Paxton's Crystal Palace

Sir Joseph Paxton was a 19th-century botanist who became instantly famous for the hall he designed for the Great Expo of 1851. After the expo, the Crystal Palace moved to a new location and became the centerpiece of the world's first theme park.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'll and I'm Tracy Wilson, and today we're going to
talk about a famous piece of architecture. Uh and some

(00:21):
pieces of architecture seemed to have nothing but bad luck,
and today's topic could probably be filed under luck comma bad.
But it didn't start out that way. It's it's beginnings
were quite lovely and pretty glorious and um, you know,
filled with success. Yeah, the run of bad luck was
definitely a later part of its history. Yes, when the
building moved, which is one of those things that doesn't

(00:42):
happen very often, but in this case, uh, it did.
And it was a gloriously beautiful structure which was called
the Crystal Palace. And that's a name that's been attributed
to many many buildings, but this is kind of the
Crystal Palace Paul capital letters. Yes. Uh so, first we'll
talk a little little bit about the architect behind it,

(01:02):
who did not actually start out as an architect. No,
and this this led to some concerns. Yeah, so it
was Sir Joseph Paxton. He was a nineteenth century English
botanist and then later an architect. He designed um meant
More towers and a famous hot house which was called
the Great Stove at Chatsworth, and he also designed gardens,

(01:25):
and there is a piece called Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural
Encounters in Garden Art of fifteen fifty to eighteen fifty
and in that piece Margaret Flanders Darby says that Paxton
quote is celebrated as the very definition of nineteenth century
upward mobility because he started out humble and ended up
pretty celebrated. Yeah. He was born on August third, eighteen

(01:47):
o one in Bedfordshire to a farm family, and when
he was young he worked for the Duke of Devonshire
as a gardener at Chiswick Gardens. In eighteen twenty six
he had cultivated this French with the Duke and really
impressed him with his horticultural wiles. So at that point
he was assigned to the post of Superintendent of Gardens

(02:09):
at the Duke's estate in Derbyshire known as Chatsworth. Some
of the elements of the garden designs that he created
there uh in what's called the classic mixed style, still
exists and there at Chatsworth Paxton designed and build a
greenhouse for the Duke, that's the one we referenced earlier
called the which is sometimes casually called the Great Stove
because it was a hothouse. Uh. And he also created

(02:32):
these really impressive fountains. He built a model village there. Uh.
He was very busy creating a lot of structures for
the garden and the grounds. And one of his greatest
accomplishments was that he was able to keep this exotic
lily cutting that he got from Guiana not just alive
but thriving. The leaves were allegedly twelve feet wide, so

(02:53):
if you can wrap your brain around that, there is
a picture of his daughter sitting on one of them.
That was just this amazing acomplishment considering that this was England,
which is not really where you think about these giant,
sort of exotic lilies growing. Uh. And he had built
at the specialized house for the heated pool, which was
quite new to the idea of gardening. And he was

(03:15):
obviously an extremely clever man, and he had this innate
and ability to solve problems in really creative ways. But
he also had an eye for the visual element, because
often these creative problem solving situations were also just visually stunning.
In eighteen forty nine, Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, who

(03:35):
was also the President of the Royal Society of Arts,
launched this plan to host an exhibition to showcase Great
Britain's industrial achievements. He managed to get funding for the
project really quickly. Most of that funding came from quick
Queen Victoria and he planned a site for the expo
at Hyde Park. So designers were asked to submit their

(03:58):
ideas for a structure for the ship to the Industrial
Exhibition Executive Committee. So it's a little bit of a
design contest, uh, And there were numerous challenges for architects
to deal with if they wanted to submit to this project. First,
this structure had to be constructed quickly. Second, there were
concerns about the destruction of elm trees in the park,

(04:19):
so the hope was that the design would accommodate those
elm trees in some way. Third, the building had to
be temporary. It would have to be removed from Hyde
Park by a date of June one, eight fifty two,
And of course it also had to be big enough
to accommodate all of the exhibitors that the committee wanted
to attract, as well as all the foot traffic that

