The Meadows

This guide to the Meadows returns to the International Exhibition of 1886, when a glass pavilion taller than a ten-storey building rose across the park and organisers built a full replica of a vanished medieval street inside it. It follows the numbers that don't add up: millions of visitors, a guinea-a-season ticket, and an 1827 law that should have stopped any of it being built here at all. Two carved pillars beside the park's west end are what's left to ask about.