Crystal Palace Birdhouse
This is a birdhouse situated in the tree line overlooking the ruins of the Crystal Palace in Crystal Palace Park, South London. The committee of The Great Exhibition of 1851 retracted their intentions of showing the Prince Albert Dwellings within the exhibition grounds that occupied Hyde Park that summer. The house was built by The Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes and represented an early example of British social housing and reformist support for working families within this new age of Victorian industrialisation. Cautious that the reformist nature of the model dwelling would undermine the wider political undertones of the exhibition, the model was not allowed to sit in or near the grounds of the Exhibitions Crystal Palace and instead occupied a peripheral space to avoid diluting the exhibition's foremost ideology.