One of my favourite radio programs is In Our Time, a series for autodidacts. Today Melvyn Bragg and guests were talking about the Great Exhibition of 1851 (download the MP3 of the program here). They mentioned that the glass for the Crystal Palace came from Chance, the Birmingham glassmaker, whose factory was situated canalside at Spon Lane.
There's a history of the Chance glassworks here, on the fascinating and informative Revolutionary Players website, a history of Birmingham industry. As I understand it, the Chance family bought a pre-existing glass factory in 1824 and heavily expanded it to take advantage of the newly-cut Telford canal. In the mid-19th Century the Chance glassworks straddled the canal, as this picture shows.
The section of canal on the streetmap is here, and there's a memorial of the Crystal Palace in the streetname 'Crystal Drive' on one side of the canal, and 'Palace Drive' on t'other.
Did the glass for the Crystal Palace come to London by canal? In this Multimap combined roadmap and aerial view I notice that Crystal Drive runs right alongside the railway, but if I was sending precious glass in bulk to London, I'd trust it to go slowly and gently by narrowboat, not by the jolting early railways.
Not as exciting a post as I thought it might be when I started typing it (after a lot of browsing) half an hour ago. But of mild interest I think.
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