Jawbone Walk: The Meadows and the 1886 Exhibition
Why is it significant?
Around you stretches the Meadows, a great green lung of grass and avenues where students lie in the sun, barbecues smoke and footballs bounce. You are on Jawbone Walk, a long path lined with trees, and its odd name is a clue to the summer when this park hosted the world.
Key Facts
| Place | Jawbone Walk: The Meadows and the 1886 Exhibition |
|---|---|
| Address | Jawbone Walk, The Meadows, Edinburgh EH9, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.94150, -3.19310 |
| Part of Walk | Surgeons, Skeletons and Dolly the Sheep: Edinburgh's Southside of Medicine and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Around you stretches the Meadows, a great green lung of grass and avenues where students lie in the sun, barbecues smoke and footballs bounce. You are on Jawbone Walk, a long path lined with trees, and its odd name is a clue to the summer when this park hosted the world.
The Meadows were once a loch. The Burgh Loch, a shallow, marshy lake that supplied the town with water, lay here until it was drained in the eighteenth century, largely through the efforts of Thomas Hope, a pioneering agricultural improver. Hope Park, at the eastern end, still carries his name. A muddy loch turned into a promenade: the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment loved nothing more than improving things.
In 1886 the Meadows filled with the International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, a vast temporary palace with a dome and halls full of engines, electric lights, manufactured goods and art, plus a reconstructed street of old Edinburgh. Millions of visitors came that summer. The stand of the Shetland and Fair Isle knitters brought a pair of enormous whale jawbones, and afterwards they were set up as an arch over this path... and gave it its name.
Whalebone arches were once a common sight in Scotland, souvenirs of an industry that hunted whales almost to extinction. These jawbones stood here for well over a century, weathering slowly, until they were taken down for conservation in the 2010s. Other relics of the exhibition survive: at the western end of Melville Drive stand the stone pillars put up by the city's master masons, and nearby a sundial recalls the exhibition's opening.
Picture it: electric light over the grass, brass bands, crowds in their Sunday best, and science on show as the greatest entertainment of the age. Now head south across the Meadows to Melville Drive, then follow Marchmont Road a short way and turn left into Sciennes Road, to a large late-Victorian hospital building.