When I began looking for the Coburg past in England it took a 20th-century German, the exiled architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, to show me (in his book High Victorian Design: A Study of the Exhibits of 1851) that a clock face draped with water maidens, a prominent exhibit in the Hyde Park show, shared so much, imaginatively, with Wagner's Rhinegold, in composition at the same time. Coburgian England loved the allegorical and the full-blown in its artefacts, just as Wagner did in his music. 

Pevsner, who liked to make German connections in London, then linked the music back to the architecture. He found that both the 1851 clockcase and the opera being written during 1853-54, recalled the classicising grandeur of the architect Gottfried Semper, who was one of London's German political exiles in Albert's day. The man who had built the Dresden opera house was a friend of the revolutionary-minded Wagner. When the 1848 revolution failed, Wagner fled to Switzerland and Semper to London. Semper's influence hovers over Albertopolis before settling on the Albert Hall; and its Coburgian connection is further marked by the music that began to be staged, on a huge scale, first of all at the Crystal Palace, later transferring to the Albert Hall. A  precursor was the Schiller Festival organised by the London German community in 1859, the year of the poet's centenary. Much of the celebration was musical, but torchlight processions, illuminated fountains and fireworks delighting a crowd of at least 10,000 turned it into a spectacle that far exceeded the concert hall. A choir of 1,000 sang a setting of "The Song of the Bell" under the Crystal Palace's glass dome. The size and success of the event were staggering, and became the model for a British Mendelssohn Festival a year later, when a chorus of 3,000 performed the oratorio Elijah, with an orchestra including 250 string players. Mendelssohn, who loved London and lived there for long periods, was a friend of Albert and Victoria, and the royal couple recalled many hours of music-making together. When he died in 1847 they commissioned a bronze statue, exhibited in 1860 on the illuminated terraces at Crystal Palace, where crowds danced around it. 

The German community felt upstaged, and as the British embarked on a new era in their artistic life, the exiles' newspaper Hermann couldn't resist commenting: "Just let these poor Cockneys take a trip for once and learn what German art can do . . . These gentlemen forget that we possess a Mozart, Hayden [sic] and Weber, and in their ignorance don't know that Händel, whom they forcibly remould as an Englishman, was born in Halle . . ."

Albert championed above all the orchestral music of the classical and Romantic periods. When he arrived in England the Queen's brass band shocked him and he replaced it with a string orchestra. According to his biographer Roger Fulford, Lohengrin was first heard on English soil at Windsor. As Albert's influence spread, these were the tastes that typified the repertoire at the Crystal Palace, where an orchestra of that name was formed and began giving Saturday concerts. A performance of Wagner's Rienzi must have set ablaze, metaphorically, that vast greenhouse of a show space, set in its Versailles-like gardens.  

But it was not only the power of grand opera to which Wagner had given a unique northern turn, it was also the use of the grounds and involvement of the audience. The sheer scale of the Crystal Palace events showed how music could feature in the life of the people, and that was Wagner's message in his völkisch — mythological dramas. No one minded the nationalistic element back in the 19th century. Indeed, according to the scholarship of the day, the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans were fellow Teutons, who had resisted Normanisation and retained their national essence, so of course they could and should share in music like this.  

The long-term south London resident Alfred Manns was conductor of the Crystal Palace Orchestra as its reputation soared. Manns, later knighted by Edward VII, was another naturalised German, and he followed directly in Albert's footsteps, winning over the British to the symphony. Crystal Palace was the arena where the great Hans Richter conducted Wagner, and where Henry Wood got the idea for the Proms in 1895.