Some further Continental examples of the use of iron in the late twenties and thirties deserve mention at this point. Alavoine—at whose suggestion Duc’s Bastille Column, begun in 1831, was made of metal, though the metal is bronze not iron—designed in 1823 a flèche 432 feet tall to rise over the crossing of Rouen Cathedral in the form of an openwork cage of iron. Begun in 1827 and interrupted in 1848, this was finally completed by the younger Barthélémy (Eugène, 1841-98) and L.-F. Desmarest (1814-?) in 1877. In 1829-31 Fontaine roofed the Galeried’Orléans, which he built across the garden of the Palais Royal, with iron and glass. This structure, now destroyed, was more prominent and also much wider than most of the many passages and galeries[[162]] with glass roofs that had been built in Paris and elsewhere in France from the 1770s on. The most impressive extant French example is the Passage Pommeraye in Nantes, built by Durand-Gasselin and J.-B. Buron (?-1881) in 1843; in this the circulation moves upwards from one end to the other through three storey-levels. A modest Milanese example of 1831, the Galleria de Cristoforis by Andrea Pizzala (?-1862), might be mentioned here also, as it was the local prototype for the greatest of all these characteristic nineteenth-century urban features, Mengoni’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele begun in the sixties (Plate [75B]). Of the many early nineteenth-century ones that remain in other European cities, the Galerie Saint-Hubert in Brussels, built by J.-P. Cluysenaer (1811-80), a pupil of Suys, in 1847, is one of the largest and best maintained. Warren’s Providence Arcade in Providence, R.I., has been mentioned earlier.
Related to the galeries, and sometimes also so-called, were the large Parisian enterprises of this period that were really early department stores. The Bazar de l’Industrie, built by Paul Lelong (1799-1846) in 1830, had a large glass-roofed and iron-galleried court of the sort that was to be continued in Parisian department stores down into the present century (see Chapter [16]). Even larger and bolder were the similar courts in the department store known as the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie, built by Grisart and Froehlicher in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in 1838, which has already been mentioned for its richly arcaded Renaissance façades (Plate [62A]). Shop-fronts of iron were also frequent in Paris[[163]] by this time. Thus in France, as in England and America, the use of iron was closely associated with structures for business use, but more usually with sales emporia than with office buildings (see Chapter [14]). Such, however, were not unknown in England and America, though they were generally less extensive and made less use of glass-roofed courts.
Glass held in wooden frames had for some time been extensively employed for greenhouses. How early iron began to be substituted for wood is not clear, and not perhaps of much consequence.[[164]] Hopper’s ornately Gothic Conservatory of iron and glass at Carlton House in London, demolished in the twenties, has been mentioned several times already (Plate [60B]). In 1833, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75) built a very large and handsome iron greenhouse without any stylistic decoration. The structure of the square pavilions was as transparent and rectilinear as the interior framework of Veugny’s slightly later market seems to have been, and the ranges between were covered, just as so many wooden greenhouses had been, with transparent roofs rising in two quadrants. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire the Great Conservatory was built in 1836-40 by the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65), possibly with some minor assistance from Decimus Burton. This quite outclassed the largest earlier greenhouse, the Anthaeum at Brighton, designed in 1825 and built in 1832-3 for the horticulturist Henry Phillips, with a dome of iron and glass 160 feet in diameter which collapsed before it was quite completed. The Chatsworth conservatory was a still larger rectangle, 227 feet by 123 feet, with the exterior rising in a double cusp like the side ranges of Rohault’s Paris greenhouse—or, for that matter, like the section of the Anthaeum. The columns and beams here were of iron, but the great arched principals of the ‘nave’ and the ‘aisles’ were of laminated wood and four-foot long panes of glass were held in wooden sashes arranged in a ridge-and-furrow pattern. A particular invention of Paxton’s, whose name was given to such roofs, was the hollowing out of the wooden members at the base of the furrows to serve as gutters.
Decimus Burton’s still extant Palm Stove at Kew, carried out by the contracting engineer Richard Turner of Dublin in 1845-7, with rounded ends and a higher central area, is more bubble-like than Paxton’s because of the absence of ridges and furrows on its continuously glazed surface (Plate [67A]). But both these great greenhouses were among the most striking monuments of their Early Victorian day and were never exceeded later in elegance though often in size. French rivals, long since destroyed, were the Jardins d’Hiver in Lyons and Paris of 1841 and 1847 by Hector Horeau (1801-72), the latter a rectangle 300 by 180 feet and 60 feet tall.
