Like the exhibitions themselves this account covers a vast range of topics - art and industry, ships and machinery, architecture, empire, women, royalty, tourism - not to mention woollen underwear and self-pouring teapots. The five great shows chart, in a particularly accessible way, a century of profound social and economic change - from the Victorian self-confidence of the second city of Empire, to the Scottish nationalism of 1911, to a brief glimpse of modern utopia in 1938, and finally the regeneration of derelict dockland for the 1988 Garden Festival.