothers could make. And there'd be a modular system for making the glazing in a system which was known as Paxton Roofing, which is like a ridge and furrow system, so the roof goes slightly up and down, framed in wood. It had to do that so it would drain the weather efficiently. And the iron frame, there's a limited number of standardised parts which could be made one, two or three stories high and reproduced almost indefinitely. But it sort of started with the widest pane of glass that Chance brothers could make. And the module sort of started with that. And the design was really as much about the techniques used and how it could be made in parts, delivered by terrain and wagon and assembled on site. And there were further elements of the design which they developed as they went along, like the design design for glazing. It involved cars running on temporary tracks along the roof of the building. And the design for drainage of the vast roof through the columns. That really had to be developed as they went along because 18 acres is going to catch a lot of rain. And so the design is partly to do with the techniques by how it's made. And it partly had to be improvised as they went along. But it was a miracle of organization design. It was the largest enclosed space that had ever been built in the world with 3,330 columns and 2,224 girders. And it was 1848ft long and 456 wide. That's about 563 meters long. And it was built in five months flat by 5,000 labourers. It was built in five months. The biggest enclosed space in history. It's hard to believe, isn't it?

Dan Snow (22:40)

It is hard to believe. And don't tell me it was on budget. I can't cope with that.

Stephen Brindle (22:44)

It was built at a total cost of £89,000 and their budget for the building was 100,000.

Dan Snow (22:49)

So it was incredible speed. I came in well under the budget. Right, okay. And was it supposed to be temporary?

Stephen Brindle (22:57)

Yes. Yeah. And it was. It was dismantled afterwards and rebuilt.

Dan Snow (23:00)

So the building was a huge success. Did it get a bit hot in there? I mean when. When everyone was packed in. Well, tell me about the exhibition itself.

Stephen Brindle (23:09)

Well, there were problems and there were criticisms and there were opponents. People said the crowds of people would spread cholera and they said there would be riots and they said there'd be revolutions with so many people coming together and the crowds would threaten public morals. And they said the heath of building would make people faint. And then there were rather more realistic criticisms. This is very English one, which related to trees in Hyde Park. And they were going to have to fell about six or seven large trees. And people weren't happ about that. So the building had to be given a big cross transept with an arched roof which actually greatly improved its appearance in order to house a number of big trees. And so the building was built around these big trees. But there were birds nesting in the trees which were trapped inside the building. And they realized that they trapped several hundred birds inside the Crystal palace at quite a late stage, which were going to poo all over the exhibits.

Dan Snow (24:09)

Oh, right. And how do they get rid of those?

Stephen Brindle (24:12)

Well, they couldn't use slingshots, of course, or shotguns. Glass commissioner going out of their minds. And Prince Albert tells Queen Victoria, as it might be over the breakfast table, and she said, send for the Duke of Wellington, who was duly sent for, and the Queen explained the problem to him and he said simply, try sparrow.

Dan Snow (24:33)

Hawks, Mum, that's brilliant. So I mean, the victor of Waterloo brings a bit of old school wisdom. It's not like he was suggesting old school common sense.

Stephen Brindle (24:42)

No one had thought of that until the Duke of Wellington was called in.

Dan Snow (24:46)

So the Duke of Wellington's last, his last great victory was over the London Sparrow.

Stephen Brindle (24:52)

Yeah, and saved the Great Exhibition.

Dan Snow (24:54)

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Dan Snow (28:38)

So they dealt with the birds and the bird poo problem. The other great British tradition is everyone's saying something's going to be rubbish and then falling swooning for it when it actually happens. Do you get that typical profile here?

Stephen Brindle (28:48)

Yes, indeed. There's a rather wonderful passage in a letter by the Prince Consort in which he goes through all of the terrible things which people predicted would happen. And of course, it was a triumphant success. And on the opening on 1 May in 1851 was attended by 24,000 people amassed, choirs sang and Queen Victoria opened the exhibition and she wrote the tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building with all its decorations and exhibits, all this was indeed moving and a day to live forever. God bless my dearest Albert and my dear country, which has shown itself so great today. And she came another 22 times, so. So Queen Victoria obviously really enjoyed it.

Dan Snow (29:32)

So she wants to go and have a proper look around all the.

Stephen Brindle (29:35)

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot to see, too.

Dan Snow (29:37)

Well, do you tell me how much was there to see? So you go in. Is it just what it's like? Presumably at the time revolutionary, but now familiar, like a modern trade show or a modern exhibition? Is this what the stalls?

