The Palm House at Bicton Park Botanical Gardens, Devon

Bicton's Palm House in East Devon dates from the early 1820s, which puts it among the earliest curvilinear glasshouses anywhere. Its overlapping domes are glazed with thousands of small, scale-like panes set in slender iron bars, a technique that predates the big sheet glass of the Victorian giants later in this gallery. Palms and other warm-climate plants fill the house, but the structure is the reason to come: it shows what glasshouse builders were attempting a generation before Kew.