The Crystal Palace - Victorian wonder which gave its name to a London suburb

The remarkable Victorian structure known as the Crystal Palace was built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London's Hyde Park.

It was a spectacularly large exhibition hall, built of plate glass and cast iron to a design by Joseph Paxton.

After the exhibition, it was removed from Hyde Park and re-erected in Sydenham, southeast London, where it became a significant feature until destroyed by fire 85 years later.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a World Fair - showcasing wonders of technology, arts and industry from around the world, with an emphasis on the achievements of Britain and its Empire. It ran for six months and was enormously successful, visited by many famous and wealthy people as well as thousands of ordinary working class citizens from around the country. It is said that a third of the British population visited the Great Exhibition.

Engineer and gardener Joseph Paxton produced a design that fulfilled all requirements - temporary, cheap, quick to build, and simple. His original sketch is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

A newly constructed railway brought the tons of timber and iron, and 10 million square feet of glass to Hyde Park, where the exposition opened just over nine months from the initial design. The structure was three times the size of St Paul's Cathedral.

Although it was originally intended only as a temporary structure, the palace was moved after the exhibition to a permanent location at Sydenham (pictured), where it was surrounded by elaborate gardens and additional attractions. Two new 280-foot-tall water towers designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel powered fountains that launched jets of water 120 feet in the air. In the garden there were sculptures of recently discovered dinosaurs.

The cost of moving the structure was much greater than the original build cost.

By the turn of the century, the palace was losing money and declared bankrupt in 1911. The fountains were turned off, and Brunel’s huge water towers emptied, so when the building caught fire in 1936, there was no water on hand to put out the blaze, and it was destroyed.

Television pioneer John Logie Baird had been using part of the palace for his experiments, and much of his work was destroyed too.

The park and the dinosaurs still remain, as do some stone steps and a sphinx. And the name lives on as an area of London and a football club.