What price the Dome?
Jane Ridley
THE WORLD FOR A SHILLING by Michael Leapman Headline, £14.99, pp. 227, ISBN 0747270120 The success story of the Great Exhibition of 1851 should make the government squirm. The Crystal Palace was open for five and a half months, and it attracted six million visitors, averaging 50,000 daily. The Millennium Dome was open for 12 months, and the visitor target, after repeated downward revisions, was a mere 4.5 million, with daily attendance figures as low as 10,000. How did the Victorians manage to pull it off with such flair when New Labour failed so disgracefully?
'If I had my time again,' Tony Blair declared in September, 'I would have listened to those who said governments shouldn't try to run big visitor attractions.' Michael Leapman's admirable account of the Great Exhibition shows that he should have listened to the historians too. In 1851 the politicians kept out of things. Prince Albert played the role of chairman and figurehead, but the Exhibition was the brainchild of Henry Cole, an energetic Victorian polymath who left school at 15. Cole dreamed up the idea of an international exhibition to celebrate Free Trade and industry. The decision not to ask parliament for money but to raise funds through public subscription was crucial. It meant that right from the start the people had 'ownership' in a way they never did of the Dome.
The Exhibition Commissioners were not afraid to take risks. Instead of placing the Exhibition on a remote marsh like Greenwich, they plonked it down in Hyde Park, plumb in the middle of fashionable London. Of course, the well-heeled residents of genteel Belgravia objected. But the Commission took no notice. To his credit, Prince Albert refused to be panicked by dire warnings about mob riots, assassins, plagues and revolution. The Commission took a risk with the design as well. At the last minute they junked the boring brick building they had commissioned from Brunel, and accepted a design submitted after the closing date by an outsider. Joseph Paxton, gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, used his experience of building greenhouses to create a giant prefabricated iron-framed glasshouse which was tall enough to enclose the famous elms.
The opening ceremony by the Queen was originally intended to be private, but when the press objected the Commission opened it to the paying public. For the first few weeks only high-price tickets were admitted. Only after the price was slashed to one shilling did the exhibition become a resounding success. People poured into London by the trainload to marvel at it. One 84-year-old fisherwoman walked 294 miles from Penzance and back. The Crystal Palace became a focus for national unity in a way the Millennium Dome never was.
The Exhibition was a cross between a trade fair and a freak show. There was a machine for tipping people out of bed, a two-person piano, an adjustable tailor's dummy made of 7,000 pieces and a walking stick which contained a doctor's kit. Wonders of the world like the Hope diamond and the Koh-i-Noor were on display cheek by jowl with Colt revolvers, steam-powered machines and the first waterproof coats made by Mackintosh.
Queen Victoria visited the Crystal Palace nearly every day. Mixing freely with the crowds, she made impromptu royal walkabouts. She loved the shopping. In fact, the Exhibition's effect on shopping was profound. Charles Harrod's modest grocer's shop across the road in Knightsbridge boomed on the back of Exhibition custom. William Whiteley, a 19-year-old
from Yorkshire, was inspired to create his own grand emporium, Whiteley's store, the Universal Provider. The Crystal Palace also pioneered public lavatories. It was fitted out with newly designed urinals and 'monkey closets' or cubicles, which cost a penny a time. An estimated 827,000 people spent a penny. Across the road on the site of the Albert Hall, Alexis Soyer opened London's first international restaurant, which he called Soyer's Symposium. It went bust, but Thomas Cook made his fortune by organising cheap railway excursions to the Crystal Palace.
Michael L,eapman has written an intriguing and well-researched book. By investigating the reasons for the success of the Crystal Palace he shows time and again why the Dome flopped. Critics of the Crystal Palace had only one complaint: the food was bad and expensive and the waitresses didn't wash. At least no one complained that the Dome waitresses had BO.
Previous page
