THE design was the brainchild of Joseph Paxton MP, who had just completed a conservatory for Chatsworth House in Derbyshire that drew on the structure of lily pads for lightness and strength. On Friday 11th June, 1850, he remarked casually to John Ellis, a fellow board-member at the Midland Railway, that something similar could be manufactured elsewhere and then briefly assembled, like a bedstead, in Hyde Park.*
With barely a fortnight before the deadline, Paxton sketched his plans on blotting-paper during a meeting of the railway’s Works and Ways Committee.* On Saturday 20th, he showed them to engineer Robert Stephenson, a member of the Exhibition’s building committee, after bumping into him on the train. On July 6th, Paxton adroitly blindsided his competitors by going to the popular press; and on July 26th, the building committee accepted a tender from Fox, Henderson and Company to construct Paxton’s Crystal Palace for £79,800.*
Two months later, the first posts were sunk, and on May 1st, 1851, Queen Victoria opened the “Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations.”
Most of it was made in Birmingham and Smethwick, with some additional work in London.
The matter before the Committee was a disciplinary one. Paxton wrote so industriously throughout that he was asked to render judgment. Household Words takes up the tale: “When the case closed, one of his colleagues turned specially to him, saying, ‘As you seem to have noted down the whole of the evidence, we will take the decision from you.’ ‘The truth is,’ whispered the Chairman, ‘I know all about this affair already, having accidentally learned every particular last night. This,’ he continued, holding up the paper, ‘is not a draft of the pointsman’s case, but a design for the Great Industrial Building to be erected in Hyde Park.’”
This is the figure given by contemporary sources and by The Crystal Palace Foundation. It does not include the cost of materials; overall, the Crystal Palace cost £150,000 to build, roughly £16.5M in 2019.