‘A copy – or rather a translation … with numerous sparkling emendations.’ Re-rebuilding the Pompeian Court of the Crystal Palace

The cry ‘what to do with the Crystal Palace’ continues to reverberate long after the Palace’s fiery demise. Whilst local heritage groups continue to cherish it, its memory has been jeopardised by authorities, both bureaucratic (who have failed to implement a coherent conservation plan for the site) and academic (who have largely refused to engage with building or exhibition). The result, the mental dismantling of the Sydenham Palace from nineteenth-century histories, has been explained by scholarly aversion to reconstruction/inauthenticity and play/populist entertainment, the very aspects which defined it. This chapter explore a small part of the Palace, the Pompeian Court, through our own digital visualisation, housed in Second Life, a popular multi-user online virtual world. By choosing such a venue, we have favoured the pursuit not of absolute authenticity but of virtual presence, offering a space in which visitors to the model, through their avatars, might circulate the space, interact with each other and the exhibits.

From Ajanta to Sydenham: ‘Indian’ art at the Sydenham Palace

Discussions about the display of Indian art and material culture in the Victorian imperial metropolis have largely focused on the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its progeny, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). However, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham Hill was an important, but much overlooked, location of imperial and colonial display well into the twentieth century. This essay begins by examining the Sydenham Palace at a site of imperial spectacle from its opening in 1854 and well into the twentieth century. Relevant events included the African Exhibition of 1895, the opening of the Victoria Cross Gallery in the same year and the Colonial Exhibition of 1905, and the display of Major Robert Gill’s copies of the frescoes from the Buddhist rock-cut temples at Ajanta in India (until they were destroyed by fire in 1866). The crowning occasion in the Sydenham series of imperial events was the Festival of Empire in 1911 which celebrated the ascension of George V as ‘King-Emperor’. Taking the 1911 Festival as a case study, this essay explores the complex and often conflicting narratives of empire that were communicated through the courts and grounds at Sydenham.

‘What is to become of the Crystal Palace?’ The Crystal Palace after 1851

This introductory chapter explores and establishes the Sydenham Crystal Palace in relation to existing scholarship on the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Sydenham Palace combined education, entertainment and commerce, and spans both nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We resituate it as an important location within the London art world and establish the broader connections it had with rival ventures such as the South Kensington Museum and the numerous international exhibitions in the period. We set out the new possibilities for the analysis of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual and material cultures opened up by this unique venue, problematising the periodisation of art works and attitudes into discretely ‘Victorian’ and ‘Edwardian’ categories.

The cosmopolitan world of Victorian portraiture: the Crystal Palace portrait gallery, c.1854

‘The World of Victorian Portraiture’ focuses on the 500 plaster cast busts that make up the largely ignored portrait sequence at the Crystal Palace, that ran throughout and alongside the Fine Arts Courts, treating the portrait collection as a microcosm of Sydenham as a whole. Focussing on a close reading of Samuel Phillips’s official 1854 guide to the portrait sequence, in relation to the few surviving images of portrait busts at Sydenham, the chapter seeks to counter a myopic, insular, working-class historical emphasis on Sydenham as a provincial, proletarian pleasure park. In its place, the chapter returns to centre stage the complex, cosmopolitan, high cultural experiences and ambitions of a specific subset of visitors - the ideal audience imagined by the official guides.

‘A present from the Crystal Palace’: Souvenirs of Sydenham, miniature views and material memory

Focusing on two souvenirs: a ‘peep egg’ (after 1851), a stone egg decorated with a floral pattern, inscribed ‘A present from the Crystal Palace’ (Bill Douglas Collection, Exeter University) and a needle case in carved bone (c. 1860-7) in the shape of a folded umbrella or parasol (V&A), this chapter discusses the spy-glass keepsake’s role as both a visual record of the Sydenham Crystal Palace and as an emblem of popular visual memories of the site. Such keepsakes stand testimony to a prevalent affection or fondness for the Palace in the latter part of the nineteenth century, or at the very least, its currency in popular culture and the growing leisure industry.

Peculiar pleasure in the ruined Crystal Palace

In 1951 the filmmaker and poet James Broughton moved to London from San Francisco. At that time he was beginning to garner a reputation for his short, whimsical, films, which often made use of outmoded costumes and decaying public spaces. One important reason he gave for moving was the idea that Britain had a more open-minded society for queer artists like himself to work within, in contrast to the McCarthy-era USA. With the help of a number of figures from the British film establishment he managed to make a half-hour-long film The Pleasure Garden in London. The film is for the most part set among the ruins of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the surrounding park. Broughton’s film is an allegory of Britain as he found it in the summer of 1951, asserting its own vision of a post-war national identity in the Festival of Britain. This chapter examines the way in which the Festival of Britain revived certain ideas of national identity from the past, yet neglected others – and the way in which these ideas were doubled and questioned in Broughton’s film.

The armless artist and the lightning cartoonist: performing popular culture at the Crystal Palace c.1900

Discussions of art at the Crystal Palace have largely focussed on sculpture and architecture from the past contained in its Fine Arts Courts. This chapter explores the role of art via a different trajectory using the paper trail of popular culture contained in the Daily Programme of events and the Crystal Palace’s own magazine, to reveal its connections to two artists who worked at the Palace around 1900. Drawing on contemporary popular journalism of the period, this chapter engages with representations of the artists Bertram Hiles and Herbert Beecroft as part of commercialised forms of leisure available at the Crystal Palace. The case studies of these two artists temporarily working in residence at Sydenham brings into focus the role of the Crystal Palace in modern consumer practices that in turn embraced the visual pleasures of gazing and looking. Far from the high moral tone of the original Hyde Park enterprise, the work of Hiles and Beecroft fused the visual pleasures offered by art with popular entertainment.

‘[M]anly beauty and muscular strength’: sculpture, sport and the nation at the Crystal Palace, 1854–1918

This essay recovers episodes in the wide and varied sporting history of the Crystal Palace in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, and situates it in the context of ideas about the body, nation and empire that were manifest in the 1850s Fine Arts Courts, showing how the Greek and Roman courts in particular were received in changing ways across Victorian and Edwardian culture. The Sydenham Palace brought together ‘Fine Arts’, consumer, and sporting cultures, and allows an examination of the ways in which these three seemingly disparate areas of study were closely intertwined. The essay emphasises the national, racial and gender politics implicit in the relationship between these three categories. Discussing Sandow’s Institute, the 1911 Inter-Empire Games, and the occupation of the Palace by the Royal Navy during the First World War, it relates the Palace’s apparently more formal Fine Arts Courts and Natural History Department to its grassy grounds, its static exhibits to its moving, breathing visitors, art historical education to bodily reformation.

Dinosaurs Don’t Die: the Crystal Palace monsters in children’s literature, 1854–2001

Dinosaurs Don’t Die, claimed the title of Ann Coates’ 1970 children’s book. Coates’ prose, and the charming illustrations by John Vernon Lord which accompanied it, wondered what would happen if the antediluvian monsters from the Crystal Palace came back to life. In fact, the prehistoric creatures had already refused to die: first resurrected by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Richard Owen in the early 1850s they had survived the 1936 fire to become Sydenham’s only remaining display. The monsters have lived on, both on a set of South East London islands, but also in many children’s books from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. In this article I track how the Crystal Palace monsters fit into the evolution of more general representations of extinct creatures in children’s books and exhibitions over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.