Joseph Paxton

Sir Joseph Paxton (3 August 1803 8 June 1865) was an English gardener and architect, best known for designing The Crystal Palace.

Paxton was born in 1803, the seventh son of a farming family, at Milton Bryan He became a garden boy at the age of fifteen for Sir Gregory Osborne Page-Turner at Battlesden Park, near Woburn. After several moves, he obtained a position in 1823 at the Horticultural Society's Chiswick Gardens. These were close to the gardens of William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire at Cheswick House. The Duke frequently met the young gardener as he strolled in his gardens and became impressed with his skill and enthusiasm. The Duke offered the 20-year-old Paxton the position of Head Gardener at Chatsworth, which was considered one of the finest landscaped gardens of the time.

One of his first projects was to redesign the garden around the new north wing of the house and to set up a 'pinetum', a collection of conifers which developed into a 40-acre (160,000 m2) arboretum which still exists. In the process he became skilled in moving even mature trees. The largest, weighing about eight tons, was moved from Kedleston Road in Derby. Among several other large projects at Chatsworth, such as the Rock Garden, the Emperor Fountain and the rebuilding of Edensor village, he is best remembered for his glass houses.

Mterials he used With a cheap and light wooden frame, the conservatory design had a ridge-and-furrow roof to let in more light and drain rainwater away. Cunningly, Paxton used hollow pillars to double up as drain pipes and designed a special rafter that also acted as an internal and external gutter. All of these elements were pre-fabricated and, like modular buildings, could be produced in vast numbers and assembled into buildings of varied design.

In 1832, Paxton developed an interest in glasshouses at Chatsworth where he designed a series of buildings with "forcing frames" for espalier trees. Generally considered a landscape gardener, Paxton's superiority in conservatory design earned him recognition as an innovative architect. His position in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for the Coventry allowed Paxton to dedicate his later years to urban planning projects. At the time the principles of using glass houses was in its infancy and those at Chatsworth were dilapidated. After some experimentation, he designed a ridge and furrow roof which would be at right angles to the morning and evening sun, with an ingenious frame design which would admit maximum light - the forerunner of the modern greenhouse.

Crystal Palace

Aerial View of the Crystal Palace in 1934

Annie Paxton standing on a Victoria amazonica leaf in the lily house; Paxton's design for the Crystal Palace took its cue from the organic structure of this plant.

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The Great Conservatory was the test-bed for the prefabricated glass and iron structural techniques which Paxton pioneered and would employ for his masterpiece: The Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851. These techniques were made physically possible by recent technological advances in the manufacture of both glass and cast iron, and financially possible by the dropping of a tax on glass.

The Palace was 1 848 feet long, 408 feet (124 m) wide and 108 feet (33 m) high. It required 4 500 tons of iron, 60 000 cubic feet of timber and needed over 293 000 panes of glass. Yet it took 2 000 men just eight months to build, and cost just 79 800. Quite unlike any other building, it was itself a demonstration of British technology in iron and glass. In its construction, Paxton was assisted by Charles Fox, also of Derby for the iron framework, and William Cubitt Chairman of the Building Committee. All three were knighted. After the exhibition they were employed by the Crystal Palace Company to move it to Sydenham.

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Pravin Suthar 08-BCTG-08