Plans to re-create Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace reported in the Guardian.

The structure first erected in Hyde Park in 1851 for the Great Exhibition was significant in both scale and its pre-fabricated form of construction. Paxton was head gardener at Chatsworth and his Stove House there gave him the confidence to attempt the scale of the Crystal Palace (there is evidence his first attempts at glass house structures was using laminated timber).

He was a true polymath and innovator of his time, his range of work and influence is staggering from publishing (on horticulture and botany), creating the world’s tallest fountain, designing and planting the world’s first public park at Birkenhead, architecture through to investing in the UK’s railways. In his later years he became a member of Parliament. The life of Paxton is best told by Kate Colquhoun in ‘A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton’.

The proposed replication of Paxton’s Crystal Palace is alien to the life of the man and those around him who created so much.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia