‘Covered promenades for wet weather’: London’s winter gardens and people’s palaces, 1870–1900

Abstract

This essay explores the interior spaces of three nineteenth-century, London-based, large-scale, multi-functional, public leisure centres — the Alexandra Palace, the Royal Aquarium and Summer and Winter Gardens, and the People’s Palace. Thanks to the possibilities of iron and glass, and the model provided by the Crystal Palace, the new buildings were constructed from the 1870s onwards, offering a new building type and providing London’s working-class population with the recreation that the earlier open-air Pleasure Gardens had offered the aristocracy and the middles classes, albeit indoors. A mixture of entrepreneurialism and social reform drove the development of the new venues. This article seeks to unpack the complex interior spaces of these new buildings, focusing on the components they had in common, among them winter gardens, great halls and ice-skating rinks. The tensions that arose from the attempts, made in all three centres, to combine high cultural educational offerings with more popular passive entertainment are explored, as are the experiences of the visitors. The conclusion briefly considers the legacy of nineteenth-century winter gardens and people’s palaces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.