Stephen Brindle (29:49)

Yeah, there are lots of really Fine contemporary views, watercolored views. So if listeners just Google Great Exhibition 1851, go to Images, you'll find lots of them. You're picturing an enormous enormous glass roof building with one very long main nave. It's about a third of a mile long and it's three stories high. So there are upper galleries on each side. And this main nave runs whole length. And there's a big cross transept with an arch roof which goes higher, which has trees. And the simple and effective colour scheme whereby the columns yellow and blue and the girdes are blue. And there were four basic categories, raw materials, machinery, manufactures and fine art. And each class had a jewellery and the jewelry was awarded prizes and there was a huge catalogue of winners awarded at the end. And was a separate machine hall with a boiler house so that they could display steam powered machinery of all times running. And lots of people bought season ticket and went back again and again because there was so much to see. And countries like France and Germany and Russia and the United States and what were then territories of the British Empire, most notably India, took great sections of it and displayed exhibitions. And each of these would have been like a super crowded department store or trade fair. So there was really a huge amount to see.

Dan Snow (31:15)

And tell me some of the highlights and what, what were people talking about? What, what were people surprised by?

Stephen Brindle (31:21)

Oh, early photographs in particular and just they've already been invented. Some of the first photograph, early photographs in existence are of the exhibition taken by Fox Talbot. The Koh I Noor, the great diamond which we had Britain had acquired. I think, I think it was a slightly sort of extorted gift out of an Indian prince, as far as I recall, rather less contentiously, the great, great glass fountain at the center, made by another firm of glass makers called Thomas Osler. There was Baron Marichetti's plaster model for the statue of Richard the Lionheart, which eventually got made in bronze and put outside the House of Lords.

Dan Snow (32:00)

Oh, the one that's still there today?

Stephen Brindle (32:02)

Yeah, that's right. There was a stuffed elephant carrying a howdah in the Indian section. Then there were. There were slightly more ridiculous things like an umbrella which is also a gun. And there were lots of tableaus of stuffed animals, tableaus of stuffed kittens having tea, that kind of thing. And then there were the sort of crazily over ornamented sideboards and cupboards and mirrors and things which were among the more perhaps unfortunate aspects of taste around that time.

Dan Snow (32:38)

So it's a mixture of businesses really showing off at quite big at Large scale and then, and then consumer stuff that you could buy little home furniture, knickknacks for your home.

Stephen Brindle (32:48)

Absolutely. There was something called the medieval court, because this was the height of the Gothic revival. And the medieval court was put on by Awmpugin, the great designer who is designing the interior of the palace of Westminster. And the medieval court was all of the wonderful recreated medieval style items you could buy for your home or your church. So if you thought what your house really needed was a Gothic chandelier or Gothic dining table and chairs, you just merge on around to the medieval evil court and place an order with the relevant manufacturer.

Dan Snow (33:22)

You've got tens of thousands of people going, where do they go? To the toilet.

Stephen Brindle (33:29)

You've totally caught me out. I am, so to speak, caught short. Let us hope that provision was only suitably large quality, suitably large scale, because the average daily attendance was 42,000. So that's, that's a lot of toilets, isn't it? And on the peak day, 100,000 people came, came and over, I think it was five months, 6 million people came, which is about a third of Britain's population at the time. So it's the largest mass event in history to date. And it was possible because of the.

Dan Snow (34:01)

Railways and it was both the largest mass of history but, but it was also the trailblazer. It was the forerunner of this, of the world that we recognize today where we, we travel around, we go to gigs and exhibitions and festivals and conferences and, and this is how modern humans live. But it all begins here.

Stephen Brindle (34:16)

It's fascinating, yeah, because railways had really just come into existence and there was a national railway network. And so the idea that people could travel and travel regularly, quite long distances for pleasure or to go and see something, hardly existed as an idea, except for the very rich. But this was. But mass tourism was really invented for the Great Exhibition and Thomas Cook, the entrepreneur, founded his business running excursions to see the exhibition. So in a very literal way, you could say the mass travel business was founded on the base of it.

Dan Snow (34:51)

Were all the organizers happy with how it went? Was there any concern with the sort of French manufacturers, the German manufacturers, looking a bit tasty? Or were things roughly as they'd been intended to be, showing off the greatness of Britain?

Stephen Brindle (35:04)

I think the event was judged to be such a huge success that I don't think they worried particularly much over much about the quality of foreign manufacturers. We know in the long term they probably shouldn't have been. And in the long term, within about 30 years, both Germany and the United States had overtaken Britain in the primary measures of iron and steel production and things like that. But at the time it was just far too great a success and triumph in a way, against the odds for people to feel very worried about that. And it inaugurated a decade of strong economic growth and really of great optimism across Britain and Europe and in France. These were the early years of the Second Empire. It was a great decade for France too.