(04:39):
they wanted to come and see the visitors. So that's
kind of a tall order. It needed to be a
giant temporary convention center basically, which even with modern tech,
would be kind of tricky. I know it happens, right,
but then when you think back to the early eighteen fifties,
it's really quite something to think about, right. Joseph pack

(05:00):
To submitted his idea for a glass and iron structure
on June. The commission wanted him to address the concern
over destroying the elm trees in the park, and they
requested that he revised his design to include this vaulted
cross wise piece in the building, which is called a transept,
and that would enclose the elm trees and prevent the

(05:22):
need for them to be destroyed. He did this, and
his design was accepted in part because his construction plan
involved pieces that could be brought together in segments and
installed in a modular production process. All the other submitted
designs and involved this like large scale masonry, so they
really we're not practical for the very short time frame

(05:45):
they had to build a thing for the idea that
they wanted to take it down later. Yeah, it's almost
like they got this idea of they wanted to showcase
their country's cultural history. So a lot of them kind
of went in the castle zone and it's like, no, no,
you're missing kind of part of the brief. We need
to we need this to be quick up and down right. Well,
And I think if I had been in the meeting

(06:06):
where they came up with this whole idea in the
first place, it's like, let's build a really big building,
but only for a very short amount of time and
then we will take it down, I would have just
been like, are you serious? Is this the best use
of your time and resources? Well, but uh, you know,
Paxson figured it out and because the most available glass
dimension at the time was apparently ten inches by fort

(06:29):
uh and the structure was going to need a lot
of glass, that standard size was actually used as the
basis for a lot of the entire design. There's actually
a really really cool site that will link to in
the show notes that breaks down how that geometry works.
And they've actually built out CG models of the various
elements of the structure so you can kind of look
at them in three D and see how it all

(06:50):
came together and how those glass pieces were used in
those dimensions to create what became the Crystal Palace. And
as a side note, I feel like I should say
the name the Crystal Palace was not officially given by Pakiston.
It kind of came up in the press as this
was being discussed during the submission and acceptance process and
the the pre build lead up to it. That journalists

(07:13):
started calling it a Palace of crystal, and it kind
of took the name accidentally, but then it got adopted officially.
I wonder if that annoyed people who were really into
glass possibly. Maybe One really interesting challenge that comes with
building a huge building made entirely of glass is the
fact that glass just can't handle a huge waterload in

(07:36):
that configuration, so rain can be really dangerous. So they
put in special gutters, which of course were named Paxiston gutters,
and those are designed to quickly carry water away through
this big gutter system and really just keep fluid from
accumulating on the roof and crushing the thing. Yeah, it
was very, very efficient. It was almost like a tributary

(07:58):
approach in reverse, where they would start very small and
just lead into the progressively bigger gutter system. Well, and
if you think about like our office is pretty much
a giant building walled in glass, those are there's the
vertical surfaces, Like the horizontal surfaces in our building are
are not glass because it's too it's really really hard

(08:19):
to Maintainpecially it's safe and we'll get to the scale
in a little bit when we talking about construction, which
will make you realize how mammoth the structure really was.
I was, I was unaware. Uh. During construction, there was concern,
as you hinted at earlier, that Paxton's lack of real
architectural experience was really going to be a problem. Who

(08:42):
are like, well, yes, it's beautiful, but there's going I
don't know how to make buildings. He makes greenhouses, uh,
and his area of expertise was hothouses, So they were
not the kind of things that would be seeing the
kind of foot traffic that the Expo was expected to have.
And there was very real fear. Yeah, meeting Tracy again

(09:03):
would be saying sure, so due to all these concerns
that the Expo was going to be housed in a
structure that was designed by a gardener, even though his
experience had really moved way past just gardening at that point.
It was decided that all iron girders had to be
tested before they could be installed, and they also added

