This article is from the November 2024 edition of Jabet’s Ash, the newsletter of the Stoke Local History Group, courtesy of its Chair, John Marshall. John writes….
The next meeting of Stoke Local History Group will feature local author and journalist Peter Walters who will talk about the remarkable life of the Victorian landscape gardener Joseph Paxton, best known in Coventry as the designer of the city’s magnificent London Road Cemetery.
Joseph Paxton was born in August 1803, the seventh son of poor farm labourers in Bedfordshire, and he rose from those humble beginnings to become, at the age of 20, the head gardener at Chatsworth House, the Duke of Devonshire’s large country house in Derbyshire.
At Chatsworth, Paxton forged a formidable reputation with his designs for gardens, fountains, a model village and an arboretum. In the late 1830s he also built an iron and glass conservatory – known as the Great Conservatory – and a lily house, specially designed to house a giant lily with a structure based on the leaves of the plant. It was at Chatsworth that Paxton met and married Sarah Bown, the housekeeper’s niece, who often took charge when he was absent.
In 1851 came Paxton’s greatest achievement and his national fame, when he produced a revolutionary design for the main hall of the Great Exhibition – a vastly magnified version of his glass house at Chatsworth. It was relatively cheap, simple to erect and remove, and had a prefabricated, modular design, with an extensive use of glass. It became known as the Crystal Palace and won widespread critical acclaim when the Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park in May of that year.
Following the exhibition, Paxton was knighted by Queen Victoria and when the event finished, his Crystal Palace was famously re-erected at Sydenham where it stayed until it burned down in 1936.
Paxton stayed as head gardener at Chatsworth but took on a large number of other projects, including his work at Coventry. He became the Liberal MP for Coventry in 1854 and achieved great wealth through successful speculation in the booming railway industry.
You are invited to join the Stoke Local History Group for their meeting at Stoke Library, on Friday 6th December at 10.30am Peter Walters, Vice Chair of the Coventry Society, will talk about ‘The Life and Times of Joseph Paxton’.
