The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and plate-glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace’s 990,000 square feet (92,000 m2) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m). Because of the recent invention of the cast plate glass method in 1848, which allowed for large sheets of cheap but strong glass, it was at the time the largest amount of glass ever seen in a building and astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights, thus a “Crystal Palace”.
The name Crystal Palace came from the playwright Douglas Jerrold. On 13 July 1850 he wrote in the satirical magazine Punch as ‘Mrs Amelia Mouser’ about the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, referring to a palace of very crystal, a name that was subsequently picked up and repeated even though the building had not been approved at that stage.
After the exhibition, the building was rebuilt in an enlarged form on Penge Common, at the top of Penge Peak next to Sydenham Hill, an affluent south London suburb full of large villas. It stood there from 1854 until its destruction by fire in 1936.
The name was later used to denote this area of south London and the park that surrounds the site, home of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre as well as Crystal Palace F.C. who were founded at the Crystal Palace. A re-working of the building, known as The Garden Palace, was constructed in Sydney in 1879, but this building too was destroyed by fire. In 2013 a proposal was made to re-build the Crystal Palace within the Crystal Palace Park, but the project was cancelled in 2015. The park still contains Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s Crystal Palace Dinosaurs from 1854.