Sir Joseph Paxton | |
|---|---|
 Sir Joseph Paxton | |
| Born | (1803-08-03)3 August 1803 Bedfordshire, England |
| Died | 8 June 1865(1865-06-08) (aged 61) Sydenham, London, England |
| Occupation | Architect |
Sir Joseph Paxton (3 August 1803 – 8 June 1865) was an Englishgardener, architect, engineer andLiberal Member of Parliament. He is best known for designingthe Crystal Palace, which was built inHyde Park, London to house theGreat Exhibition of 1851, the firstworld's fair, and for cultivating theCavendish banana, the most consumedbanana in the Western world.
Paxton was born in 1803, the seventh son of a farming family, inMilton Bryan, Bedfordshire. Some references, incorrectly, list his birth year as 1801. This is, as he admitted in later life, a result of misinformation he provided in his teens, which enabled him to enrol at Chiswick Gardens. He became a garden boy at the age of fifteen for Sir Gregory Osborne Page-Turner atBattlesden Park, nearWoburn. After several moves, he obtained a position in 1823 at the Horticultural Society's Chiswick Gardens.[1]
The Horticultural Society's gardens were close to the gardens ofWilliam Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, atChiswick House. The duke met the young gardener as he strolled in his gardens and became impressed with his skill and enthusiasm. He offered the 20-year-old Paxton the position ofhead gardener atChatsworth, which was considered one of the finest landscaped gardens of the time.
Although the duke was in Russia, Paxton set off for Chatsworth on theChesterfield coach arriving at Chatsworth at half past four in the morning. By his own account he had explored the gardens after scaling the kitchen garden wall, set the staff to work, eaten breakfast with the housekeeper and met his future wife, Sarah Bown, the housekeeper's niece, completing his first morning's work before nine o'clock. He married Bown in 1827,[2] and she proved capable of managing his affairs, leaving him free to pursue his ideas.
He enjoyed a friendly relationship with his employer who recognised his diverse talents and facilitated his rise to prominence.
One of Paxton's first projects was to redesign the garden around the new north wing of the house and expand Chatsworth's collection of conifers into a 40-acre (160,000 m2)arboretum which still exists. He became skilled at moving mature trees. The largest, weighing about eight tons, was moved from Kedleston Road in Derby. Among several other large projects at Chatsworth were therock garden, theEmperor Fountain, and rebuildingEdensor village. The Emperor Fountain was built in 1844;[3] it was twice the height ofNelson's Column and required the creation of a feeder lake on the hill above the gardens necessitating the excavation of 100,000 cu yd (76,000 m3) of earth.[4]
In 1832, Paxton developed an interest in greenhouses at Chatsworth where he designed a series of buildings with "forcing frames" forespalier trees and for the cultivation of exotic plants such as highly prized pineapples.[5] At the time the use of glass houses was in its infancy and those at Chatsworth were dilapidated. After experimentation, he designed a glass house with a ridge and furrow roof that would be at right angles to the morning and evening sun and an ingenious frame design that would admit maximum light: the forerunner of the modern greenhouse.
The next great building at Chatsworth was built for the first seeds of theVictoria regia lily which had been sent to Kew from the Amazon in 1836. Although they had germinated and grown they had not flowered and in 1849 a seedling was given to Paxton to try out at Chatsworth. He entrusted it toEduard Ortgies, a young gardener and within two months the leaves were 4.5 ft (1.4 m) in diameter, and a month later it flowered. It continued growing and it became necessary to build a much larger house, the Victoria Regia House. Inspired by the waterlily's huge leaves – 'a natural feat of engineering' – he found the structure for his conservatory which he tested by floating his daughter Annie on a leaf. The secret was in the rigidity provided by the radiating ribs connecting with flexible cross-ribs. Constant experimentation over a number of years led him to devise the glasshouse design that inspired the Crystal Palace.
With a cheap and light wooden frame, the conservatory design had a ridge-and-furrow roof to let in more light and drained rainwater away. He used hollow pillars doubling as drain pipes and designed a special rafter that acted as an internal and external gutter. All the elements were pre-fabricated and, likemodular buildings, could be produced in vast numbers and assembled into buildings of varied design.
In 1836, Paxton began construction of the Great Conservatory, or Stove, a huge glasshouse 227 ft (69 m) long and 123 ft (37 m) wide that was designed by the 6th Duke's architectDecimus Burton.[7] The columns and beams were made ofcast iron, and the arched elements of laminated wood.[8] At the time, the conservatory was the largest glass building in the world. The largest sheet glass available at that time, made by Robert Chance, was 3 ft (0.91 m) long. Chance produced 4 ft (1.2 m) sheets for Paxton's benefit. The structure was heated by eight boilers using seven miles (11 km) of iron pipe and cost more than £30,000. It had a central carriageway and when the Queen was driven through, it was lit with twelve thousand lamps. It was prohibitively expensive to maintain, and was not heated during the First World War. The plants died and it was demolished in the 1920s.
In 1848 Paxton created theConservative Wall,[9] a glass house 331 ft (101 m) long by 7 ft (2.1 m) wide.
