"The Crystal Palace, in which the Great Exhibition of All Nations was held, has become a great national icon. It housed the first of the great international exhibitions, occasions aptly described by a French commentator as 'the tournaments of our times'. The honours were as hotly, if more pacifically, contested, and attracted exhibitors not only from the British Isles, but also from all over Europe, from the United States and South America, and even from India.

A Royal Commission, a uniquely British device, was created to run the Exhibition, under the Presidency of Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. Such was the success of the Exhibition that when its doors closed and the Crystal Palace was banished from fashionable Hyde Park to suburban Sydenham, the Commission found a new role for itself in founding a museum quarter to educate and train recruits for British industry.".

"The Exhibition itself is only one part of the story of the Royal Commission which, of course, continues in existence today. The history of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 is, in its own way, an epic story. Though created to meet the needs of a special occasion, its members turned a single initiative into a long-term programme for British industry and education.".

"This book records the work of the Commissioners over 150 years in promoting Industry throughout the British Isles and later throughout the Empire and Commonwealth, working for both education and industry. A series of little-known, but interesting, exhibitions kept the notion of foreign competition before industrialists, and splendid buildings arose in South Kensington.

These were designed to house the national collections of applied art in the Victoria and Albert Museum, acknowledged as one of the leading museums of design in the world, and the industrial exemplars of the Science Museum, whose collections inspired its great rival, the Deutsches Museum in Munich."--BOOK JACKET.