The Great Exhibition

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The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park on 1 May 1851 in Joseph Paxton's prefabricated iron and glass building, itself an industrial product assembled from standard components in months. Around six million admissions were taken over the season, many of them by excursion train — the railway network being what made a national audience possible. Its surplus funded the museums and colleges of South Kensington. It is best read as the moment Britain chose to display the transition as an accomplished fact, at the very point when its industrial lead was about to be contested.

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