Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (31 page)

The surviving cinemas are living monuments to an age when entertainment in London was experienced socially. It was the golden age of the ‘good night out’ because entertainment at home was, at best, limited to the gramophone or a sing-along around the piano, or, from the 1920s onwards, the wireless. I’ve always liked the idea of people getting dressed up for a night on the town and I love thinking about all the millions of multi-denominational Londoners who still do - although I’d advise you to leave the pomegranate in the fruit bowl and stick to popcorn.

CHAPTER TEN

I
accept I am no palaeontologist but I do have one dinosaur-related a fact which I have personally verified and which I am now happy to share with you. For more than 140 years, a small colony of these ancient creatures has been living peacefully in a leafy corner of south London. Good, eh.

The story of how these unexpected residents took possession of their slice of the capital involves a motley assortment of characters, including Queen Victoria’s husband Albert, a brilliant but ruthless scientist who fought with Darwin and founded one of London’s great museums, and a humble farmer’s son who made his name by propagating Britain’s very first dwarf banana. Its plot features the greatest show in the history of London (and I’m not talking about
Starlight Express
), an event which left its footprints in every corner of the modern city and paved the way for some of London’s best-known buildings. It’s a story of high finance and big ambitions, international intrigue and personal vanity. And it all begins with a greenhouse.

Not just any old greenhouse, mind you. This isn’t Uncle Ted pottering around on the allotment, instead think of the greatest greenhouse the world has ever seen. A greenhouse so whopping that you could grow enough tomatoes in it to feed Britain for a year and still have plenty left over to go squidgy in the fridge. A greenhouse so glorious that it attracted visitors from around the globe and came to be known as the eighth wonder of the world. A greenhouse built to house the greatest show on earth. A greenhouse they called the Crystal Palace.

It was created, of course, not for tomatoes, but for the Great Exhibition - the celebrated Victorian extravaganza which, for a few glorious months in the summer and autumn of 1851, took over a huge plot of land in London’s Hyde Park to show off all that was biggest and best about the British Empire. You may remember that I came across some of the original display cabinets from the Exhibition at Floris perfumiers in Jermyn Street while following the trail of Beau Brummell through the fashionable West End. They’d been bought by the shopkeepers after the Exhibition had closed to the public and the buildings which housed it moved from the site in Hyde Park. It was this chance discovery which set my imagination running: what other remains from this legendary event had survived in the modern city, and where might I find them? This led me via Hyde Park to south London’s very own Jurassic Park and an encounter with the aforementioned dinosaurs.

The legendary exhibition was dreamed up by Henry Cole, one of those great Victorian movers and shakers who dipped his fingers into a whole smorgasbord of different pies over the years. His impressive CV includes central roles in the creation of the Penny Black - the world’s first postage stamp - and the building of the Royal Albert Hall, although his forthright approach to fundraising also made him, according to Prime Minister Lord Derby, ‘the most generally unpopular man I know’. High praise indeed, although it didn’t prevent Cole from being appointed in 1850 as the boss of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, an impressive-sounding outfit of the great and good dedicated to ensuring that the British Empire continued to lead the world in just about anything you can think of. Always on the lookout for new ideas, Cole had gone to Paris to visit their national exhibition and returned home to England with his imagination on fire. Duly inspired, he hotfooted it back to the Society and argued the case for a bigger, better version of the Paris show to be staged in London - Hyde Park, to be precise. He pitched his plan for a great international exhibition to none other than Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, who was president of the Society and, like every good Prussian, a champion of all things British.

With Albert throwing his full weight behind proceedings, you might have thought it would be a mere bagatelle to get the show up and running. But it seems that there were plenty of people who didn’t like the idea one bit. Some worried about the sheer number of people likely to descend on London from the farthest-flung corners of the kingdom, bringing a tidal wave of death, disease and destruction in their wake, which were genuine fears back then, it seems.

