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Chatsworth Conservatory and Lily House, site
Chatsworth House, east of Bakewell, Derbyshire
associated engineer
Sir Joseph Paxton
date 1837 - 1840, 1849
era Victorian | category Building | reference SK261702
With these two buildings, Joseph Paxton pioneered the use of prefabrication in the construction of large span glasshouses, anticipating the methods he was later to use on Crystal Palace, the building he designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Paxton (1803-1865) became Head Gardener at Chatsworth House in 1826 at the age of 23. He had impressed its owner, William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, whose London residence (Chiswick House) was close to Paxton's previous place of work, Chiswick Gardens.
In the first half of the 19th century, there was intense interest in exotic plants from tropical regions and these required hothouses to survive. In 1837 work started on Paxton's Great Conservatory for Chatsworth, sited where the maze now stands. Architect Decimus Burton, who later worked with ironworker Richard Turner on the Palm House at Kew, drew up the plans.
The conservatory was 84m long and 37m wide. Though iron columns and accessories were used, arches, glazing bars and gutters were built up from timber sections. This systemised approach emerged as key to achieving the Great Exhibition building, and Paxton envisaged its use on an even larger scale in the unbuilt scheme, The Great Victorian Way (1855).
The Great Conservatory could be described as the first building in Britain to have an industrial aesthetic, the direct result of the use of batch-produced components. The building proved Paxton's technical and organisational credentials.
In 1849, a second conservatory � the Lily House � was built at Chatsworth to house a single species of lily, Victoria Regia, recently brought from the Amazon and transferred from Kew Gardens where it hadn't thrived. Designed by Paxton, it also was constructed in a combination of wood, iron and glass. He developed a flat roof version of the ridge and furrow glazing, and a curtain wall system of hanging vertical bays of glass from cantilevered beams. The combination of these techniques � the glazing methods and the batch-production of components � led directly to the design of Crystal Palace.
Paxton continued as Head Gardener at Chatsworth House despite becoming a Member of Parliament and a leading figure in the emerging railway industry. He retired when the 6th Duke died in 1858.
The Great Conservatory and the Lily House were demolished in the early 1920s after they fell into disrepair.
Architectural assistant: Decimus Burton
Research: ND
bibliography
"A History of Architecture" by Sir Bannister Fletcher
The Athlone Press, London, 1963 (seventeenth edition, revised R.A. Cordingley)
"Building Systems Industrialisation and Architecture"
by Barry Russell
John Wiley & Sons, London, 1981
"The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architecture and Technological Change"
edited by Pedro Guede
Location
Chatsworth Conservatory and Lily House, site
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