Dan Snow (35:51)

So it was a big success.

Stephen Brindle (35:53)

It did. And it even made money. It made a profit of £186,000, which might sound today like, you know, wouldn't buy you a flat in an outer London borough. But at the time that left a whole range of legacies. And a new commission was set up, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, which is, which still exists. And it bought the Gore House estate, which was a big piece of land in Kensington. And part of it was used for property development to build very posh houses on Prince's Gate and Queen's Gate. And they were meant to generate an income. And it provided sites for cultural institutions which include the Albert hall and the new Royal College of Art and Imperial College and the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum and the V and A all on site site bought by it. So they all benefited and the site became known as Albertopolis.

Dan Snow (36:49)

So Albertopolis, which people can go and visit today and be very familiar with today, world class universities, world class museums and cultural venues that was all paid for out of the profit of the Great Exhibition.

Stephen Brindle (36:59)

Yeah, the site and the commission still exists and it's been awarding scholarships and fellowships for research in the sciences and engineering. Still today, young scientists and engineers are still getting scholarships from the profits made by the 1851 exhibition.

Dan Snow (37:14)

That is remarkable. And I suppose that's why Albertopoulos, that's why when he died he had the enormous memorial overlook this, this new little mini city he'd managed to make happen.

Stephen Brindle (37:25)

The prince died 10 years later in 1861. And it is rather shocking to think, you know, he was about, only about 42 when he died. So the Prince, you know, was not an old man. He was in his early 30s when he did all this. And in the mood of national mourning, Prince had been associated with this great national triumph. And two memorials were built because they were Victorians after all. And the Albert Memorial is actually on the site of the, the exhibition of the, the Crystal palace in Hyde Park. So that's the easier place to tell where it is. And there's a marvellous set of gates called the Colebrookdale Gates, which are just a bit up the way from the Albert Memorial. And they were made by the Coalbrookdale Company and they were one of their exhibits at the exhibition. Exhibition. But characteristically for the Victorians, they. They wanted a memorial to the exhibition itself. So there was already a memorial to The Exhibition of 1851, which is the one to the south of the Albert hall, and that is also a statue of the prince holding a copy of the catalogue. So it looks, if it's a memorial to him, but it's actually a memorial to the exhibition.

Dan Snow (38:31)

And also, characteristically, the Victorians, they found good use for the. The building itself. They didn't just junk the whole thing.

Stephen Brindle (38:38)

Yeah. So what's the use prefabricated buildings if you can't dismantle them and put them somewhere else? So Fox, Henderson and company, who'd built it in the first place, they bought it back and they dismantled it. And the company had been founded, which involved Paxton and several other people involved in the exhibition. And they bought a big plot of land in Sydenham in South London, our hill. And the Crystal palace was rebuilt there, and a great park was created around it, and it became a huge visitor attraction. So the name Crystal palace in South London comes from the fact that the Crystal palace was rebuilt there. It was smaller, but architecturally it was more elaborate. It had arched transepts, arched cross buildings at three points. And so it was quite a lot smaller, but it looked more elaborate. And it was like a theme park. It was a setting for mass concerts and events, and it had fixed displays in it, some of which were like artistic representations of historic cultures. So there was one area which was like an Egyptian temple, and there's one which, like an Assyrian temple, and there was one which was like a recreation of the Alhambra in Granada. But then there were other areas which were like big concert venues, and it was set in this great park. And at the far end of the park there was a lake which was equipped with plaster dinosaurs, which you can still see there.

Dan Snow (40:06)

And they remain. And they remain because the rest of the building, tragically doesn't.

Stephen Brindle (40:10)

Yes. Yeah. The. The Crystal palace in Crystal palace in. In South London was destroyed by fire in 1937. And to many, it seemed to symbolize the end of Victorian Britain. So what's still there are the railway stations and the terraces. A lot of the statues and rather fabulous model dinosaurs are there. And Crystal palace gave its name to a whole suburb, so there were lots of legacies of it. There was the new commission, all the scholarships they paid for the establishment of Albertopolis. Like all those museums, the palace itself had an afterlife. But above all, it gave birth to a certain idea of the world being potentially a global marketplace and of progress through peace and free trade.

Dan Snow (40:54)

Wow, that is an extraordinary legacy or an event that must have just felt so revolutionary and exciting to see live through. Thank you very much, Steven Brindle for coming back on the podcast and talking me through it.

Stephen Brindle (41:05)

Dan, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Dan Snow (41:11)

Thanks very much for listening everyone. Before you go, I have to tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a tv. Or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time folks.

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