(09:25):
cross bracings that were made of wood, primarily as sort
of a visual reassurance for visitors. Yeah, it just looked sturdier, yeah,
which is kind of fun. And the building was actually
put together in less than eight months by two thousand
men that are sometimes referred to in some um historical

(09:46):
documents on it as unskilled labors. Like basically these skilled
workers had put together the modular pieces, but then they
were shipped to the site and it was almost like,
I don't want to demean it by saying, like click together,
but you really didn't have to have like a degree
in engineering to see how they went together and to
assemble those barn raising. It was pretty smartly designed in
that regard barn raising or glass. Yes, And the finished

(10:10):
dimensions of this structure are it was one thousand, eight
hundred and forty eight feet long, which is about five
hundred sixty three. It was four hundred and eight feet
wide or a hundred and a hundred and eight feet high,
which is about thirty three ms on including the galleries
and the ground floor, more than eight miles or thirteen

(10:33):
kilometers of display tables were housed. Eight miles of display tables.
This is where my mind really boggled. Well, it's one
of those things where trying to kind of filter it through,
like my modern experience, I'm like, this is kind of
like a dragon Con or comic con was in an

(10:53):
entirely glass building. Let's never do that, no, for other reasons,
but when you think about it at that scale of
like a huge convention center that's made entirely of glass,
you can't help but be a little one impressed at
just the sheer brazenness of it, and two pretty wowed

(11:15):
by the engineering, again by someone who people were kind
of poo pooing as a mere gardener. So yeah, well,
and to be fair, while the structure was definitely unique
and eye catching, there was one major flaw in its design,
and you could attribute that flaw directly to Paxton's previous
experience being a hot house designer rather than an architect.

(11:39):
Because the palace was designed like a giant hot house,
it basically worked like a giant hot house. So when
you went inside, it was basically an oven. They put
in this rather elegantly designed louver system that allowed for
some ventilation and moved cool air from the base of
the building up into the main halls. But as you

(12:00):
may guess if you have ever been into a greenhouse
in your life, is not really enough. No, and I
mean they had taken other precautions. They had. The liver
system had been built in to the design from almost
the beginning, and they had even placed the boiler house
which produced steam that powered all the exhibits UH in
another building separate from the exhibit hall. Again that he

(12:21):
had thought about the heat, it just wasn't enough to
mitigate the problem, because the sun shining through the glass
still turned the whole place into an oven. Well. And
then when you fill it up with people, I mean
even a fully modernized air conditioned building, when filled up
with people, as the temperature goes up very quickly. And

(12:41):
so to remedy these temperature issues, they put these large
canvas tarps that were draped in between the roof ridges
up to offer some shade, and the fabric drapings actually
ended up being a benefit in a couple of other ways.
They cut down on glare and they created a more
even softer lighting for the interior of the building. Uh.

(13:01):
And they had to of course, as we mentioned, glass
not great at load bearing. Um there were so there
were small openings designed into the seams of the drapings
that let water pass through and go directly to the
paxton gutters. Uh. So the tarps wouldn't get too heavy
for the glass, they wouldn't compromise the structure, and again
it was a pretty elegant solution to the whole problem.

(13:22):
One other ingenious aspect of the structures design was small
gaps in between the wood planks and the floor. So
every evening after the crowd left, they could just sweep
the accumulated dirt from the day into the gaps for
quick going up. Yeah. Because remember it was a temporary building.
So while it had um uh like a column sort

(13:45):
of base to it um like a foundation, it didn't
have like a full slab foundation, so they really could
just kind of return the dirt back to the earth.
And then it was very very smart uh, And it
went up on on schedule and opened onto time. The
exhibition opened to the public on May one, eighteen fifty one.
Nearly fourteen thousand exhibitors were at the show, and they

(14:09):
featured such items as steam engines, prosthetic legs, chewing tobacco,
false teeth guns, hydraulic presses, and rubber goods made by Goodyear.
Exhibitors from France, the United States, Turkey, Russia, and Egypt attended,
and even the coy Door Diamond was on display. The
expo ran until October eleventh of eighteen fifty one, and

