The Victorian age and the Great Exhibition

The workshop of the world: factories, the Crystal Palace and the first great attempts to reform design.

Under Queen Victoria Britain was the world's leading industrial country. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace displayed machines and goods from all over the world, and the profit went to museums and schools in South Kensington. Augustus Pugin championed Gothic as honest construction, and Owen Jones gathered the world's ornament in The Grammar of Ornament.

Christopher Dresser designed teapots and metalwork for industry in an austere, geometric style. William Morris's firm, founded in 1861, began making wallpapers and fabrics as an alternative to factory goods.