Page 8 - History 2020

Pugin at the Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace was the venue for the 1851 Great Exhibition, or to give it its full
name, the ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’. This was
principally designed to celebrate Britain as the “Workshop of the World” – a phrase
coined by a young and up-an-coming Tory politician and novelist, Benjamin Disraeli.
One if its driving forces was Queen Victorian’s husband Prince Albert, who had a
passion, unusual for his class, for industry and invention. About half the exhibits were
British. To encourage variety, areas called “courts” were allocated where
manufacturers could display their own exhibits as they chose. August Pugin, who

hated the whole idea of the exhibition and ridiculed its custom-built venue, the
Crystal Palace, nonetheless saw an opportunity to promote his Gothic Revival
message.

Nonetheless he saw an opportunity to promote his enthusiasm for hand-made
medieval stuff rather than machine-made modern stuff. He was the brains behind
the so-called “Gothic Revival” and is the reason our towns and cities are full of mock-

medieval Victorian churches and public buildings. He got permission from the
Exhibition organisers to create a “Medieval Court” in which he assembled a host of
items in the Gothic style: hand-crafted furniture, church ornaments, a giant cross, an
ecclesiastical stove (ideal for heating cathedrals), pots and furniture.

It split opinion. Many criticised it as backward-looking and outdated. Critics used
words like “theatrical”, “pious” and “lifeless”. One compared it unfavourably to a
steam locomotive, whose function determined its “eloquent and harmonious” form,

far superior aesthetically to Pugin’s “meretricious make-believe” with its “false
outlines and incongruous ornament.”