London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Ok, today, let’s start with a number.
109,915.
Let me give you that again.
One hundred and nine thousand, nine hundred and fifteen.
People.
All turning up at the same building.
On the same day.
In London.
And the date?
October 7th, 1851.
Exactly 175 years ago today.
And the building?
Well, there had never been anything remotely like it.
A palace made of iron and glass.
Nearly 1,850 feet long.
Nineteen acres under cover.
More than 100,000 things inside it.
Huge elm trees growing up through it.
Steam engines pounding away.
Diamonds.
Elephants.
Guns.
Machinery.
Statues.
Furniture.
Textiles.
Things that glittered.
Things that hissed.
Things that clanked.
Things nobody had ever seen before.
Welcome to the Great Exhibition.
Welcome to the Crystal Palace.
Welcome to Hyde Park on October 7th, 1851.
The busiest day in the history of the Great Exhibition.
109,915 visitors.
In one day.
Now, first things first.
Don’t picture the Crystal Palace down in Crystal Palace.
Wrong Crystal Palace.
That comes later.
This one is right here in central London.
Hyde Park.
Just across the road from where the Albert Memorial stands today.
And what a thing it must have been.
Imagine walking through Hyde Park and seeing what looks like the biggest greenhouse God ever put on earth.
Glass.
Glass everywhere.
Sunlight pouring through it.
Trees inside it.
People inside it.
Flags.
Colour.
Noise.
And London gawping at it.
The Crystal Palace was the work of Joseph Paxton.
And Paxton knew a thing or two about greenhouses.
He was the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener at Chatsworth.
That’s the lovely part of this story.
The Victorians want a building to showcase the industrial might of the entire world.
Architects produce grandiose schemes.
There are plans involving millions of bricks.
There are domes.
There’s Brunel.
There are committees.
There are arguments.
And along comes a gardener.
Paxton had been building enormous glasshouses at Chatsworth.
So his answer, essentially, was: why don’t we build the world’s biggest greenhouse?
And they did.
They built the thing in months.
Prefabricated.
Iron columns.
Iron girders.
Miles and miles of glazing bars.
Nearly 300,000 panes of glass.
And the finished building covered about nineteen acres.
The main structure was 1,848 feet long and 408 feet wide.
And soaring over the middle was a great glass transept 108 feet high.
Why the enormous hump in the middle?
Trees.
There were mature elm trees standing on the site and Paxton simply built the building around them.
Wonderful.
No, don’t cut the trees down.
Put them indoors.
That’s very London.
And of course once you put trees inside a building you get birds.
Which meant the organisers acquired another problem.
Bird droppings.
Queen Victoria apparently raised the problem with the Duke of Wellington.
The Iron Duke’s solution?
“Sparrowhawks, Ma’am.”
You couldn’t make it up.
The Great Exhibition had opened on May 1st.
Its full, magnificent title was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.
And that’s exactly what it was supposed to be.
The world brought its stuff to London.
More than 100,000 objects.
Nearly 14,000 exhibitors.
Thirty-four nations represented.
Britain and its empire occupying the western half.
The rest of the world in the eastern half.
And you could come in and see what human beings had been making.
And inventing.
And discovering.
And dreaming up.
Steam engines.
Hydraulic presses.
Agricultural machinery.
Clocks.
Carriages.
Silks.
Carpets.
Ceramics.
Furniture.
Musical instruments.
Jewellery.
Photography.
Stuff from India.
Stuff from America.
Stuff from France.
Stuff from Russia.
Stuff from everywhere.
And right at the centre of it all was an enormous glass fountain weighing four tons.
Because apparently having built the largest glass building on earth the Victorians looked at it and thought, needs more glass.
There was the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
There was a stuffed elephant carrying a howdah.
There was an umbrella that doubled as a gun.
That’s useful.
Very London weather.
Rain?
Umbrella.
Highwayman?
Same umbrella.
And there were stuffed animals arranged in little tableaux.
Including kittens having tea.
And a frog shaving.
Human civilisation had reached its summit.
Steam engines.
The Koh-i-Noor.
A shaving frog.
And London loved it.
Everybody came.
Queen Victoria came again and again.
Charles Darwin came.
Charlotte Brontë came.
George Eliot came.
Tennyson came.
Karl Marx came.
The rich came.
The middle classes came.
And crucially, working people came.
Because this wasn’t just an exhibition for grandees.
