Chapter Six
South Kensington
The Palace That Vanished and the District It Paid For
Why is South Kensington called South Kensington?
In brief: South Kensington describes the district south of the older Kensington settlement. The name was fixed to the developing museum quarter and its railway interchange during the nineteenth century.
Transport context: London Underground station.
On 1 May 1851, London walks into a building that should not exist.
It is longer than many streets and higher than the trees it contains. Iron ribs rise beneath an immense skin of glass. Sunlight enters without asking permission. Beneath it stand fountains, statues, machines, furniture, fabrics, weapons, ceramics, jewels and raw materials gathered from Britain, its empire and more than thirty participating countries. Mature elms grow through the floor because Joseph Paxton has curved the transept above them rather than cut them down.1
Twenty thousand people have come for the opening.
Queen Victoria arrives with Prince Albert and their children. There are uniforms, diplomats, commissioners, music, an archbishop and the disciplined splendour of a state occasion. Albert stands before his wife and reads the Commissioners’ report. He has worked for this day so long that triumph must feel dangerously like exhaustion.
The Queen looks up into the immense brightness. In her journal she will call it one of the greatest and most glorious days of their lives.2
The building has an official name of great Victorian confidence: the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.
The public gives it a better one.
The Crystal Palace.
Paxton is not an architect in the approved manner. He is a gardener who has learnt from glasshouses, iron frames and the giant waterlily at Chatsworth. When the official building scheme becomes trapped among expense, delay and heavy masonry, he offers something that can be manufactured in parts, brought to Hyde Park and assembled with unprecedented speed. The design is immense but repetitive. Its miracle depends upon standardisation.3
The Palace on Blotting Paper
The first surviving image of the Crystal Palace is not a grand architectural drawing.
It is a handful of lines on blotting paper.
The familiar account places Joseph Paxton at a board meeting of the Midland Railway in Derby in June 1850. Other men attend to railway business. Paxton attends sufficiently, one assumes, to avoid being dismissed, but his pen works on another problem. On the absorbent paper before him he sketches a long glazed hall, a central transept and the repeated structural rhythm that will allow an unprecedented building to be made from ordinary parts.4
The drawing is hurried. That is its power. The essential idea appears before presentation has had time to conceal it.
Paxton has already spent years persuading iron and glass to behave like architecture at Chatsworth. He knows how a greenhouse sheds rain, admits light and repeats a module. The exhibition commissioners are struggling to invent a palace. The gardener enlarges a glasshouse until it can contain the world.
The story of the board-room sketch has been polished in retelling, and the exact circumstances should not be treated as though a stenographer were present. The object itself, however, survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum: pen and ink on blotting paper, the enormous building reduced to something that could have been folded into a pocket.4
Within a year, the lines have become iron columns, timber gutters and hundreds of thousands of panes of glass.
A district will eventually grow from the profit.
But first it exists as a gardener’s interruption to a railway meeting.
This is appropriate. The building that contains the industrial age is itself one of its exhibits.
Inside, the century arranges an argument about progress.
Steam engines turn. Pumps lift water. Machines spin cotton, print pages, cut stone and promise to reduce the labour of hands. There are luxury objects for rooms most visitors will never enter and agricultural tools for fields many Londoners have left behind. India, Canada, the Caribbean and other parts of the empire appear as sources of materials, ornament and wealth. The Exhibition calls itself a meeting of nations, though the nations do not meet on equal terms.
Empire is presented as abundance. Industry is presented as destiny. Progress has been divided into classes, numbered and placed in a case.
The crowd comes anyway.
It comes again and again. Admission prices are reduced. Excursion trains bring clerks, artisans, provincial families and organised groups of working people. Queen Victoria visits more than thirty times. By the close, more than six million visits have been made and over 100,000 exhibits have passed before the public.1
Then the doors close.
The objects are packed. The great interior empties. The Crystal Palace is dismantled and rebuilt at Sydenham, where it will survive until fire destroys it in 1936.5 Hyde Park is returned to grass, paths and ordinary weather.
The event appears to have vanished.
But the Commissioners count the money.
After every expense, the Great Exhibition has produced a surplus of approximately £186,000. Albert insists that it should not dissolve into the Treasury or be divided among temporary good causes. The profit is to continue the Exhibition’s work. Art, science and industry, briefly gathered beneath one glass roof, will be given permanent institutions.6
The palace leaves.
Its money crosses the road.
