His neo-classical conservatism was condemned as ‘pagan’ by one rival
If Decimus Burton had only designed one building, and that had been the Palm House at Kew Gardens, he would deserve to be famous. It is a pioneering work of steel and glass, built in collaboration with the Dublin ironmaster Richard Turner, completed three years before the celebrated Crystal Palace of 1851, its swelling, doubly curving bubble of glass more beautiful and – unlike the latter – still standing.
As the great Observer critic Ian Nairn put it, the Palm House is a work of “utter originality and unselfconscious perfection … nearer to a beautiful animal or to one of the plants it encloses than to the fumbling, guilt-laden compositions of architecture”.