(14:31):
there was a big closing ceremony on October fift and
everyone agreed that the show had been a huge success
and it actually did turn a nice profit, and more
than six million visitors had attended during the time that
the expo was open. As a consequence of all of
this success, Joseph Paxton was knighted in that same year
for his work on the project. Because the Crystal Palace

(14:51):
had been such a success, it inspired other exhibitions to
house their shows and glass conservatories. This included the Cork
x Shibition of eighteen fifty two, the New York City
Exposition of eighteen fifty three, and the Paris Exhibition of
eighteen fifty five, as well as others. So having a
big glass Exhibit Hall was a thing now, yeah, because

(15:12):
it was so cool and unique and really beautiful. It
was cool and unique until everyone was doing it, until
it became hot and popular. But once the Expo was over,
Paxson really yearned to preserve the Exhibit Hall, as did
the public. I think there was a sense of they
really have to take it down now. And while it

(15:34):
did have to be moved from its spot in Hyde Park,
the good news was that because of its prefab design,
it could be reassembled elsewhere. There were a whole lot
of battles along the way, but Paxson managed to set
up the Crystal Palace Company under a Royal charter and
with the help of a bunch of other wealthy gentlemen
who were willing to fund the moving project and serve

(15:56):
as its directors. In August eighteen fifty two, the k
instruction started on the Crystal Palace in its new home.
This was Sydenham Hill, which was in southeast London, and
the rebuilt palace opened in June of eighteen fifty four.
There were some structural changes to it. It didn't go
together exactly the way it had been for the Expo,

(16:17):
but it was pretty close. Uh, they kind of switched
some things around, I think to match the new footprints.
It wasn't that they got to the end where does
have a piece leftover? Uh though. And in its new incarnation,
the Crystal Palace became what many people call the world's
first theme park. It had more than two million visitors
each year, and they enjoyed educational exhibits. There were like

(16:40):
museum style setups. There was a roller coaster. There, there
was live entertainment, there were cricket matches. Uh. And they
even put in a prehistoric dinosaur swamp, which I kind
of love. Uh. And it's worth keeping in mind that
the existence of dinosaurs, while there had been some fossil
record for a long time before that, they really had
only kind of put together there the concept of what

(17:01):
dinosaurs were a few decades before this, so they were
kind of working from very early ideas of dinosaurs. The
Crystal Palace Park was even popular with royalty, which is
not so surprising. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited on
a regular basis, and kings, queens, shaws, Sultan's and all

(17:21):
kinds of other rulers from all over the world visited
as well. And as a random and very holly specific
interest aside. In eighteen seventy one, the Crystal Palace was
actually home to the world's first cat show. Uh, and
it actually hosted many other subsequent shows of cats and
other animals. So it's just a very popular place. Uh,

(17:42):
you know, huge kind of cultural center and theme park. Right.
That actually was after the Crystal Palace started its long
and unfortunate run of terrible look. Yeah, it had been
such a great success as an exhibition hall, and everyone
really lauded its beauty and its beautiful design. But once
it moved, it seemed like its luck kind of ran out.

(18:04):
It started to have one piece of bad fortune after another.
And whether you want to attribute that to actual change
in luck or just this will happen when a thing
is around a long time, it will accumulate bad events.
It really had some really rough ones. Yeah. That starts
in eighteen sixty one when high winds damaged the structure,
and then a few years after that. Five years after that,

(18:26):
on December thirtieth, eighteen sixty six, a fire destroyed the
north end of the building and a number of the
natural history displays, including the Alhambra Assyrian Byzantine Court Indian
and Naval galleries, as well as the Tropical Department, and
they had sort of a small zoo happening at the time,
and several of the animals housed in that park zoo

