Bingley Hall, the world's first purpose-built exhibition…
1850 CE
The precursor of Bingley Hall was an "Exhibition of the Manufactures of Birmingham and the Midland Counties" in a temporary wooden hall built in the grounds of, and attached to, Bingley House on Broad Street in central Birmingham (which once belonged to banker Charles Lloyd and was visited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and opened on September 3, 1849, for visitors to the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival.
This exhibition was visited by Charles Darwin, and also on November 12 by Prince Albert and may have contributed to his ideas for the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace.
Bingley Hall is built by Messrs Branson and Gwyther (architect J. A. Chatwin), for six thousand pounds in six weeks in 1850, using steel columns surplus to the construction of Euston railway station.
It is built in the Roman Doric style using red and blue bricks (the Staffordshire blue bricks being diverted from building the Oxford Street viaduct).
Covering one and a quarter acres internally, it measures two hundred and twenty-four feet (sixty-eight meters) by two hundred and twenty-one feet (sixty-seven meters), used eleven thousand seven hundred feet (thirty-six hundred meters) of twenty-one-inch (five hundred and thirty millimeter) glass, and has ten entrance doors.
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North Europe
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