South of Hyde Park lies land that London knows principally as Brompton: estates, nursery grounds, market gardens, scattered houses and speculative streets advancing unevenly over open ground. Kensington is an older and grander name, attached to a manor, a village and a royal palace farther north and west. But South Kensington, as a distinct place with a public identity, is not waiting fully formed for anyone to discover it.7
It has to be made.
The Royal Commission begins buying land in 1852. Its estate eventually covers roughly eighty-seven acres. Albert imagines museums, colleges, learned societies, exhibition spaces and schools in which art, science and manufacturing might improve one another. A temporary spectacle is to become a district.8
Grand ideas need money. They also need minutes, drains, contracts, committees, roofs and somebody willing to answer correspondence.
Albert has Henry Cole.
Cole is a civil servant with the momentum of weather. He has helped organise the Exhibition and believes that British manufacturing will improve only when designers, makers and the public are taught to recognise good design. He is practical enough to understand that education requires buildings, opening hours and refreshment; vain enough to quarrel over credit; energetic enough to be indispensable even to people who find him intolerable.
He also understands names.
Brompton is old, accurate and respectable. It is also associated with market gardens, roadside development and the iron sheds soon to be mocked as boilers. At Cole’s suggestion, the new cultural quarter adopts the more aristocratic-sounding South Kensington.9
The addition of one word performs a social transformation.
South makes the place appear to be an orderly extension of Kensington rather than an ambitious development imposed upon Brompton. It borrows prestige from the north and gives the new institutions a collective address. The name sounds geographical, almost inevitable. It is neither. It is part description, part programme and part advertisement.
London is often built this way. First the developer names the future. Then the streets are required to catch up.
The Museum of Manufactures, created after the Exhibition, moves to the estate in 1857 and opens as the South Kensington Museum. Its first major structure is a long temporary iron building. The Builder considers it brutally ugly and compares it to a monstrous boiler. London, grateful for an insult that can be used as an address, calls the buildings the Brompton Boilers.9
The old name has not surrendered quietly.
Inside the Boilers and the galleries added beside them, Cole experiments with the public museum. Gas lighting permits evening opening in winter, allowing working people to visit after their day’s labour. Refreshment rooms provide hot food to visitors who have travelled beyond the convenient provisions of central London. Collections of art, manufacture, machinery and design are displayed not merely to be admired but to instruct.10
Cole believes taste can be administered.
At Marlborough House he has already created a Gallery of False Principles, filling it with commercially successful objects chosen as examples of bad design. The public is amused. The manufacturers are furious. The display closes after two weeks.9
This does not discourage him.
South Kensington grows by persistence, argument and addition. Galleries gather around courtyards. Schools move in. Collections divide and multiply. The South Kensington Museum will eventually become the Victoria and Albert Museum, while its scientific collections develop into the Science Museum. Across Exhibition Road, Alfred Waterhouse’s Natural History Museum opens in 1881, its terracotta animals climbing over a building conceived as a cathedral for the natural world.11
Prince Albert does not live to see most of it.
He dies in 1861, aged forty-two. After his death, the district becomes both the continuation of his scheme and an expanding memorial to him. The Royal Albert Hall opens in 1871. The Albert Memorial rises across the road in Kensington Gardens. Colleges of art, music and science settle around the Commission’s estate.
The quarter acquires a mocking nickname: Albertopolis.
The joke implies excess, royal self-importance and a small kingdom of committees. It survives because the plan succeeds.
A district devoted to public knowledge is being assembled. Yet one difficulty remains.
The public must be brought to it.
Railway companies are willing to help, provided they may also obstruct one another.
The Metropolitan Railway is extending southwards from Paddington. The Metropolitan District Railway is pushing west from Westminster. Their tracks are intended to meet near the museums at an interchange provisionally called Brompton Exchange.12
The name is sensible. It identifies both the older locality and the function of the station.
It has no chance.
By the time the exchange enters public life, South Kensington has prevailed. The museums have made the new name desirable. The railway map will make it durable.
On Christmas Eve 1868, the District Railway begins carrying passengers between South Kensington and Westminster. Steam locomotives draw wooden carriages through shallow cuttings and tunnels. Smoke collects beneath the roofs. Gas lamps compete with it. The station belongs to the first generation of underground railway architecture anywhere in the world: pale brick retaining walls, iron spans, open air where the engineers can obtain it, and darkness where property ownership makes darkness necessary.12
Above ground, Albert’s quarter proposes harmony between art, science and industry.
Below it, the railway companies fall out.
In 1871 the District constructs additional platforms and a separate entrance so that the rival companies can operate with less dependence upon one another. Each wants control of tracks, trains, passengers and revenue. The station is enlarged not by common vision but by managed suspicion.13
This, too, is a London method.
