Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-65),  who achieved fame with his all-glass, prefabricated and incomparable Crystal Palace Exhibition Hall of 1851, was the protagonist of glass in architecture. In 1837 he designed the conservatory at Chatsworth which, like the Crystal Palace, is now destroyed.

Inspired by Chatsworth, Decimus Burton and Richard Turner designed the much larger Palm House in London's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where they were the supervising architects.

The Palm House is 363 feet long by 100 feet wide and rises to a height of 66 feet. Besides educating visitors in the natural world, one of the functions of English greenhouses at the time was to display the exotic range of plants and flowers that flourished in the British Empire.