The admission price changed on different days.
And the cheap days cost one shilling.
Which brings us back to October 7th.
Because October 7th, 1851 was a shilling day.
And they came.
Good heavens, did they come.
By train.
By omnibus.
By cab.
On foot.
From London.
From the provinces.
Excursion trains brought people pouring into the capital.
Some workers travelled overnight, spent the day at the Exhibition and travelled back the following night so they only lost one day’s wages.
Think about that.
Night train to London.
A whole day inside this astonishing glass world.
Night train home.
Back to work.
That tells you what this thing meant to people.
For pretty much all of them it would have been the greatest spectacle they had ever seen.
And by October the clock was ticking.
The Great Exhibition was nearly over.
So on Tuesday, October 7th, they poured into Hyde Park.
109,915 people in a single day.
And here’s the number I particularly love.
104,630 of them paid their one shilling at the door.
Just stop there.
Think about the physical reality of that.
One hundred and four thousand, six hundred and thirty shillings.
Coins.
Silver coins.
Coming across the counters.
One after another.
Clink.
Clink.
Clink.
Clink.
Clink.
All day.
Eighteen money takers were normally employed.
On the really heavy days extra men were brought in.
Money porters collected the cash.
Collectors counted it.
Tellers checked it.
Then the money went into iron chests overnight.
And the following morning, October 8th, there was so much silver from the previous day that one cab wasn’t enough.
They needed two.
Two hackney cabs.
To carry the Great Exhibition’s takings across London to the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street.
And The Times noticed.
Even the Bank of England, it said, was beginning to feel the flow of silver from the Exhibition.
There’s your picture.
Morning in London.
Two hackney cabs rattling east.
Boxes of silver inside them.
The proceeds of the biggest day the greatest show on earth had ever had.
And what a show.
More than six million visits over its five and a half months.
Think of the population of Britain at the time.
This was mass culture before anybody had invented the phrase.
It was a world fair.
A theme park.
A trade show.
A science museum.
A department store.
An industrial boast.
An international jamboree.
And, frankly, a gigantic Victorian flex.
Look what we can make.
Look what we can build.
Look what we can move.
Look what we can do.
And towering over all of it was Prince Albert.
This was very much Albert’s baby.
And there’s something touching about that when you stand in London today.
Because the Crystal Palace has gone.
Completely gone.
The Great Exhibition closed.
The building was dismantled.
It eventually went south of the river and rose again at Sydenham.
And in time the district itself acquired its name.
Crystal Palace.
That building too eventually burned down.
So you can’t walk into Paxton’s enormous glass palace today.
You can’t hear the machinery.
You can’t see the elephant.
You can’t inspect the gun umbrella.
You can’t admire the shaving frog.
But here’s the thing.
The Great Exhibition is still all over London.
Because it made money.
A lot of money.
A profit of £186,437.
And the Royal Commission used the proceeds to help acquire land in South Kensington.
And what grew out of that?
Well, look around.
The Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Science Museum.
The Natural History Museum.
The Royal College of Art.
The Royal College of Music.
Imperial College.
The Royal Albert Hall.
That whole extraordinary concentration of museums, science, music, art and learning.
Albertopolis.
Albert’s city.
And there’s something else I love.
The Exhibition wasn’t merely in London.
It changed London.
It created a gravitational field.
It pulled institutions towards itself.
A temporary building occupied Hyde Park for a few months in 1851.
And 175 years later you can still see the consequences written across the map.
Walk out of Hyde Park.
Cross the road.
Go down Exhibition Road.
Even the street name is telling you the story.
You’re walking through the afterlife of 1851.
And perhaps that’s the really extraordinary thing about October 7th.
109,915 people came to see something temporary.
Something that was going to disappear.
And it did disappear.
But its consequences didn’t.
London has a habit of doing that.
Put something up.
Knock it down.
And discover a century later that somehow it’s still there.
So there you have it.
October 7th, 1851.
The day more people visited the Great Exhibition than on any other.
109,915 of them.
104,630 shillings handed over at the door.
And next morning two hackney cabs set off across London, heavy with silver.
If you wanted one image to sum up the Great Exhibition, I think that might be mine.
Not the Queen.
Not the diamond.
Not even Paxton’s miraculous palace of glass.
Two London cabs.
Rattling towards Threadneedle Street.
Loaded with shillings.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
See you tomorrow.