The railway delivers visitors near the museums. Near is not the same as there.
A family arriving in rain must still emerge into the street, organise children and umbrellas, avoid carts and cabs, cross busy roads and locate the correct institution. The buildings are monumental. The route to them is inconvenient.
Several schemes attempt to solve the problem. One proposes a covered way with a tramway towards the Albert Hall. Another considers pneumatic transport. The district founded to celebrate invention attracts inventions even when it declines to build them.14
What is eventually constructed is less spectacular and more useful.
A pedestrian tunnel.
The Prince of Wales opens the South Kensington subway on 4 May 1885. It runs for 433 metres from the station beneath Exhibition Road, with exits towards the South Kensington Museum, the Natural History Museum and the exhibition grounds beyond. Cream and yellow-brown glazed bricks line its walls. Iron beams carry the road above. Lightwells and windows admit what daylight they can. Electric lamps provide what the London sky withholds.14
The railway has built a corridor into culture.
The tunnel is initially tied to the international exhibitions still being held in the district. After the last of these closes in 1886, it is used only on special occasions. In 1908 it opens freely and permanently to the public.14
By then a second railway is arriving below the first.
The Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway drives electric trains through deep-level tunnels beneath London. Its corporate name still preserves Brompton, but its station reinforces South Kensington. The Piccadilly line platforms open in 1906. Leslie Green provides one of his characteristic oxblood-red glazed façades on Pelham Street, while George Sherrin remodels the older station and lays out a shopping arcade beneath a glazed barrel roof.12
Three different cities are fitted together.
At the top are shops, streets and institutions.
Below them are the shallow Victorian platforms built for steam.
Deeper still runs the electric Tube.
Between station and museums lies the long tiled passage, carrying feet where the Exhibition once carried ideas.
The arrangement changes repeatedly. Lifts give way to escalators. Ticket halls are altered. Tracks are removed or reassigned. Entrances close and reopen. The station learns to process crowds its first engineers could not have imagined.
Its essential task remains the same.
It delivers visitors to the consequences of 1851.
Stand in South Kensington station on a wet morning during the school holidays.
Children carry dinosaur backpacks. Parents negotiate coats, maps, prams, snacks and expectations. Students turn towards Imperial College. Concertgoers ask for the Albert Hall. Visitors who have never used the Underground stop immediately beyond the ticket barrier to consider their next move, while everyone behind them wishes they would consider it elsewhere.
Transport for London now describes the station as a connection used by tens of millions of visitors each year and as the gateway to London’s museum and cultural quarter.15
The language is administrative. The spectacle is human.
Take the museum subway rather than the street exit.
The tunnel is not beautiful in the manner of the buildings it serves. It is beautiful in the manner of a thing that has performed the same useful work for generations. Footsteps multiply beneath the brick vault. School groups stretch, divide and reassemble. Musicians carry instrument cases. Posters promise dinosaurs, spacecraft, fashion, photography, engines, empires and the human body.
At the northern end, the passage releases its crowds onto Exhibition Road.
The Natural History Museum stands like a Romanesque palace populated by stone and terracotta creatures. The V&A contains the descendants of Cole’s teaching collections, though the Brompton Boilers have mostly gone. The Science Museum preserves the machinery and experiment once gathered under the broader South Kensington Museum. Imperial College and the Royal Colleges of Art and Music continue the educational programme. The Royal Albert Hall completes the curve of institutions towards the park.
The district now appears inevitable.
Museums seem to have grown naturally in a cluster. Exhibition Road appears always to have led to exhibitions. South Kensington sounds like a direction that must have existed as long as Kensington itself.
None of this is true.
The Crystal Palace did not stand here. It stood in Hyde Park and then moved to Sydenham. The quarter south of the park was bought, named and developed with its profit. Brompton did not disappear; it survives in Old Brompton Road, Brompton Oratory and the names around the edges. But the new identity proved stronger where the institutions and railway required it to be.
Walk back to the station at street level.
The iron screens over the arcade still announce SOUTH KENSINGTON STATION and METROPOLITAN AND DISTRICT RAILWAY. Beneath them lie the revetments of 1867–68, among the earliest surviving architecture of underground travel. The arcade belongs to Edwardian improvement. The deep platforms belong to the electric age. The museum tunnel belongs to a Victorian conviction that public crowds, like steam and water, could be channelled by engineering.12
Listen when the name is announced.
South Kensington.
It sounds like a point on a compass.