(18:46):
were also killed, but due to funding issues, only a
portion of the destroyed building could be rebuilt. In eighteen
nine two, a hot air balloon accident at the park
caused one fatality, and in eighteen ninety and escaped elephant
trampled a park visitor. That's both tragic and crazy to
me that there was an escaped elephant in a giant

(19:10):
glass structure. Well, I think it wasn't in the glass structure.
It was in the bigger park. Because the park was
really quite large. The structure was the centerpiece, but there
were lots of other things going out, like the dinosaur
swamp was outside the building. That the whole thing was
considered the Crystal Palace as a park. And then in
nineteen eleven the park actually declared bankruptcy. Even though it

(19:32):
had been wildly popular and continued to be and had
many visitors, the cost of upkeep, especially when they were
having to do things like repair glass that was injured
or that was damaged in winds, you know, rebuild sections
that have been lost in fire. They just could not
keep up with the expenses of rebuilding and maintaining, and

(19:53):
prior to the bankruptcy and sort of a last ditch
effort to drum up some cash, the Palace had did
what they called the Festival of Empire, which coincided with
George the Fifth Coronation, and the pageants and the displays
did give the finances of the park a slight lift,
but it really was not enough to undo decades worth

(20:13):
of fiscal strain. So on September eleventh of nineteen eleven,
an announcement appeared in The Times stating that the Crystal
Palace would be sold at auction on November twenty eighth
of that year, And in the weeks after the announcement,
a flurry of uproar and crazy fiscal juggling started happening
because people really did love it and they wanted to
save it somehow. On the ninth of November, the Times

(20:35):
ran the headline Crystal Palace saved. So Lord Plymouth, who
was Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan and Mayor of Cardiff, had
arranged to purchase the palace for two hundred and ten
thousand pounds to try to keep the beloved park off
of the auction block. The Lord Mayor of London then
set up a fund to purchase the property from Lord Plymouth,

(20:57):
and in thirteen the Crystal Palace became National property. Yeah,
Lord Plymouth sort of stepped in. He didn't actually want
to become the owner of the park, but he wanted
to save it. And it was one of those like, look,
I will do the quick thing we have to do
to save the situation and buy us some time. And
that gave the Lord Mayor of London time to be like,

(21:19):
let's now start to build up some money, so we
can take this financial strain off of you and give
it to the people of the country. Uh. In nineteen fourteen,
a charitable trust was established under the Ministry of Education
to keep the park and the historical building going, and
the trustees hired Henry James Buckland as manager of the

(21:41):
Crystal Palace. Buckland was so completely devoted to the park
and the palace and his job that he even named
one of his daughter's crystal in its honor. That's kind
of lovely, it is. During World War One, the Crystal
Palace was close to the public so it could be
used as a training are it for the Royal Naval Division.

(22:02):
The property was designated as the Royal Naval Shore Station
HMS Victory six, but soon became known as HMS Crystal Palace.
And once that had wrapped up and it got it
reopened to the public. For the next couple of decades,
Buckland really worked tirelessly to restore the neglected park and
work on continual improvements, because you know, it had been

(22:25):
falling into some disrepair prior to the auction, and so
he was kind of making up for some lost time
of care. But under his management it even started to
turn a small profit again. So just when things seemed
to be going better, they actually had seemed to be
going better for a little while at this point. On
the night of NOVEMBERTI six, the Crystal Palace was almost

(22:48):
entirely destroyed by a fire. According to a BBC article
written on the history of the Crystal Palace, there were
eight eight fire engines, four fire officers and seven forty
nine police officers called to the scene to try to
fight the fire, but it wasn't enough. Only the towers survived,
and the cause of the blaze was never identified. Yeah,

(23:10):
there was a lot of speculation. Some people claimed it
had to have been arson, But there are other instances
where people are like, hey, it's a giant building full
of delicate displays that have lots of glue and paper
in them. This could have just naturally happened, and it
was so easy to spread, as sometimes unfortunately happened in museums.

