Of course, it was in the wrong place. Then as now, this part of South London was too far flung, too difficult to get to. It was built there mainly because a railway proprietor who wanted the passenger trade, Leo Schuster, had a large estate he was prepared to sell to get it. As an investment, it was a disaster. Out there, it should have been made smaller, not bigger. But this was not the way of its stovepipe-hatted progenitors. The directors took a leaf out of Brunel's book. It had worked once incredibly well. If it was bigger, so the argument went, it would logically work even better, would draw in even more people. There were plenty of doubters around at the time, but they were steamrollered.

With our recent experience of the Millennium Dome, who is to say that we do things any better? We just waste public rather than private money, and do it in less entertaining fashion. At the Crystal Palace, you could enter Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, or Byzantium, or take part in a concert with a 22,000-strong audience, or treat it as a natural history museum. Later, it was home to the first incarnation of the Imperial War Museum, a place which has now acquired its own modern equivalent of a Crystal Palace vault.

The important thing is that it was built. And it existed for 82 years before it finally burnt down in 1936 thanks to its dodgy electrics and tinder-dry timber floors. Tragically, this happened at a time when it was undergoing something of a revival under its energetic manager of the time, Sir Henry Buckland. All the endless plans to rebuild some kind of worthy structure on the site are forever doomed to be eclipsed by the memory. We cannot recapture those times. We would be mad to try to. But the Crystal Palace is now in the DNA of world architecture. As Le Corbusier wrote after it burnt down, it was the "herald of a new age". Without it, so much today would be different.