Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

If you paid a visit to Wembley Park in London a century ago, you would have been met with a dazzling spectacle of empire. In an area

ten times the size of the famous great exhibition of 1851, the 1924 British Empire

exhibition was a grand declaration of an empire at its territorial height, showcasing imperial glamour and international technology.

But behind the spectacle was a superpower grappling with its position on the world stage,

seeking to recalibrate its own sense of influence and importance.

Speaking to Ellen Evans, Matthew Parker takes us inside the exhibition and shares what it can

reveal about attitudes to empire 100 years on.

Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today on the History Extra podcast.

It's lovely to have you back on this episode.

Great pleasure.

You joined us last year on the podcast to talk about the situation of the

British Empire in 1923 when it was at its territorial height and it's the subject of your book,

One Fine Day. In today's conversation, we're going to be talking about the British Empire

exhibition of 1924 a century ago. And to start us off, can you take us inside this exhibition as it opened its doors?

When and where was it? And what could people expect to see? Yeah, well, I've been rather sort of immersing

myself in firsthand contemporary accounts of the experience of the exhibition. And it's really

quite something. I would have loved to have gone. I mean, it's very strange,

first of all, I think, not just a hundred years later, but I think it was fairly strange at the time.

Anyway, let's go and visit, shall we? So we get on the new railway up to Wembley Park,

where there's this huge site, sort of over 200 acres, massive site. We arrive and probably the

first thing we see is the Empire Stadium, the Wembley Stadium, with its rather strange architecture

...