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The Crystal Palace Company was a company formed in 1852 to oversee the administration of the newly rebuilt Crystal Palace at Sydenham in south London and its estates. After the Great Exhibition of 1851, for which it had been built, the palace had been bought by a consortium of businessmen from its builders Messrs Fox and Henderson. The palace had been built originally in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition, to showcase the products of Britain and her empire, as well as other nations,the object being to benchmark the progress that was being made in the fields of Industry and design. The building being threatened with demolition, a London solicitor, Joseph Leech, of Messrs Johnson, Farquhar and Leech of Moorgate, conceived the idea of buying the Crystal Palace and reopening it as a public attraction. He soon gathered a consortium of interested businessmen, among them Samuel Laing, chairman of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and his deputy, Leo Schuster.
The palace was bought by the consortium for £70,000, the purchase being carried out by Francis Fuller, who had carried out a key role in the promotion of the Great Exhibition, then came the task of finding a suitable site on which to rebuild it. The solution came from Leo Schuster, who had a large estate in Sydenham called Penge Park. The estate had a large expanse of land, culminating in a high crest which commanded impressive views for miles around. It was obvious that that the building should be erected on the high ground where it could be seen to advantage. Leo Schuster sold Penge Park to the consortium and relocated to Roehampton. It was also convenient that the London Brighton and South Coast Railway had a line running close by and this also bode well for the new company, who anticipated making handsome profits from their new acquisition. As a final touch, the consortium invited Sir Joseph Paxton, the gardener who had designed the Crystal Palace, to join them in their new venture, as head of house, garden and conservatory. It so happened that Paxton had also been busy in the quest to save his building from oblivion and on his own initiative, had published a prospectus in the press, inviting people to invest in a Crystal Palace Company. By his own efforts, he had succeeded in raising £500,000 in share capital, although as events were to show, he should have gone for much more.
Now that Paxton had his palace and a site on which to rebuild it, he went into a radical redesign of his original building. He raised the structure from three to five stories, the vaulted roof, which had been added to the Hyde Park building at the last, was now extended along the length of the new building. A wing was added at each end to balance the structure. Paxton also went into a grand design of the gardens which were to complement the palace, including a vast fountain system. All this was to cost money and the original £500,000 was soon exhausted. The company had to apply for an Act of Parliament to enable them to raise another £500,000. Again this was soon dissipated and more money had to be raised. The company directors had to ask themselves how much more could they afford to spend?. Eventually it was decided that the work had gone far enough and it would not be financially sensible to continue. Eventually the directors decided that work on the building should stop.
Paxton's design, in its original form, had been tendered at £69,800, while the addition of the vaulted roof, which had proved to be its most distinctive feature, had cost another £6,000. As work progressed, many other optional extras arose which had not been taken into account, such as staircases, hand rails and diagonal bracing for structural stability which greatly added to the cost. The Hyde Park building eventually cost double the original estimate. The newly rebuilt Crystal Palace cost twice as much again, so by the time the directors called a halt to the building work,almost £1,300,000 had been spent and they would be extremely hard put to recover that sum. One key reason was that due to the activities of the religious, temperance and other tolerance groups (eg. the Lord's Day Observance Society of the time, the Crystal Palace never opened on a Sunday, which was of course the only day the working man had his day off. [See The Crystal Palace#Decline and re-word - later, it did open on Sundays.]