Conservatories are designed to be harmonious additions to a home, and because of that take inspiration from a lot of the same places as the house they are built out of, as well as some of the historic landmarks of glass and steel that made up the history of conservatories.
Taking care of conservatories and effective repair can sometimes require an awareness of this history, to ensure that the fixes match all of the work that has gone into the conservatory and maintain the structure’s beauty.
A good example of what can happen when this is neglected came from the mysterious destruction of Britain’s most famous conservatory and one of its largest-ever temporary landmarks.
Conservatories And Crystal Palace
The building that would become known as Crystal Palace was never intended to last as long as it did. It was a gargantuan conservatory of clear glass walls draped over a modular cast-iron frame, only meant to last throughout 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition.
The reason for this was out of necessity; plans for what would be the first World’s Fair had only begun to take shape in 1849, and a year later, less than 12 months from the start of the event, construction of a temporary building in London’s Hyde Park had not even started.
There were 245 designs, but only two were even close to fitting all of the required elements for the event.
Enter Joseph Paxton. At this point, Mr Paxson was known for his work on the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth House, which was at the time the largest conservatory ever made and was the home of a variety of exotic plants, most notably the Cavendish banana that he had cultivated.
Mr Paxton was seen as a landscaper and a gardener more than an architect, but on a visit to
London to meet John Ellis MP, mentioned an idea he had for the hall inspired by his work at Chatsworth House, the latter saying that if he could put together a proposal in nine days he should submit.
Allegedly, he spent a Midland Railway board meeting sketching a design on a piece of blotting paper that would later become the basis for Crystal Palace.
It was initially rejected due to arriving too late, but amidst pressure from the general public after it was published in the Illustrated London News, the plan would ultimately prevail, taking just 39 weeks from start to finish.
After the Great Exhibition closed after a successful six-month event, it was dismantled from Hyde Park and reconstructed on Sydenham Hill in a form remarkably different to the one from the Great Exhibition.
Unfortunately, the move was extraordinarily expensive, costing £1.3m (£150m adjusted for inflation) which ended up never being paid back.
This led to the building being increasingly neglected from the 1890s until the 1920s, but just as it appeared that the building would have a new lease of life and remain a permanent fixture of London’s skyline, it caught fire on 30th November 1936.
For reasons that are still speculated on to this day, an explosion in the women’s cloakroom started an office fire that very quickly spread thanks to the wooden floors, setting the entire building alight within hours and burning the palace almost completely to the ground.
To this day it is unknown who started it and why, although John Logie Baird, the man who invented the first working live television system, allegedly believed it was set to sabotage his work, with some of his early mechanical television equipment stored in one of the towers.