Sir Joseph Paxton
3rd August, 1803
Wales is a very small country. You’re never more than about 20 minutes from the sea or from an adventurous landscape of white-water rafting, mountains, caves and other lung busting activities. All of which makes it a wonderful place to visit for a holiday and I recommend you do. Tourism has long ago replaced steel, coal and iron as Wales’ economic backbone.
All of which would make it seem as though getting around in Wales is relatively easy and it isn’t. Where I currently live, in Texas, the landscape couldn’t be different. Here there are great long vistas of nothing but cotton fields and sky. You can see the curvature of the Earth in Texas, whistling away into a landscape made purely of horizon. Wales, by contrast, is squashed into a Tolkienesque world of valleys and forests, of hills and more hills punctuated by the occasional mountain. Driving 200 miles in Texas in one go is nothing. It’s a routine journey taken on a flat, straight, wide road that carves its way, Roman style, across the plains. In Wales, going anywhere takes forever.
As a result, a journey from where I grew up, in a valley so small that half of it never saw sunlight in winter months, to the nearest city, Swansea, a distance of less than 50 miles, would seemingly take hours to complete. Especially in the years before the only motorway in Wales was extended west all the way to the county town of Carmarthen. Before that it would take so long, it literally was a day out. You’d leave at 6AM and arrive home sometime after 9PM with all the things you got from Swansea that you couldn’t get anywhere else, like a ZX Spectrum, a Marilyn Monroe poster and a pair of punk bondage trousers in vinyl with red straps. Y’know, normal stuff.
Like all journeys home, you would pass a local landmark that would finally tell you that you were in your country now, not that fancy-ass, city-slicker, shops don’t shut at 4 in the afternoon, posh nonsense that the neon people got to enjoy. You were back in the real world where everything smelled of cow shit and the radio stopped working when you went into a valley. The real world.
For me that landmark was, and still is although the motorway now bypasses it somewhat, a great Victorian monolith folly that stood like a dalek on the heights above the Towy Valley, called Paxton’s Tower. Originally part of the nearby Middleton Hall estate that burned down in 1931 and is now home to the National Botanical Garden of Wales (another excellent attraction and worth several visits), the tower was originally a sort of play house/dining room for the rich bastards who owned most of the surrounding area. We grew up believing that the reason it was called Paxton’s Tower was that it was built by the famous architect Sir Joseph Paxton. It wasn’t, it was built by a local Member of Parliament called William Paxton, no relation, and designed by some fellow called Samuel Pepys Cockerell who had a cool name, but that’s about it.
Joseph Paxton, though was a very interesting chap because his speciality was designing huge glass houses, the mightiest of which was the enormous The Crystal Palace, which he designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and which itself burned down in 1936, the 1930s being a great decade for burning shit to the ground.
Oh. And he invented bananas.
Paxton was born in 1803 in Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire, the 7th son of a farmer. Various sources give his birth date as 1801, but Paxton later admitted he had changed his birth date so he could enrol at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chiswick Gardens in 1823.
Chiswick Gardens were not far from Chiswick House, one of the homes of the 6th Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish, and it was there that the duke met the 20-year-old Paxton and became impressed by his knowledge and enthusiasm. He offered Paxton the prize role of head gardener at his main home of Chatsworth House, one of the finest landscaped gardens in the country and Paxton leapt at the opportunity.
With the duke away in Russia on business, Paxton set off for Chatsworth and arrived before dawn. With nobody to let him in, he jumped over the garden wall. Before 9am that morning, he had set the staff to work, met the head housekeeper, fallen in love with the housekeeper’s niece, Sarah Brown, and eaten breakfast. He married Sarah in 1827. I don’t know why he took so long.
The Duke and Paxton got on like a house on fire, which had they lived until the 1930s would have been very apt, and the duke trusted him entirely. It was a perfect match; a man with an extraordinary amount of money bankrolling another with an extraordinary range of ideas.
Paxton immediately set to work on the estate at Chatsworth. He planted and remodelled the local conifer forests into the 40-acre arboretum still there to this day, becoming an expert at moving mature trees. He built the rock garden, redesigned the local village and built the huge Emperor Fountain, over 300ft tall and gravity fed by a lake on the hill above the gardens.
In 1823, Paxton developed his love of greenhouses, building an innovative glass structure at Chatsworth that was designed 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. He used it to cultivate exotic plants such as pineapples.
The next great glass house at Chatsworth was built especially to house the seeds of the Victoria regia lily, which had been in Britain for a while at Kew Gardens, but had refused to flower. In 1849, the team at Chatsworth got them to flower and it became necessary to build a much larger house, the Victoria Regia House. The design for the frame of the house came from the lilies themselves, with the rigidity provided by the radiating ribs connecting with flexible cross-ribs, inspired by the underneath of the lily leaves. He tested the weight of his constructions by getting his daughter, Anne, to lay on them. These techniques were to later help him solve the enormously complicated engineering problems at Crystal Palace. Another innovation was to use the hollow frames of the building as gutters to transport water around the building, although this also turned out to be their downfall as they also spread rust and decay around it, too.
