Series: History of Expos — Article 4 of 86
Eleven years after the Great Exhibition of 1851 had made London the birthplace of the World Expo, the city staged a sequel. The International Exhibition of 1862, formally the London International Exhibition of Industry and Art, opened in South Kensington on 1 May 1862 and ran until 1 November, with public access extended to 15 November. It drew more than 6.1 million visitors and 39 participating countries, according to the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE). Yet where the first exhibition had been staged in a mood of national confidence, the second unfolded under the shadow of a royal death and a foreign war, and its history illustrates how vulnerable even an established exhibition format was to events beyond its organisers’ control.
A delayed sequel
Her Majesty’s Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, the body that still administered the surplus from that fair, had originally planned the follow-up for 1861. It was postponed, in part because of the Second Italian War of Independence, which unsettled continental participation, and in part because of the American Civil War, which broke out in April 1861 and complicated the involvement of the United States, then one of the exhibition’s intended major participants. The rescheduled 1862 date placed the exhibition squarely inside a war that would shape much of what visitors saw and did not see inside its galleries.
An opening in mourning
Prince Albert, co-architect of the 1851 exhibition and president of the organising commission for its sequel, died in December 1861, five months before the doors opened. Queen Victoria, in mourning, did not attend the opening ceremony; her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, presided in her place beneath the exhibition building’s western dome, and the Earl Granville delivered the formal address. The organisers commissioned an unusually elaborate musical programme to mark the occasion, including an ode by Alfred, Lord Tennyson set to music by William Sterndale Bennett, a Fest-Ouvertüre by Giacomo Meyerbeer, and a triumphal march by Daniel Auber. Giuseppe Verdi’s commissioned cantata, Inno delle nazioni, was caught up in a dispute over its inclusion and was performed separately, at Her Majesty’s Theatre, three weeks after the opening.
War’s shadow over the exhibition halls
The American Civil War affected the exhibition beyond its scheduling. The Union naval blockade of Confederate ports had cut off the raw cotton supply to Lancashire’s mills, producing the Lancashire Cotton Famine and severe hardship among textile workers in the years around the fair. American participation was consequently reduced, and India’s cotton and textile exhibits were promoted partly as evidence that the empire could supply an alternative source, reflecting Britain’s live anxiety about its most important industry rather than simple imperial display.
A building nobody loved
The exhibition halls, designed by Captain Francis Fowke of the Royal Engineers and built in under a year by Lucas Brothers and Sir John Kelk, cost around £300,000, funded from the 1851 exhibition’s surplus rather than the Treasury. Constructed largely of cast iron with brick façades, the building included two glass domes, each 150 feet wide and 260 feet high, which were, at the time, the largest domes yet built. Contemporary critics were unimpressed: the Art Journal called the plain brick frontage on Cromwell Road “a wretched shed,” and comparisons with Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 were consistently unflattering. Parliament declined to buy the building after the exhibition closed, and its materials were sold and reused to construct Alexandra Palace in north London. The site itself was later given over to the Natural History Museum, extending the museum district — informally known as “Albertopolis” — that the 1851 surplus had begun.
Innovation, and an unofficial debut
The exhibition displayed the decade’s industrial advances since 1851: a working submarine telegraph cable, Alexander Parkes’s Parkesine (widely regarded as the first man-made plastic), the Bessemer steel process, an early mechanical refrigerator that reportedly drew crowds, and a portion of Charles Babbage’s analytical engine. William Morris’s newly formed decorative arts firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., attracted notice for its stained glass and furnishings. Japan had no official pavilion, since it would not formally participate in a World Expo until 1873, but Rutherford Alcock, Britain’s envoy to Japan, showed several hundred objects from his personal collection of lacquerware, porcelain and textiles. The display coincided with the arrival in London of Japan’s first official diplomatic mission to Europe, whose members attended the opening as guests, and is generally credited as British audiences’ first substantial exposure to Japanese design — an encounter that later influenced the retailer Arthur Lasenby Liberty, founder of Liberty & Co.
The numbers behind the spectacle
Sources differ slightly on exhibitor and country counts, ranging from 28,000 to over 30,000 exhibitors and 36 to 39 countries; this article follows the BIE’s figure of 39. Visitor numbers, at just over 6.1 million, matched 1851’s total but fell well short of the organisers’ hoped-for 11 million. Financially, the exhibition was not the success its predecessor had been: receipts of £459,632 against costs of £458,842 left a nominal profit of £790, and some accounts describe a small loss instead, covered by a private guarantor rather than the wider body of subscribers. No public funds were involved either way.
The line to Riyadh
The 1862 exhibition is a reminder that the World Expo format, still only its second outing internationally, was never insulated from geopolitics: a royal death delayed and subdued its opening, and a civil war on another continent shaped which countries showed up and what they had to sell. The regulatory framework the BIE built in 1928, and under which Expo 2030 Riyadh is registered, exists partly to give host cities and participating nations a stable, insured structure that the organisers of 1862 did not have. The South Kensington site’s afterlife as a museum quarter also anticipates a pattern Riyadh has adopted explicitly: using the Expo surplus and the vacated site, at Wadi Al Sulai, to build a permanent civic legacy once the exhibition itself has closed.
This is the fourth in a weekly series tracing the 174-year history of the World Expo, ahead of Riyadh’s own edition in 2030.
Sources
- 1862 International Exhibition — Wikipedia
- Expo 1862 London — Bureau International des Expositions
- 1862 London Exhibition — Graces Guide
- The Exhibition Building of 1862 — Survey of London, British History Online
- The 1862 London International Exhibition: Machinery on Show and its Message — Taylor & Francis
- The International Exhibition of 1862 — Antique Box Guide
- Japanese art and design on display at the 1862 London International Exposition — Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan
- The London Exposition of 1862 — ArcGIS StoryMaps
Note: exhibitor and participating-country counts vary across sources (28,000–30,000 exhibitors; 36–39 countries); this article follows the BIE’s published figures. Accounts also differ on whether the exhibition’s final finances amounted to a nominal profit or a small loss absorbed by a private guarantor; both versions appear in reputable sources and are noted above rather than resolved.