The Crystal Palace’s structural vocabulary—though not, alas, the quality of its space—can be appreciated in the Midland Station at Oxford, built by Fox & Henderson with identical elements in 1852. There one can still see how the new methods enforced a modular regularity more rigid than that of Romantic Classicism and also encouraged a tenuity of material quite unknown to the Neo-Gothic as executed in masonry. Thus the visual result ran doubly counter to the rising fashions in architecture in the fifties (see Chapters 9 and 10). Within five years of the moment when the Crystal Palace was greeted with such general—though never universal—acclaim the climactic moment of the early Iron Age was already over. In those few years, however, Crystal Palaces rose in many other major cities. The finest was perhaps that built in Dublin in 1852-4 by Sir John Benson (1812-74) with its bubble-like rounded ends; the least successful that in New York[174] of 1853 by G. J. B. Carstensen (1812-57), the founder of the Tivoli in Copenhagen, and Charles Gildemeister (1820-69). The prompt destruction of this last by fire was a fearful early warning of the limitations of iron construction unsheathed by masonry. The burning of Voit’s Glaspalast of 1854 in Munich, like that of the Sydenham Palace, occurred in our own day, as also the similar end of the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam, which was built by Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75) in 1856. The prestige of iron construction was never higher than in the early fifties. For Balmoral Castle, not yet rebuilt in its final form, the Prince Consort ordered in 1851 a prefabricated iron ballroom by E. T. Bellhouse of Manchester modelled on the houses for emigrants to Australia by Bellhouse that the Prince had seen at the Great Exhibition. In the Record Office in London, begun by Pennethorne in this same year, even more iron was used for the internal grid of separate storerooms and for the window-sash than in the great mill that Lockwood & Mawson built for Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1854. The internal structure of this last represented another major contribution by Fairbairn. Characteristically, however, the detailing of the external masonry of the Record Office is more or less Tudor, if rather crude and over-scaled, while that of the Saltaire mill is picturesquely Italianate.