In 1836, Paxton began construction of the Great Conservatory, also known as the Stove. This immense glasshouse, designed by the 6th Duke’s architect Decimus Burton, measured 227 ft (69 m) in length and 123 ft (37 m) wide. The columns and beams were crafted from cast iron, while the arched elements were made of laminated wood. At the time, it was the largest glass building in the world.
The largest sheet glass available then, produced by Robert Chance, was 3 ft (0.91 m) long. However, Chance created 4 ft (1.2 m) sheets specifically for Paxton. The structure was heated by eight boilers and utilized seven miles (11 km) of iron pipe, costing over £30,000. It featured a central carriageway, and when Queen Victoria was driven through it in a carriage, it was illuminated by twelve thousand lamps.
Maintaining the conservatory proved to be ruinously expensive. During the First World War, it went unheated, leading to the death of the plants. Ultimately, it was demolished in the 1920s.
It was in these buildings that Paxton first began to cultivate bananas. Though they were not the first known banana specimens in Europe, in around 1834 Cavendish received a shipment of bananas from Mauritius. They were botanically described by Paxton as Musa cavendishii, after the duke. For this, Paxton won a medal at the 1835 Royal Horticultural Society show.
So successful were the bananas grown at Chatsworth that they were exported back around the world to be cultivated, entering mass cultivation in the early part of the 20th Century. I was being facetious when I said that Paxton invented the banana, but when Panama Disease began destroying the then dominant banana species Gros Michel in the 1950s, the cultivation of bananas around the world switched to Cavendish varieties instead. Today, every banana you buy is a Cavendish that can trace its lineage back to the original plant at Chatsworth, which is still there.
The Great Conservatory served as the testing ground for the prefabricated glass and iron structural techniques that Paxton pioneered and later used for his masterpiece, the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851. These techniques were made possible by recent technological advances in glass and cast-iron manufacturing, and financially feasible by the removal of a tax on glass.
In 1850, the Royal Commission appointed to organize the Great Exhibition faced a dilemma. An international competition to design a building for the Exhibition yielded 245 designs, but only two were remotely suitable, and all would take too long to build and be too permanent. There was public and parliamentary outcry against the desecration of Hyde Park.
While visiting London as a director of the Midland Railway, Paxton met with chairman John Ellis, who was also a member of parliament. Paxton mentioned an idea he had for the hall, and Ellis encouraged him to produce some plans, provided they could be ready in nine days. Despite being committed for the next few days, Paxton spent much of a board meeting in Derby doodling on a sheet of blotting paper. By the end of the meeting, he had his first sketch of the Crystal Palace, inspired by the Victoria Regia House. This sketch is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Paxton completed the plans and presented them to the Commission, but faced opposition from some members, as another design was already in the planning stage. Paxton decided to bypass the Commission and published the design in the Illustrated London News, receiving universal acclaim.
The novelty of the Crystal Palace lay in its revolutionary modular, prefabricated design, and extensive use of glass. Glazing was carried out from special trolleys, allowing one man to fix 108 panes in a single day. The Palace measured 1,848 ft (563 m) in length, 408 ft (124 m) in width, and 108 ft (33 m) in height. It required 4,500 tons of iron, 60,000 sq ft (5,600 m²) of timber, and over 293,000 panes of glass. Remarkably, it took 2,000 men just eight months to build and cost only £79,800. A unique achievement, it was a demonstration of British technology in iron and glass. Paxton was assisted by Charles Fox, also of Derby, for the iron framework, and William Cubitt, Chairman of the Building Committee. All three were knighted. After the exhibition, they were employed by the Crystal Palace Company to move it to Sydenham, where it remained until it was destroyed by fire in 1936.
Paxton was a Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry from 1854 until his death in 1865.
He submitted to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications a plan dubbed the Great Victorian Way in June 1855. It planned to build an arcade ten miles around the heart of London, modeled after The Crystal Palace. It would have included shops, housing, streets, and an atmospheric railway.
He remained the head gardener at Chatsworth until the duke’s death in 1858, when he retired. Outside of his work there and at The Crystal Palace, he designed public parks across the country, the great seat of the Duke of Bedford, Mentmore House, urban houses in London, a cemetery, Château de Ferrières in France and numerous other projects, which, with my architectural historian hat on, were all rather gaudy, gothic revival, sprawling Victorian monstrosities. Nice if you like that sort of thing, not if you don’t. But he very definitely didn’t design Paxton’s Tower.
Paxton did very well, financially, more so from his shrewd investment in the burgeoning railway system than from his design work. Paxton died at his home at Rockhills, Sydenham, in 1865 and was buried on the Chatsworth Estate in St Peter's Churchyard, Edensor. Sarah remained at their house on the Chatsworth Estate until her death in 1871.
His glass houses were extraordinarily beautiful things, his other work an acquired taste and one I haven’t acquired, but it’s not often you can say that you invented bananas and built the biggest greenhouse the world had ever seen.