(23:32):
Displays are often not always made to be really fire
retardant um, and by n seven, most of the iron
work of the once regal and now demolished Crystal Palace
had actually been removed by scrap merchants because at that
point to rebuild the whole building, they just did not
have the finances for it. During World War Two, the park,

(23:52):
which still existed even though the Crystal Palace had been destroyed,
was closed to the public again and used as a
post for governmental war work. For a while, the North
Tower was used to test dummy bombs. Yeah, they would
just drop them off the tower and test them, just
kind of It's like dropping eggs and kind of. The

(24:13):
South Tower was dismantled over the course of the winter
of nineteen ninety one, and then on April sixteenth one,
the North tower was destroyed with explosives. According to some accounts,
the towers were continued considered too conspicuous and war strategists
feared that they would be too easy for German bombers
to spot. So here's a quote from Buckland about the

(24:35):
state of the park following all of this. The general
devastation which we have suffered would lead one to suppose
that our acres had been chosen as the field for
the most realistic battle of the war. All our equipment, stands, seating,
and furniture have either been destroyed or removed by the military.
Not an inch of mahogany has been left in the

(24:55):
contents of the buildings. Not a single shelf has been
left in any cover. Yeah, Buckland was really not very
delighted without the military returned his beloved park. I mean again,
remember that this man loved his work and his job,
so I think he kind of felt like it had
been misused and abused a little bit. Uh. And it
should be noted that Buckland actually stayed on as manager

(25:16):
there until he resigned in nineteen nine. In nineteen forty five,
competition was announced for architects and town planners to submit
layouts for a new Crystal Palace and surroundings, and while
a winner was announced in May of nineteen forty six,
in June of that same year, a letter to the
Joint Committee on the part of the assessors indicated that

(25:37):
while a prize had been awarded, the winning entry was
not practical and they should have another competition. Uh. We
didn't really find any evidence that that second competition never
really took place. No, it seems like there was I'm
not sure how much of it can be chalked up
to like poor planning versus they just didn't get the

(26:00):
level of expertise in the entries that they had hoped for.
But it was sort of like, uh, we just had
to pick the one that we thought was generally prettiest,
but we can't make any of these, which is a pity.
And then it it never really happened. Um. However, the
Crystal Palace park still remains. Uh. Now it's home to

(26:21):
a concert bowl, there's a sports center there, there's pretty
much all of the other accouterments you would expect in
a park like play areas. Uh. And the dinosaur Court
remains though, and it was actually refurbished a while back,
which I kind of love. Uh. And even though the
dinosaurs are not really we recognize now as accurate, you know,
Like I said, they were originally put together and design

(26:43):
and we didn't know as much about dinosaurs as we
do now, So some of them would be a little
silly if you look at them with um a picky
I do they have cavemen next to them? I've seen
pictures and I didn't see any caveman, but there are
like some downed animals and stuff like snacks. I would
have a problem with caveman. No. Uh. And in the

(27:05):
year since Sir Henry Buckland resigned, there's been a steady
ebb and flow of projects in the park, as there
would be in any public space where you know, people
will make a bid to build a thing, and sometimes
it even gets announced in the papers, but then it
never happens, or small structures are built. One building was
turned into a museum for the Crystal Palace. Uh. But

(27:27):
you know, continues, however, there is a sort of new development. Yeah.
In July, which is basically just before we're recording this. Yeah,
just a few weeks ago, it was announced that the
Chinese developer was working on plans to rebuild Paxton's Crystal Palace,
although the Mayor's office and Bromley Council representatives were pretty

(27:48):
clear that the project was still in the very very
early and theoretical stages. Yeah, there have been other discussions
that it was going to get rebuilt before that didn't
pan out, So we'll see what happened. It would be
really neat if that could happen, but we don't know.
We'll see, We'll wait and see. As for Sir Joseph Paxton,
the architect of the original Crystal Palace, he continued to

