If you’ve ever been befuddled by the placement of a whale’s jawbone at the Marchmont entrance to one of the Meadows’ main thoroughfares, now seems as good a time as any to be enlightened. This May is the 125th anniversary of opening of the 1886 Edinburgh Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art by one Prince Albert, an event attended by a not un-impressive thirty thousand visitors.

The Edinburgh Exhibition has its own legacy, though it is marked by its dissipation. Gone is the presumably pompous Grand Hall, after it was determined that no permanent structures should be erected on the Meadows, a rule thatpersists to this day. Also dismantled, alas, are the electric railway that linked the short distance between Brougham Place and Middle Meadow Walk and the hyperreal stage-set of ‘Old Edinburgh’, a classic piece of Industrial-era medievalism whose eeriness is well conveyed by the photographs of Marshall Wane. The bulky pillars (apparently containing about twenty different varieties of stone) at either end of Melville Drive persist, but just about everything that could be moved on has been: witness the Portuguese cannon on Calton Hill, which commemorated Britain’s victory in the Burmese War; or the Brass Founders Pillar on Nicholson Square, demonstrating the skills of Edinburgh- and Leith-based craftsmen; or the tiles with scenes relating to industry, salvaged from the GrandHall to be displayed in the Café Royal on West Register Street. Then there’s that jawbone. The Shanghainese can keep their rapidly improving public transport system and their green technology: I wouldn’t trade the experience of walking through the mouth-parts of a long dead superbeast on a daily basis for anything.