The Great Conservatory was thetest-bed for the prefabricated glass and iron structural techniques which Paxton pioneered and would employ for his masterpiece:The Crystal Palace of theGreat 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 atax on glass.
In 1850 theRoyal Commission appointed to organise the Great Exhibition were in a quandary. An international competition to design a building to house the Exhibition had produced 245 designs, of which only two were remotely suitable, and all would take too long to build and would be too permanent. There was an outcry by the public and in Parliament against the desecration ofHyde Park.
Paxton was visiting London in his capacity as a director of theMidland Railway to meet the chairmanJohn Ellis who was also a member of parliament. He happened to mention an idea he had for the hall, and Ellis promptly encouraged to produce some plans, provided they could be ready in nine days. Unfortunately he was committed for the next few days, but at a board meeting of the railway in Derby, it is said he appeared to be spending much of his time doodling on a sheet ofblotting paper. At the end of the meeting he held up his first sketch of the Crystal Palace, inspired by the Victoria Regia House. The sketch is now in theVictoria and Albert Museum.
He completed the plans and presented them to the Commission, but there was opposition from some members, since another design was well into its planning stage. Paxton decided to by-pass the Commission and published the design in theIllustrated London News to universal acclaim.
Its novelty was its revolutionary modular, prefabricated design, and use of glass. Glazing was carried out from special trolleys, and was fast: one man managed to fix 108 panes in a single day. The Palace was 1,848 ft (563 m) long, 408 ft (124 m) wide and 108 ft (33 m) high.[11] It required 4,500 tons of iron, 60,000 sq ft (5,600 m2) 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 byCharles Fox, also of Derby for the iron framework, andWilliam Cubitt, Chairman of the Building Committee. All three wereknighted. After the exhibition they were employed by the Crystal Palace Company to move it toSydenham where it remained until it was destroyed by fire in 1936.
In 1831, Paxton published a monthly magazine,The Horticultural Register. This was followed by theMagazine of Botany in 1834, thePocket Botanical Dictionary in 1840,Paxton's Flower Garden (vols. I & II) in 1850[12][13] and theCalendar of Gardening Operations. In addition to these titles he also, in 1841, co-founded perhaps the most famous horticultural periodical,The Gardeners' Chronicle along withJohn Lindley,Charles Wentworth Dilke andWilliam Bradbury, and later became its editor.
Paxton was aLiberal Member of Parliament forCoventry from 1854 until his death in 1865.
In June 1855 he presented a scheme he called theGreat Victorian Way to the ParliamentarySelect Committee on Metropolitan Communications in which he envisaged the construction of an arcade, based on the structure of the Crystal Palace, in a ten-mile loop around the centre of London. It would have incorporated a roadway, anatmospheric railway, housing and shops.[14]
Although he remained the Head Gardener at Chatsworth until 1858, Paxton was also able to undertake outside work such as the Crystal Palace and his directorship of the Midland Railway. He worked on public parks inLiverpool,Birkenhead,Glasgow,Halifax (thePeople's Park) and the grounds ofThe Spa, Scarborough. In October 1845 he was invited to lay out one of the country's first municipal burial grounds inCoventry. This became theLondon Road Cemetery, where a memorial to Paxton by Joseph Goddard was erected in 1868.
Between 1835 and 1839, he organised plant-hunting expeditions, one of which ended in tragedy when two gardeners from Chatsworth sent to California drowned.[15] Tragedy also struck at home when his eldest son died.
In 1850, Paxton was commissioned by BaronMayer Amschel de Rothschild to designMentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire. This became one of the greatestcountry houses built during theVictorian Era. Following the completion of Mentmore,James Mayer de Rothschild, one of Baron de Rothschild's French cousins, commissionedChâteau de Ferrières atFerrières-en-Brie near Paris to be "Another Mentmore, but twice the size". Both buildings still stand today.
_cropped.jpg)
Paxton also designed another country house, a smaller version of Mentmore, atBattlesden nearWoburn in Bedfordshire. This house was bought by theDuke of Bedford thirty years after its completion, and demolished, because the Duke wanted no other mansion close toWoburn Abbey.
In 1860, Paxton also designed Fairlawn, 89 Wimbledon Park Side, for Sir Edwin Saunders,Queen Victoria's dentist.[16]
Paxton was honoured by being a member of the Kew Commission, which was to suggest improvements forRoyal Botanic Gardens, and by being considered for the post of Head Gardener atWindsor Castle.
On 17 March 1860, during the enthusiasm for theVolunteer movement, Paxton raised and commanded the11th (Matlock) Derbyshire Rifle Volunteer Corps.[17]
Paxton became affluent, not so much through his Chatsworth employment, but by successful speculation in the railway industry. He retired from Chatsworth when the Duke died in 1858 but carried on working at various projects such as the Thames Graving Dock. Paxton died at his home at Rockhills, Sydenham, in 1865[18] and was buried on the Chatsworth Estate inSt Peter's Churchyard, Edensor. His wife Sarah remained at their house on the Chatsworth Estate until her death in 1871.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forCoventry 1854 –1865 With:Edward Ellice Morgan Treherne | Succeeded by |