Alfred Meeson was a Londoner who was practising as an architect and engineer in Yorkshire when Sir Charles Barry summoned him in 1842 to oversee the "constructional and engineering details" of the Houses of Parliament (Cust and Barson). Meeson lived on site there, and remained in London after that. He was employed in a similar capacity with the 1851 and 1862 Exhibitions, and the building of E. M. Barry's 1858 Covent Garden Theatre and Captain Francis Fowke's Royal Albert Hall. In the sixties and seventies, together with John Johnson, another architect favoured by the contractor John Kelk, he worked with the firm of Kelk and Lucas on the new "Palace for the People" in north London. The Palace, named after Princess Alexandra, was destroyed by fire only sixteen days after it was opened. Meeson set to work with Johnson again to produce a somewhat different, larger blueprint, and Alexandra Palace was successfully and speedily rebuilt.
Source
Cust, L. H., rev. Susie Barson. "Meeson, Alfred (1808-1885), architect and engineer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Viewed 23 December 2007.
Last modified 1 January 2008