In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had published
The Communist Manifesto
, much of it written, by the way, in the British Library in London. The same year had seen a string of revolutions in other European countries, and in London the Chartist movement had organised a mass demonstration in Kennington Park, south London, as part of their campaign for greater democracy - a show of strength which prompted the government to deploy 8,000 soldiers and 150,000 special constables in case things got feisty.

As it turned out, the day passed off peacefully, but the fear of large crowds with the potential to turn nasty lingered on, which is why some people thought the idea of an exhibition in the park was a bad one. According to
The Times
, ‘The whole of Hyde Park and, we will venture to predict, the whole of Kensington Gardens, will be turned into a bivouac of all the vagabonds of London so long as the Exhibition shall continue.’ Others were especially concerned about the threat posed by foreign tourists. An MP called Charles Sibthorpe predicted the return of the bubonic plague to the capital, while the nationalist
John Bull
magazine, in an astonishing display of spluttering xenophobia, quaked at the prospect of ‘the influx of large masses of visitors, whose moral standard in their own homes is considerably below our own’.

As if all the opposition wasn’t enough to put them off, there was another challenge for the organisers to deal with: a suitable home had to be built to house the extravaganza. They launched a competition, inviting any interested parties to submit ideas for the building. These days, of course, the whole process would be much simpler - simply launch a TV show, complete with public voting and a panel of judges, all expertly marshalled by Bruce Forsyth, who may, now I come to think of it, perhaps have visited the 1851 show as a young man. Members of the Great British public would be encouraged to throw their hats into the ring and make an exhibition of themselves in the hope of being selected to help make an exhibition for the rest of us. But the Victorians opted for something more modest.

The competition was launched in March 1850 and would-be builders were given a month - that’s four whole weeks - to cook up a suitable plan. They were only being asked to create a building fit to accommodate the greatest show on earth - how much more time did they need? Two hundred and forty-five designs were submitted, but almost all of them were, to use a technical architectural term, complete pants.

Unfazed, the organisers decided to take matters into their own hands and challenged the members of their own building committee to come up with an alternative scheme. Since the committee included Sir Charles Barry, the man who designed the Houses of Parliament, plus a whole toolbox full of legendary engineers, they weren’t exactly going out on a limb here. If I tell you that, in the end, most of the design they came up with was the work of a certain Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the man who gave us the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS
Great Britain
, you may expect to have your socks blown off by his solution to the plan. But please don’t remove your shoes in anticipation.

When Brunel, puffing no doubt on an improbably large cigar, closed his eyes and dreamed the impossible dream, he saw not the glittering glass palace which would eventually house the Exhibition, but bricks instead. Millions of bricks. Fifteen million, to be precise, all cunningly arranged to create what a later critic suggested would have become ‘a vast, squat, brick warehouse four times the length and twice the width of St Paul’s’. Big, I grant you, but not very beautiful. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brunel’s plan did not send the pulses of the committee racing, although it would probably have been enough to earn him ‘Man of the Year’ at the annual knees-up of the British Brick-makers Association. It’s worth remarking that Brunel’s failure also meant a narrow escape for south London football fans: had things turned out differently they might have found themselves cheering on not Crystal Palace, but Brick Warehouse Wanderers instead.

Having bumped into Brunel’s brick wall, the Exhibition committee needed a plan C. With the fate of the Exhibition swinging in the wind, an unlikely hero stepped centre stage to save the day. He was a farmer’s son from Bedfordshire by the name of Joseph Paxton. Paxton had started his working life as a humble gardener (think Alan Titchmarsh with whiskers) but worked his way up to become head man on the estate of the Duke of Devonshire (think Alan Titchmarsh with whiskers and a top hat). Along the way, he’d notched up a series of impressive firsts, including the propagation of that miniature banana I mentioned earlier, and, at the other end of the scale, a giant Amazonian waterlily with five-foot leaves. But how did these horticultural achievements, impressive as they were, equip Paxton with the skills necessary to succeed where a man like Brunel had failed? What use are green fingers, when it comes to designing a major public building? We didn’t turn to Titchmarsh when we were planning the Millennium Dome, and Monty Don has not, as far as I am aware, been consulted on the new Olympic Stadium taking shape in east London.

