At the heart of Exhibition Road is a small organisation with a big name – the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. Founded in 1850 by the husband of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, it has played – and continues to play – a central role in the history and development of the area.
As its name implies, the Commission was established by Royal Charter to plan and stage the Great Exhibition. This took place between May and October 1851 in Joseph Paxton’s fabulous ‘Crystal Palace’ in Hyde Park – hence the name of Exhibition Road.
The first ever world fair, the Great Exhibition had nearly 14,000 exhibitors and over 100,000 exhibits from around the world, and more than 6,000,000 visitors flocked through the doors in the less than five months it was open. With a minimum cost of a shilling for entry, the Exhibition was a resounding success, making a profit of £186,000 – equivalent to many millions today.
The Great Exhibition was a transforming event. It opened the world to competitive trade and confirmed Britain’s position among the world’s major manufacturing nations. It also opened London to tourism, inaugurated the America’s Cup yacht race and, with the first turnstile public conveniences, introduced the expression ‘to spend a penny’ into the language.
When the Exhibition closed, the Royal Commission was then established as a permanent body to spend the profits in order to meet Prince Albert’s ambition to ‘increase the means of industrial education and extend the influence of science and art upon productive industry’. To this end the Commissioners purchased 87 acres of land in Brompton (now South Kensington) stretching from what is now Kensington Gore to Cromwell Road. Here they aided the establishment of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and Imperial College as well as the Royal Colleges of Art and Music.
This extraordinary legacy, a unique cultural estate, became known as Albertopolis and to this day the 1851 Royal Commission still acts as landlord for much of the site and plays an active part in the estate and its continuing development – including through the Exhibition Road Cultural Group.
Amazingly, when the cultural estate was largely developed, there were still sufficient funds available for the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to set up, in 1890, a major programme to award fellowships for research to perpetuate Prince Albert’s original vision to support productive industry.
This programme continues to this day and among past recipients of the Commission’s prestigious fellowships can be counted 12 Nobel Prize winners, six holders of the Order of Merit and four Presidents of the Royal Society. Today the Commission awards some 25 fellowships and scholarships a year, for advanced study and research in science, engineering, the built environment and design. It also makes occasional special awards and promotes other educational ventures of national importance. All this is still from the profits of the Great Exhibition…
Further information about the Commission, its awards and its extensive archive can be found on the Commission’s website at www.royalcommission1851.org.uk.
