Sir Joseph Paxton

Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865), English horticulturist, engineer, architect, landscape gardener, and politician, chiefly famous as the designer of the Crystal Palace, one of the most momentous buildings of the 19th century.

The son of a Bedfordshire farmer, Paxton began work as a gardener when he was 15, and in 1823 he took up employment at the Horticultural Society in Chiswick. The president of the society at this time was the 6th Duke of Devonshire, who was greatly impressed by Paxton’s industrious nature and inventive mind; in 1826 he invited him to become his head gardener at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, one of the most famous of England’s stately homes. Over the next quarter of a century Paxton was largely responsible for transforming the duke’s previously neglected garden into one of the finest in the country. He became a friend of the duke as well as an employee, accompanying him on journeys abroad.

Paxton’s work at Chatsworth was varied, including the construction of the Emperor Fountain (1844), which at this time had the highest water jet of any fountain in the world. He designed numerous greenhouses for the garden, culminating in a huge structure known as the Great Conservatory or “Great Stove” (1836-1840, demolished in 1920); this had an arched framework of metal and wood supporting a curved glass roof, and Paxton invented machinery to produce standardized parts for the building quickly and efficiently. His success at Chatsworth led to commissions elsewhere, including the design of several large public gardens, for example Birkenhead Park, Cheshire (1843-1847), the first park in Britain to be produced at public expense.

In 1850 a competition was held to find a design for a building to house the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations”, which was scheduled to be held in Hyde Park, London, the following year; the exhibition was the first example of the kind of vast international show that was later called a world’s fair. More than 200 entries were received for the competition, but none was thought to be entirely suitable and a compromise design for a domed brick building was produced by committee. Uninvited, Paxton then submitted his own radical design for a huge iron-framed glass building, and after much argument this was accepted; the name “Crystal Palace” was applied to it by the magazine Punch in its issue of November 2, 1850, and soon caught on.

The building was erected with astonishing speed, using the mass-production prefabrication techniques Paxton had pioneered at Chatsworth, and it was completed just in time for the opening on May 1, 1851. It caught the public’s imagination, being regarded as a kind of modern wonder of the world (it was the largest building ever constructed up to this date), and it helped to make the exhibition an enormous success. Paxton became a household name and was knighted to mark his achievement. His masterpiece was seen by visitors from all over the world and was a major landmark in the history of architecture; it was the first conspicuous building to make use of prefabrication, and it helped to gain acceptance for iron and glass as worthy architectural materials.

The ingenious constructional techniques used in the Crystal Palace meant that it could be disassembled as well as built with great speed, and after the exhibition it was re-erected in slightly changed form at Sydenham in south London as the centrepiece of a park laid out by Paxton (the building was destroyed by fire in 1936 and little survives of the park). Paxton later designed other structures similar to the Crystal Palace, but they were never built. He was nominally responsible for several much more conventional buildings, but it is uncertain how much their design should be credited to Paxton himself and how much to his son-in-law and architectural partner, George Henry Stokes (1826-1874). Among these buildings the best known is probably Mentmore, Buckinghamshire (1852-1854), a large country house in Elizabethan style.

In 1854 Paxton became Member of Parliament for Coventry. He continued in this office until 1865, when he retired because of ill health, brought on partly by overwork; he died soon afterwards.