Joseph Paxton was a gardener, not an architect. He had spent his career building glasshouses at Chatsworth, and his masterpiece for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was essentially a glasshouse scaled to the ambition of an empire. Stretched 1,851 feet long - one foot for every year of the new century by then half elapsed - it covered 990,000 square feet of Hyde Park beneath 293,000 panes of glass. Three times the size of St Paul's Cathedral. Built in thirty-nine weeks. Paxton's design used identical 49-inch panes throughout, mass-produced by Chance Brothers of Smethwick, who had to import labour from France to fill the order. The hollow cast iron columns served double duty as concealed rainwater pipes. The whole structure was prefabricated, modular, and so light it needed almost no masonry. Some sections went up within eighteen hours of leaving the factory.

Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition on 1 May 1851. Over the next five and a half months, more than six million admissions passed through the gates - extraordinary in a country whose population was barely twice that. The displays included the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a massive hydraulic press, Sevres porcelain, music organs, and the 27-foot Crystal Fountain. Britain occupied half the floor space; France was the largest foreign contributor. Working-class visitors paid one shilling on weekdays. In the retiring rooms, sanitary engineer George Jennings installed his 'Monkey Closet' flushing lavatories - 827,280 people paid a penny apiece to use them. The exhibition closed with a surplus of £186,000, enough to seed the South Kensington museum complex that still defines that quarter of London today.

What to do with the world's largest glass building once the exhibition ended? A consortium of railway directors bought it, dismantled it, and re-erected it on Penge Peak above South London - bigger, taller, and grander than before. The new Crystal Palace opened on 10 June 1854 with Queen Victoria again presiding, this time over 40,000 guests. For the next eighty-two years it was the centre of South London's cultural life. Garibaldi was feted there. The Shah of Persia. Christopher Dresser lectured. Charles Spurgeon preached without amplification to a crowd of 23,654. The world's first cat show was held in 1871, organised by one Harrison Weir; the first aeronautical exhibition in 1868. The FA Cup Final was played in the grounds every year from 1895 to 1914. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's life-sized concrete dinosaurs - 33 of them, modelled on the latest 1850s science - still inhabit the park today, charmingly inaccurate by modern reckoning but unchanged since the Victorians knew them.

By the 1930s the Palace was tired. The crowds had thinned, the booths had become shabby, and Sir Henry Buckland was working hard to bring the place back. On the evening of 30 November 1936, Buckland was walking his dog with his daughter Crystal - named for the building - when they noticed a red glow inside. Two employees were fighting a small fire in an office near the women's cloakroom, where an explosion had started it. The Penge fire brigade was called. Eighty-nine engines and more than four hundred firemen arrived. None of it mattered. In a building made almost entirely of glass and timber, with thirty miles of guttering full of dry leaves, the fire moved faster than anything could chase. Within hours the Crystal Palace was gone. The glow was visible from Brighton to Margate, and from the high ground of Surrey it lit the southern sky. John Logie Baird, who had been using the South Tower for his television experiments, lost much of his work in the fire and suspected sabotage. The cause was never determined.

The site sits empty now - or rather, it is a park, with the original Italianate terraces still climbing the hill where the Palace stood. The concrete dinosaurs are still there, grade-I-listed and restored. The two railway stations Paxton's project required are partly there too: Crystal Palace Low Level still in service, while the High Level station leaves only an Italian-mosaic-roofed subway under the Parade, also listed. The Crystal Palace National Sports Centre occupies part of the park, descendant of the old FA Cup Final pitches. The neighbourhood took the building's name and kept it - one of the few London districts named for something that no longer exists. From the air, the terraced hilltop still has the dimensions of an enormous footprint: a ghost outline of the building that astonished the nineteenth century and then, in a single night, vanished into legend.