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was quickly dismantled and carried away. The Sydenham Crystal Palace as horticultural hothouse In June 1854 the Great Exhibition building opened as the Sydenham Crystal Palace on the top of Sydenham Hill, to the south-east of London. The Hyde Park building had been modified in a number of ways to suit the new site. The ground floor area was reduced, but because of an increase in the height of the building its actual volume was increased by 50 per cent and the glass surface nearly doubled in area. This
This book explores the influence of imperialism in the landscapes of modern European cities including London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Marseilles, Glasgow and Seville. The first part considers some ways in which the design of urban landscapes articulated competing visions of the imperial city, including large-scale planning and architectural schemes, urban design and public monuments. The final shape of the Queen Victoria Memorial in London suggests an oddly tenuous relationship between the creation of imperial space and the representation of the empire itself. The notions of empire and romanità are expressed through the location, styling and form of the Vittoriano in Rome. The second part of the book considers the role of various forms of visual display, including spectacular pageants, imperial exhibitions and suburban gardens, in the cultural life of metropolitan imperialism. The material transformation of Paris with rhetorical devices reveals a deep-seated ambiguity about just how 'imperial' Paris wanted to appear. Sydenham Crystal Palace housed the Ethnological and Natural History Department, and its displays brought together animals, plants and human figures from various areas of the globe. The largest part of imperial Vienna's tourist traffic came from within the Austrian lands of the empire. The last part of the book is primarily concerned with the associations between imperial identities and the history of urban space in a variety of European cities. The book considers the changing cultural and political identities in the imperial city, looking particularly at nationalism, masculinity and anti-imperialism.
between Europeans and non-Europeans. The enlarged Sydenham Crystal Palace was the successor to the Hyde Park building, and it remained standing in south London from 1854 to 1936. Its displays illustrate how the British increasingly began to view themselves as heirs to the great ancient empires such as Egypt and Assyria. But they were also mindful that, just as those once dominant empires had collapsed, so too might
potential much greater than its predecessor.2 Yet their predictions proved to be a little wide of the mark, and for a long time, studies of the six-month long Great Exhibition of 1851 have marginalised the eighty-two-year presence of the Sydenham Palace.3 This volume looks beyond the chronological confines of 1851 to address the significance of the Sydenham Crystal Palace as a cultural site, image and structure well into the twentieth century, even after it was destroyed by fire in 1936. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, both as complete structure (1854– 1936) and as ruin
spyglass souvenirs of Sydenham, a peep egg (after 1851) (figures 2.1a and 2.1b) and Stanhope viewer needle case (c.1860–68) (figure 2.3), this chapter investigates how relatively low-tech, low-end miniature view mementos emerged to function as both an important visual record of the Sydenham Crystal Palace, and as an emblem of popular visual memories of the site. It considers how such keepsakes stand testimony to a prevalent affection or fondness for the Palace in the second half of the nineteenth century, or at the very least, its currency in popular culture and the
), pp. 138–69.  3 J. R. Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854–1936 (London: Hurst & Co., 2004), pp. 158–64; A. Chase-Levenson, ‘Annihilating Time and Space: Eclecticism and Virtual Tourism at the Sydenham Crystal Palace’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 34 (2012), 461–75.  4 G. A. Sala and H. W. Wills, ‘Fairyland in ’Fifty-four’, Household Words, 8:193 (3 December 1853), 313–17; see McCarthy, Crystal Palace Dinosaurs for details of the dinner.  5 See Piggott, Palace of the People; Secord, ‘Monsters at the Crystal Palace’, p. 138; H
our duty and pleasure lead us’.10 It was noted, however, that the ‘present collection at Sydenham affords us no section applied to Indian or Chinese art’, although this was due to, the author suggested, the lack of ‘remains extant there which appear to have historical claims to equal antiquity … afforded 126 after 1851 us by Egypt.’11 The Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor put its complaint at the absence of an Indian court much more forthrightly: With an oriental empire extending from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas hundreds of thousands of our countrymen are
inevitably, the Sydenham Crystal Palace’s sequence of portrait busts, even accompanied by Phillips’s short biographies, combine to raise synecdoche as a pressing, ongoing question. Can busts stand in for bodies, biographies and lives? Can representative citizens stand for their respective countries? Rather than assuming that parts can effectively represent wholes, Phillips characteristically gestured towards the missing pieces, noting that many of the busts were fragments of larger works, and filling in details of the way in which, in real life, a subject’s face was
was much more time to play with. The flood became a key part of the new discipline of geology, which swept up older antiquarianism with new fossil finds and reconfigured the meaning of what were called ‘antediluvian’ remains: they had been organisms that perished in the flood. Even when expert practice moved on from flood and fire catastrophism to graduated processes, the term remained in use throughout the second half of the century to describe extinct creatures, such as the antediluvian animals – or monsters – sculpted for the expanded Sydenham Crystal Palace
to counteract the powerful pull of its neighbour, the United States. Canada was also impressively represented at most Continental, American, and colonial exhibitions. The Dominions presence was to reach its peak at the 1911 Sydenham Crystal Palace Coronation Festival of Empire, when three-quarter-scale models of all the Dominion parliaments were built to house the various exhibits, and at Wembley in 1924-25 and Glasgow in