Did you know, the story (of corrugated iron) starts with Henry Palmer of the London Dock Company who, in 1829, took out a patent for ‘indented or corrugated metallic sheets’?
‘Walker’s patent ran out in 1843 and competition flooded in to saturate the market with new products: corrugated iron was set to become a world-wide industrial vernacular. London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 provided a platform for the new manufacturers. Victorian energy and imagination were let loose. Royal patronage also helped. The Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, ordered a corrugated iron ballroom for the Balmoral Estate. It still stands, now a joiner’s workshop, and probably the oldest metal sheet building in existence.’
‘Yet this stuff was the product of engineers and of industry: architects saw it as a threat; aesthetes as a travesty. Predictably William Morris, in a pamphlet for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1890), railed against the material ‘now spreading like a pestilence over the country’.
Read more about the History of Corrugated Iron – World Archaeology (world-archaeology.com)