Inside it are a vanished glass palace, a queen’s day of triumph, Albert’s memorandum, an exhibition of industry and empire, £186,000 in profit, eighty-seven acres of purchased land, Henry Cole’s instinct for status, the Brompton Boilers, museums lit late for working visitors, rival railway companies, steam beneath glass roofs and a tiled passage carrying children towards dinosaurs.
The Underground did not merely serve the district.
It helped complete the act of naming it.
The Great Exhibition closed in 1851.
The visitors are still arriving.
Notes and Sources
Royal Collection Trust, “The Great Exhibition of 1851”, and “Great Exhibition of 1851”. The Exhibition opened on 1 May 1851 to a crowd of about 20,000, contained more than 100,000 exhibits from over thirty participating countries and attracted more than six million visits during its five-month run.↩ ↩
Royal Collection Trust, “The opening of the Great Exhibition 1851”. The Crystal Palace enclosed mature trees in Hyde Park; Prince Albert read the Commissioners’ report to Queen Victoria, who recorded the importance of the day in her journal.↩
Royal Collection Trust, “Planning”, and “Victoria Regia”. Paxton’s prefabricated iron-and-glass proposal replaced earlier schemes and enabled rapid construction of the temporary exhibition building; his glasshouse designs drew upon his horticultural work, including the structure of the giant waterlily.↩
Victoria and Albert Museum, Facsimile of the First Sketch for the Great Exhibition Building, museum no. E.941-1983, described in the V&A-supplied record reproduced by Wikimedia Commons, and Violet Markham, “Joseph Paxton and His Buildings”, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 98 (1950). The surviving sketch is pen and ink on blotting paper. The traditional account places its creation during a Midland Railway board meeting at Derby; the text distinguishes that remembered setting from the securely surviving object.↩ ↩
Historic England, “The Crystal Palace under construction at its new site at Sydenham Hill”. The Hyde Park building was dismantled after the Exhibition, reconstructed to a revised design at Sydenham and destroyed by fire on 30 November 1936.↩
Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, “About us”; Royal Collection Trust, “The Exhibition”. The Exhibition generated a surplus of approximately £186,000, which the Commission used under Albert’s guidance to establish a permanent cultural and educational estate.↩
Survey of London, “Brompton Road: Introduction”, British History Online. Brompton was the established name for the settlement and surrounding land west of the present station before the mid-Victorian institutional development.↩
Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, “About us”, and Royal Collection Trust, Prince Albert’s sketch of the proposed Commissioners’ estate. The Commission used the Exhibition surplus to acquire an estate of approximately eighty-seven acres for institutions devoted to science, art and education.↩
Victoria and Albert Museum, “Building the V&A”. The museum moved to the Commission’s estate and opened as the South Kensington Museum in 1857. The V&A records that the Brompton neighbourhood was given the more aristocratic-sounding name South Kensington at Henry Cole’s suggestion, and explains the origin of the “Brompton Boilers” nickname.↩ ↩ ↩
Victoria and Albert Museum, “Building the V&A”. The early South Kensington Museum used gas lighting for winter evening opening and developed refreshment rooms, allowing broader public access and providing food on site.↩
Natural History Museum, “History and architecture”; Royal Albert Hall, “Prince Albert’s cultural vision: What is Albertopolis?”; Science Museum, “Nine things you didn’t know about the Science Museum”. The Natural History Museum opened in 1881, the Royal Albert Hall in 1871, and the Science Museum became institutionally separate in 1909.↩
Historic England, “South Kensington Underground Station”, National Heritage List for England entry 1392067. The Grade II-listed station dates from 1867–68, was originally called Brompton Exchange, and retains early sub-surface railway fabric. Its later components include George Sherrin’s arcade and Leslie Green’s deep-level station frontage.↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Historic England, “South Kensington Underground Station”. In 1871 the District Railway constructed additional platforms and a separate entrance after its relations with the Metropolitan Railway deteriorated.↩
Historic England, “South Kensington Subway”, National Heritage List for England entry 1392462. The 433-metre pedestrian subway was built by the Metropolitan District Railway, opened on 4 May 1885, used electric lighting and connected the station with the museums and exhibition grounds. After limited use following the last South Kensington exhibition in 1886, it opened freely to the public in 1908.↩ ↩ ↩
Transport for London, “South Kensington station”. TfL describes the station as a vital connection for tens of millions of visitors each year and a gateway to the museum and cultural quarter. Visit London likewise identifies South Kensington’s cluster of the Natural History Museum, V&A, Science Museum and Royal Albert Hall as major visitor attractions.↩