(28:09):
design gardens and build structures and hot houses and he
actually became a member of Parliament in eighteen fifty four
and he held that post until his death in eighteen
sixty five. So he really did, as we mentioned at
the top of the podcast, kind of He's a great
story of like rags to riches upward mobility is a
bit extreme. I don't think it was quite that with

(28:29):
his farm family, but he really did kind of just
through his own smarts and ingenuity, rise to prominence with beautiful,
gigantic glass building. Absolutely gorgeous. Uh. We'll have lots of
links in show notes, and many of them will have
pictures of the Crystal Palace. It's so amazing. What a
huge structure it was. Just the sheer size of it

(28:51):
is really pretty um overwhelming. I had imagined it as
much smaller until looking at all of these pictures and
the people. It's so teeny. Yeah, when you actually see
some of the sketches and stuff of the elm trees
that were encased in it, and the people walking around
in there, and people up on the balconies on the

(29:12):
upper levels, it's almost startling. That can't be Oh, that
is the scale, al right. It makes total sense that
they would put in wooden supports that were much more
to make it look sturdier, because I probably would have
been scared to go in there. Yeah. But to the
best of my knowledge, no incidents related to the safety

(29:32):
of the structure ever happened during the expo, and that
was some heavy foot traffic. Go PAXT. Then you knew
what you were doing, even though everyone doubted you do.
You also have listener mail, you know I do. Uh.
This one comes to us from our listener, Jennifer. She says, Hi,
History Podcasters, I'm new to your podcast, which I started
listening to on my hour long commute to work as

(29:54):
a foster care worker in North Carolina before I became
a social worker. I live in Afghanistan as a humanitari
an aid worker. I'm a little odd by, Jennifer. I
will say that right out of the gate. I lived
in Kabul, maser Shari, Fazabad, and a village in northern
Afghanistan for a period of two years. I lived with
local families and enmeshed in the local culture, as opposed

(30:15):
to other workers who stay mostly in camps or quote
behind the wire. During my time the year, one of
the things I found most difficult about fitting in was
how to dress appropriately. I know most people associate the
chadari or burke up with Afghanistan, but behind behind closed doors,
women actually have a very specific fashion culture. One of

(30:36):
the quote rules of society for women is that skirts
cannot be worn without pants. These pants range from a
large amount of fabric that folds and gathers and stinches
at the waist to leggings with lace at the bottom.
Either way, it's important that your pants be seen peeking
out at the bottom of your dresser skirts so that
everyone can see you are being proper and wearing pants
under your skirt. I couldn't help but think about how

(30:57):
similar this is to bloomers or pantalets you described in
the underwear podcast. Also, the men of Afghanistan continue to
wear pants like you described, with a lot of fabric
allowing for movement that then cinches at the waist. I'll
never forget my husband holding up his new pants from
the tailor and seeing that at least four of him
could have fit into the fabric and saying, how fat
do they think we are? That's what I was thinking

(31:19):
when you described the rumors about Queen Victoria's weight based
on the sides of her bloomers. Anyway, I thought you
might be interested in the similarities and in my glimpse
of fashion behind the burka. If you like pictures of
our outfits, let me know. Of course, I want to
see pictures, because that's cool. And while I was reading
this email when we got it, it made me selfishly

(31:40):
think of the fact that I don't think I ever
wear a skirt without leggings underneath. So I'm halfway there. Yeah,
I don't do bloomers, but I so rarely wear skirts.
I wear them a lot, but I uh, you know,
I take mass transit. Sometimes I walk around the city
a lot. There's you never know one wind is going
to do anything, so this better safe than sorry scenario.

(32:03):
But it is cool and I think it's some of
those things that is always an interesting touchstone to see
people shift into very very different cultures than what they
grew up with. And the clothing is often like a
big wait, what once you get out of the western
jeans and T shirt thing, it all feels very different. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, please do

(32:24):
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(32:45):
search bar, and one of the articles that will come
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And it's an article about really cool places that don't
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While the park remains, and there could be a new
one if these Chinese developers come through. You will never
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(33:08):
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