The Great Exhibition of 1851 made a fortune that built the South Kensington museums. This bar borrows its name.
The Great Exhibition Bar holds a 4.3 from twenty-two people, and it is named after the single event that, more than any other, created the neighbourhood around it.
The fair that changed everything
The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the first great world’s fair – a vast showcase of industry, invention and empire, held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, and it was one of the defining events of the Victorian age.
It was the project of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, who believed passionately in the union of art, science and industry. Six million people visited – a third of the entire population of Britain at the time – to marvel at the machines, the manufactures and the exotic goods of a global empire, all housed in Joseph Paxton’s enormous glass building.
And it made money. A great deal of money. The Exhibition turned an enormous profit, and Albert had a vision for what to do with it.
Albertopolis
Albert used the profits of the Great Exhibition to buy a large area of land in South Kensington and to build, upon it, a concentration of museums and colleges dedicated to learning – a project so ambitious it was nicknamed “Albertopolis.”
The result is the extraordinary cluster of institutions that still defines South Kensington today: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, Imperial College, the Royal College of Music, the Royal College of Art. All of it, funded in large part by the surplus from a single trade fair held in a glass shed in Hyde Park in 1851.
It is one of the most successful uses of an event’s profits in history. Most world’s fairs leave behind debts and a demolished pavilion. The Great Exhibition left behind some of the greatest museums in the world, still standing, still free, still drawing millions of visitors every year, a hundred and seventy years later.
The twenty-two
A very small sample, and a 4.3 across twenty-two people tells us little on its own. As throughout this survey, we note the number, decline to draw firm conclusions from it, and record instead the genuinely remarkable history the name points to.
Verdict
Too few reviews to judge the bar, but named after the fair that built one of the greatest museum quarters on earth from the profits of a glass shed.
The palace that moved and burned
The building itself had a dramatic afterlife that this survey has touched on before. The Crystal Palace was not demolished after the Exhibition – it was dismantled and rebuilt, even bigger, on a hill in South London, where it gave its name to the surrounding district. It stood there for over eighty years as a pleasure ground and exhibition space.
And then, in 1936, it burned down, in a spectacular fire visible across London, and was never rebuilt. The building is gone; the place name survives, along with a football club called Crystal Palace that plays nowhere near the original Hyde Park site. It is the recurring pattern of this whole project: the thing is destroyed, and only the name lives on, attached now to a suburb and a team that most fans could not connect to a glass building that burned ninety years ago.
Verdict
Too few reviews to judge the bar, but named after the fair that built one of the greatest museum quarters on earth from the profits of a glass shed.
Have a drink, then walk to the museums it paid for. They are free, they are extraordinary, and they exist because of a trade fair in 1851.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