This is where the greenhouse enters our story. Paxton’s boss, the Duke of Devonshire, owned vast tracts of land in Derbyshire. His main residence was Chatsworth House, where Paxton had built a massive greenhouse to accommodate the Duke’s collection of rare and exotic plants (277 feet long and 67 feet high since you’re asking - the greenhouse not the collection). When Paxton got wind of the problems that the Exhibition organisers were having in coming up with a suitable design, his mind turned to glass and iron. According to legend, the actual moment of inspiration struck on 11 June 1850. By now Paxton was an eminent man and, as is the way with eminent men, he was invited to sit on the board of various organisations, including the Midland Railway. During a tedious committee meeting - is there any other sort? - he grabbed a piece of blotting paper and began to doodle designs for a huge glass-house based on the Chatsworth model. You can still see what must surely rank as the most famous piece of blotting paper in the world, a fiercely contested honour, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington.

Paxton pocketed his blotting-paper design and headed back to Chatsworth, where he set his team to work on a more detailed plan. Within days he was travelling south to present his scheme to the Exhibition committee in London. He made the journey by train, and at the station at Derby he bumped into none other than the eminent inventor Robert Stephenson, the man who designed the Rocket (steam train not ice-lolly). He gave Paxton’s plans the once-over followed by the thumbs-up, a verdict which was later seconded by the committee. They green-lit the greenhouse and the Crystal Palace was born, although its famous name was dreamed up by a writer for the satirical magazine
Punch
, which had closely followed the contest to design the building.

Whatever way you look at it, Paxton’s Palace was a mighty impressive affair - a monumental glass and iron structure which enclosed a space six times bigger than St Paul’s Cathedral and boasted more than a million square feet of glass. Thankfully, the show was planned for the summer months, so at least there was no need for double-glazing. Even so, it took a team of more than 2,000 workers 22 weeks to put the thing together.

Eagle-eyed visitors to Hyde Park today will notice that the gargantuan greenhouse which accommodated the Exhibition is no longer to be found there. But even though the building has long since departed the stage, you’d think there might be other clues to help one get a sense of the scale of the place and the magnificence of the event it housed, an event which has passed into London legend, alongside similarly iconic moments, such as the great ice fairs on the frozen Thames in the seventeenth century and the first Madness gig in the Dublin Castle.

When I pitch up, I’m armed with another old map to help me get my bearings. Not just any old map, mind you, but a copy of the one produced by the publisher Joseph Cross of Holborn Hill, which was specially printed (on silk and coloured by hand, no less) in 1851 to cash in on the expected influx of visitors to the capital. Thanks to Mr Cross and his cartographers, I knew that the Palace - represented by a pleasing brick-pink rectangle on his silken sheets - was built on the grassy strip which divides South Carriage Drive on the southern edge of Hyde Park and Rotten Row - or horse highway number one, as I prefer to call it - to the north.

Having parked my scooter on a nearby meter, I point my compass north and stroll up Exhibition Road, dodging the traffic on Kensington Gore and entering the park through the Coalbrookdale Gates, a magnificent pair of cast-iron gates specially made for the Exhibition by the people who built the famous iron bridge across the Severn gorge in Shropshire. In 1851 the gates were on display within the Crystal Palace itself, before being moved to their current location once the show had closed. This is my first encounter with the surviving fabric of the Exhibition in Hyde Park and a promising omen of good things to come. Glancing to my left, I can see the Albert Memorial - the grand statue erected by Queen Victoria in memory of her beloved husband after his untimely death in 1861, aged 42. Albert was one of the prime movers behind the Exhibition and, on closer inspection, I’m pleased to see that he’s clutching a rolled-up copy of the show’s catalogue in his bronzed fist. Another promising sign.