The Great Exhibition of 1851
The French held a great Industrial Exposition in 1844 which was a great success.
Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, prodded a reluctant Parliament into approving a similar British effort. "The Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851" were constituted and £230,000 in private funds were raised. Naturally it was necessary for it to be larger than anything attempted by the French.
233 architects competed to design the building to hold the exhibition at Hyde Park. Ultimately the winner was a huge glass and iron conception by Joseph Paxton which won. Paxton's design was originally drawn on a sheet of blotting paper. When his design was adopted (but with a domed roof added by the Commissioners to accommodate some large trees in Hyde Park which would be inside) he produced a full set of plans within nine days.
The building was so large that six St Paul's Cathedrals could have been put inside. It included 900,000 square feet of glass. Britain took half the space. Countries from around the world were allocated space in the rest. (As an incentive all goods they brought in to sell were free of import duty.) There were seventeen thousand exhibitors, and six million people visitors.
After the Exhibition, the "the Crystal Palace" was taken to pieces and re-erected in Sydenham in 1852, giving its name to a new district. It was destroyed by fire in 1936.
When the Great Exhibition ended, the Commissioners found themselves in possession of a huge profit. They invested it in buying up a large chunk of South Kensington, north of what is now Cromwell Road, as a museum area. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum and Science Museum were put up. Compare that with the Millennium Dome!
Ultimately the French were not outdone in the field of great exhibitions. The Eiffel Tower was build as the entrance gateway to their International Exposition of 1889.