Sir Joseph Paxton - The glass houses, Crystal Palace, Later career, Further reading
Gardener and architect, born near Woburn, Bedfordshire, SC England, UK. He was a working gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, at Chiswick and Chatsworth, where he remodelled the gardens, and built the conservatory and lily house. He designed a revolutionary building of prefabricated sections of cast-iron and glass for the Great Exhibition of 1851 (nicknamed the Crystal Palace), which he re-erected in Sydenham in 1854. It was destroyed by fire in 1936.
Sir Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) was an English gardener and architect of The Crystal Palace.
He was born on 3 August 1803, the seventh son of a farming family, at Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire. This is, as he admitted in later life, a result of misinformation he provided in his teens, which enabled him to enrol at Chiswick Gardens.)
He became a garden boy at the age of fifteen for Sir Gregory Page-Turner at Battlesden Park, near Woburn. The Duke offered the 23-year-old Paxton the position of Head Gardener at Chatsworth, which was considered one of the finest landscaped gardens of the time.
Although the Duke was in Russia at the time, Paxton set off for Chatsworth on the Chesterfield coach forthwith, arriving at Chatsworth at half past four in the morning.
He enjoyed a very friendly relationship with his employer who recognised his diverse talents and facilitated his rise to prominence.
One of his first projects was to redesign the garden around the new north wing of the house and to set up a 'pinetum', a collection of conifers which developed into a forty acre arboretum which still exists.
Born into poverty, Paxton left school when he was fifteen to work at his brother's farm.
Here he built enormous fountains - one twice the height of Nelson's Column - as well as an arboretum, a 300ft conservatory, and a model village. In 1837 he secured a cutting of a new lily found in Guyana, and designed a heated pool that enabled him to breed the lily successfully: within three months its leaves were almost twelve feet wide.
However, the lily was too big for any normal conservatory. Constant experimentation over a number of years led him to devise his glasshouse design that inspired the Crystal Palace.
With a cheap and light wooden frame, the conservatory design had a ridge-and-furrow roof to let in more light and drain rainwater away. Cunningly, Paxton used hollow pillars to double up as drain pipes and designed a special rafter that also acted as an internal and external gutter.
By the age of forty he was a close friend of the Duke and was making a fortune as manager of his six estates and as a director of several rail companies. Paxton thought he could do better, and delivered his design - a vastly magnified version of his lily house at Chatsworth - within nine days.
Its novelty was its revolutionary modular, prefabricated design, and use of glass.
Although the Crystal Palace was initially the Millennium Dome of its time, attracting widespread cynicism from the public and the press, when it opened the Exhibition was an enormous success, the Palace a major attraction, and Paxton was knighted.
Joseph Paxton was born in Milton Bryan, England in 1801. In 1832,
Paxton developed an interest in glasshouses at Chatsworth where he designed a series of buildings with "forcing frames" for espalier trees. Generally considered a landscape gardener, Paxton's superiority in conservatory design earned him recognition as an innovative architect. His position in the House of Commons as MP for the Coventry allowed Paxton to dedicate his later years to urban planning projects.
The glass houses
At the time the principles of using glass houses was in its infancy and those at Chatsworth were dilapidated. After some experimentation, he designed a ridge and furrow roof which would be at right angles to the morning and evening sun, with an ingenious frame design which would admit maximum light - the forerunner of the modern greenhouse.
In 1837, Paxton started the Great Conservatory or Stove, a huge cast-iron heated glasshouse.
However, it was prohibitively expensive to maintain, and it was destroyed in 1923.
The next great building at Chatsworth came about from the first seeds of the Victoria Regia lily which had been sent to Kew from the Amazon in 1836. Although these had grown, they had not flowered and in 1849 one seed was given to Paxton to try out at Chatsworth. It continued growing and it became necessary to build a much larger house, the Victoria Regia House, the design of which was inspired by the lily itself.
Crystal Palace
The Great Conservatory was the test-bed for the prefabricated glass and iron structural techniques which Paxton pioneered and would employ for his masterpiece: The Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
In 1850 the Royal Commission appointed to organise the Great Exhibition were in a quandary. An international competition for a building to house had produced 245 designs, of which only two were remotely suitable, and all would take to long to build and would be too permanent.
Paxton was visiting London in his capacity as a director of the Midland Railway to meet the chairman John Ellis who was also a Member of Parliament.
He completed the plans and presented them to the Commission, but there was opposition from some members, since another design was well into its planning stage. Paxton decided to by-pass the Commission and published the design in the Illustrated London News to universal acclaim.
Quite unlike any other building, it was itself a demonstration of British technology in iron and glass. In its construction, Paxton was assisted by Charles Fox, also of Derby for the iron framework, and William Cubitt Chairman of the Building Committee.
Later career
Although he remained the Head Gardener at Chatsworth, the Duke allowed him to undertake outside work - like the Crystal Palace and his directorship of the Midland Railway.
He worked on public parks in Liverpool, Birkenhead, Glasgow, Halifax and the grounds of the Spa Buildings at Scarborough.
In 1850 Paxton was commissioned by Baron Mayer de Rothschild to design Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire.
Paxton also designed another country house, a smaller version of Mentmore at Battlesden near Woburn in Bedfordshire.
Between 1835 and 1839, he organised plant-hunting expeditions, one of which ended in tragedy.
Paxton was honoured by being a member of the Kew Commission which was to suggest improvements for Royal Botanic Gardens, and by being considered for the post of Head Gardener at Windsor Castle.
He became affluent, not so much through his Chatsworth job, but by successful speculation in the railway industry.
In October 1845 he was invited to lay out one of the country's first municipal burial grounds in Coventry.
In 1831, Paxton published a monthly magazine, The Horticultural Register.
He retired from Chatsworth when the Duke died in 1858 but carried on working at various projects such as the Thames Graving Dock, while Sarah remained at their house on the Chatsworth Estate.
He died on 8 June 1865.
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