Crystal Palace FC Is Named After a Palace That Burned in One Night

Crystal Palace FC is named after this building. The company that ran the palace founded the professional club in 1905 to play at the stadium in its grounds, where the FA Cup Final was held from 1895 to 1914, and the palace is still on the club's badge. On the night of November 30, 1936, the Crystal Palace burned, and by morning only its two towers were standing. The building had held the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, and then been taken apart and put up again, larger, on a hill in south London, where for most of eighty-two years it failed as a business. This is the story of the glass building that grew from a lily house, the company that could never make it pay, the floor that had worried its builders since 1851, and the 2013 promise to build it a third time, which ended in a council report in 2015. Every date, figure and quotation in this film comes from the sources below. The 3D sequences are reconstructions drawn from the building's published dimensions; the fire is shown as a stylized, labelled reconstruction, not a photograph. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open 1:28 A Great Many Lily-Houses 4:23 A Palace for the People 6:23 A Fifth of Their Value 9:10 In One Lot 11:06 The Manager 11:57 The Night 14:26 A Guiding Landmark 15:47 How Long, O Lord 17:18 The Replica 19:05 Closing SOURCES First and Second Reports of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851 (1852) Charles Downes, The Building Erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition (1852) Samuel Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park (1854); Routledge's Guide to the Crystal Palace (1854) Hansard, 29 April 1852 and 30 April 1914; The London Gazette, 11 August 1911 The Illustrated London News, 1849 to 1941; Household Words (1851); The Household Narrative (1853, 1854); Walford, Old and New London (1878) The Guardian, 1 December 1936; the London cables of 1909 to 1941 as printed in Australian newspapers (The West Australian, The Age, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph and others, via the National Library of Australia's Trove) Historic England: the list entries for Crystal Palace Park, its towers, subway, column and memorial, and the Heritage at Risk register The Crystal Palace Foundation; the London Fire Brigade; the Victoria and Albert Museum (Paxton's sketch, E.575-1985); Ray Herbert on the Baird studios London Borough of Bromley, report DRR15/020 to the Executive (25 March 2015) and its news releases; Inside Croydon (2015, 2018); Construction Enquirer and ArchDaily (2013, 2014) Maps: Natural Earth (public domain); the Thames from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL) IMAGES 76 archival photographs, engravings and drawings in the public domain, most of them through Wikimedia Commons from the Illustrated London News, period guidebooks, prints and photographs of 1851 to 1941, the Library of Congress, the Rijksmuseum (stereographs of the Sydenham palace), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Philip Henry Delamotte's photographs of the palace going up, 1853 and 1854) and the Imperial War Museums (photographs of 1914 to 1924, and Sir John Lavery, The Royal Naval Division, Crystal Palace, 1916). Photographs used under Creative Commons licences, with thanks: Marathon, N Chadwick, Jim Osley, Robert Lamb, Stephen Craven, Peter Trimming, George Griffin, Christopher Hilton (CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons) Doyle of London, Chris Furby, Ethan Doyle White, Peter Cooper (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) Celsoazevedo (CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) 72 3D sequences, maps, chapter and quote cards made for this film. MUSIC "Laniakea", "False Vacuum Decay", "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly", "Red Shift" and "Kayak" by The Grey Room, Density & Time; "Earth Appears" by Brian Bolger; "Looping Ascent" and "Ponderous Days" by Joel Cummins; "Night Falls" by Everet Almond; "Palindrome" by Alex Hamlin; "Heartbeat Of The Wind", "Traverse The Sky" and "Elegy" by Asher Fulero; "Keys To Unravel" and "Between The Spaces" by The Soundlings; "Curse Of Old" and "Risen" by Density & Time; "Missing Persons" by Jeremy Blake; "Last Sunrise" by Adam MacDougall; "Natural Light" by Chris Haugen. YouTube Audio Library