The Chairman opened the March meeting by giving details of the plaque to be attached to the war memorial following Don Freeth\u2019s research, the visit to the Morgan factory, the Social and the lunch on the Severn Valley Railway.<\/p>\n
The evening\u2019s speaker was John Aitken who enthralled his audience with an account of Prince Albert and the Crystal Palace Exhibition.\u00a0 Despite a difficult design brief,\u00a0 Joseph Paxton rose to the challenge and within in month of his initial doodles blueprints has been produced.\u00a0 There were several local links with the building: the contractor was Fox and Henderson of Birmingham, Chance at Smethwick produced 900,000 square feet of glass and the entrance gates were cast at Coalbrookdale.\u00a0 John showed us photographs of some of the worldwide exhibits, ranging from household items to huge machines.<\/p>\n
The exhibition profit was used to build \u2018Albertopolis\u2019, the area of South Kensington containing the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum.\u00a0 The building itself was dismantled and re-erected at Sydenham but was destroyed by fire in 1936.\u00a0 Sadly, Prince Albert died aged 42 only ten years after the Exhibition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Chairman opened the March meeting by giving details of the plaque to be attached to the war memorial following Don Freeth\u2019s research, the visit to the Morgan factory, the Social and the lunch on the Severn Valley Railway. The evening\u2019s speaker was John Aitken who enthralled his audience with an account of Prince Albert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-letters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}