When London’s Iconic Crystal Palace Burned to the Ground in a Devastating Fire

On the night of November 30, 1936, thousands of London residents flocked to Sydenham Hill in the English capital’s southeast to witness a vicious, roaring blaze. The iconic Crystal Palace was aflame.

The inferno was witnessed “by more people than any previous fire in Britain,” a blaze so significant that “the glare in the sky could be seen in ten counties and from high points 80 miles away,” the Daily Telegraph reported the next day. “Pilots of airliners crossing the [English] Channel watched the glow.”

Within half an hour, the entire structure—some 25 acres of cast iron and glass—was ignited, and throughout the night, it burned down to an unrecognizable ruin of its former grandiose self.

At the time, newspapers focused on the £9,000 organ and the research laboratories of John Baird, a television innovator, that were lost in the fire. Though no people died, the crowds watching the Crystal Palace crumble also stood witness to the destruction of a building that, for more than eight and a half decades, was a palace devoted to the majesty of empire and industry.

Built in 1850, the Crystal Palace was first located in London’s Hyde Park, where it housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than six million people visited the event—an estimated third of the British population at the time. It showcased manufactured goods from across the world, including entire houses, hydraulic presses, exotic perfumes, Colt pistols and intricate furniture—marvels of the Victorian Age.

But perhaps the most impressive part of the exhibition was the venue itself—a palace of 3,330 iron columns and 900,000 square feet of glass, built in just nine months. It was even enlarged to incorporate two massive, historic elm trees that would have been felled to accommodate the structure otherwise.

So popular was the Crystal Palace that, instead of facing demolition after the exhibition ended, it was completely disassembled, moved and rebuilt in Sydenham Hill.

The new, improved and relocated palace opened in 1854 and served as a venue for an ever-expanding list of exhibitions, meetings and events. Flowers, farm animals, cats, dogs, photography and transportation were all the subject, at one time or another, of exhibitions in the palace. The venue hosted meetings of groups like the National Temperance League, police officers and religious factions from across the empire. It held concerts and hosted a 4,500-pipe Great Organ. In 1868, it even held public screenings of a giant, gas-powered Zoetrope animation device.

Between 1854 and 1884, attendance averaged two million visitors a year, with visitors streaming to the south of London by train, according to the Crystal Palace Foundation, a volunteer organization that preserves the site’s history.

In 1911, the Crystal Palace hosted its largest event, the Festival of Empire Exhibition, a chance for subjects to see their rulers in person, for overseas dominions to sing the empire’s praises and for imperial unity to shine out across the world.

But on the last night of November 1936, the destruction of the palace signaled something entirely different—what Winston Churchill reportedly called “the end of an age.” Only the palace’s water towers (demolished in the 1940s because of fears they would provide easy landmarks for German bombers) and a garden of motley dinosaur statues from the 1850s survived.

As one anonymous poet wrote in the Morning Post, all that he could do in front of that now “smoldering mass” was to “recall the joys you held for one small lad / In bygone summers.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.