With the thirties begins the story of a new building type, the railway station,[[165]] in whose sheds the mid century was to realize some of the largest and finest examples ever of ‘ferrovitreous’, or iron-and-glass, construction. The structures utilizing iron thus far mentioned have been of two sorts, some, such as bridges, markets, greenhouses, etc., with only subsidiary masonry elements, if any at all; others, examples of mixed construction with metal providing only the internal skeleton or the roof. Railway stations were generally—and before the fifties always—examples of mixed construction, but of a rather special sort. The iron and glass portions, that is the sheds, and the masonry portions are likely to be merely juxtaposed, not truly integrated. Such a masonry frontispiece as Hardwick’s Euston Arch in London of 1835-7 had no connexion at all with the functional elements of the station behind—here by Robert Stephenson—although Euston was an extreme case. But a happy co-ordination of the masonry and the iron-and-glass portions of stations was rarely achieved anywhere.
Of the earliest railway station, that at Crown Street in Liverpool of 1830, nothing remains; it was in any case a very modest structure.[[166]] Of its successors at Lime Street the present station is the fourth on the site. Even the ‘Arch’ at Euston, the next major station to be built, is now gone, despite the strenuous efforts of the Victorian Society and others in Britain and overseas to save this symbolic portal to the Victorian Age. However, the first station at Temple Meads in Bristol, which was built by Brunel in 1839-40, is physically intact, though supplanted in present-day use by a larger and later one. Castellated as regards the masonry block in front, the shed here is equally medievalizing; for its roof is of timber, not of iron, and based on the fourteenth-century hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall in London, whose width it exceeds by a few feet only.
Of the once far finer Trijunct station at Derby, built in 1839-41, the last portions of Francis Thompson’s brick screen have finally been destroyed; the three original sheds provided by Robert Stephenson, with Thompson’s collaboration on the detailing, were each 56 feet wide in comparison to the 40-foot width of Stephenson’s earlier ones at Euston (Plate [62B]). The tie-beam roof had much of the graceful directness and linear elegance of Rohault’s greenhouse or Veugny’s market.
More and more, the use of iron was being generally accepted as a technical necessity in the forties. At Buckingham Palace Blore, in adapting one of Nash’s side pavilions as a chapel for Queen Victoria in 1842-3, used visible iron supports just as Nash had done so long before in the interiors of the Brighton Pavilion for her uncle. Yet generally the use of iron in important masonry structures in the thirties and the early forties was quite invisible, being confined to the floors and the substructure of the roofs. In 1837-9 C.-J. Baron (1783-1855) and Nicolas Martin (1809-?), for example, provided a complete iron roof above the vaults of Chartres Cathedral, a work of very considerable scale and technical elaboration that provided the immediate prototype for the iron roof of Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, designed in 1840 and begun in 1846. At the Houses of Parliament, the actual construction of which started only in 1840, Barry capped the whole with iron roofs—the external iron plates are actually visible, of course, but the fact of their being of iron is rarely recognized. Fireproof floors built according to various French and English patent systems were increasingly thought necessary in all high-grade construction. Queen Victoria’s Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, constructed without the aid of an architect by the builder Thomas Cubitt, had them throughout, as did many other well-built country houses of the forties, at least in the passages and stair-halls.
Here and there in the commercial buildings of this decade the iron skeleton used inside came through to the exterior, as it had on one of Rickman’s Liverpool churches a generation earlier. A small office building at No. 50 Watling Street in London, with visible iron supports and lintels in the upper storeys but with brick corner piers and brick spandrels, was a case in point, probably dating from early in the decade. By 1844 Fairbairn was recommending in a report that fireproof construction should be used in all warehouses. Increasingly this was done in Lancashire and, before long, elsewhere; Fairbairn himself had introduced it ten years earlier in the Jevons Warehouse on the New Quay in Manchester.
Closely associated with the development of iron construction is the development of prefabrication; indeed, the parts of an elaborate iron edifice, such as a bridge or a greenhouse, are necessarily prefabricated and merely assembled at the site. From the early forties, and perhaps even before that, lighthouses were frequently erected in ironmasters’ yards in Britain, disassembled, shipped to Bermuda or the Barbadoes, and then reassembled. In 1843 John Walker of London provided a prefabricated palace for an African king and, by the end of the decade, prefabricated warehouses and dwellings of iron were being supplied to gold-diggers in California and emigrants to Australia in very considerable quantity. A look at the prefabricated houses of the 1940s will perhaps explain why almost none of these ancestors of a century earlier seems to have survived, at least in recognizable form. None the less, the advance of prefabrication remains a notable technical—though hardly architectural—achievement of the 1840s and 1850s.