In the long reign of a single queen,
Britain changed the world and was itself utterly transformed.
Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.
By the time she died in 1901, we had built the modern world.
It was a time of outstanding engineering, remarkable innovation.
All of it driven by ambitious pioneers.
It shapes the country we live in today.
Efficient and fast -
new transport systems allowed people to move freely for the first time.
You get a real sense, in here, of Victorian engineering, don't you?
Oh, yeah. It's wonderful.
Giant feats of ingenuity saved lives.
The Victorians had ambition.
They thought big, and they got on with it.
Amazing inventions revolutionised our domestic lives.
What I'm holding in my hand changed our homes forever.
Automation transformed mass production.
Factories could now produce goods at a rate never imagined before.
The change is like a nuclear weapon going off.
This is the story of how the Victorians built Britain.
This time, I learned how a radical new transport system was carved
out of London.
They might have had a couple of cranes, but other
than that all of it was done by hand.
How engineers wrestle to run steam trains underground.
It must have been Dante's Inferno.
And how a clever idea transformed affordable transport.
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the landscape
of Britain was being transformed.
London was the most prosperous city in the world, with a population
of around 2 million.
It was a very crowded place.
Most were living within two miles of the Thames.
Judith Flanders has spent years writing about Victorian Britain.
Judith, what would the streets of London have been like at the start
of the Victorian era?
They would have been noisier, and more confusing,
and more terrifying than this.
We've got traffic, we've got buses, we've got vans, we've got cars,
bicycles, what we don't have is them all going in all directions at once.
There were no rules of the road.
Everyone walked. Everyone rode.
Everyone drove all in the same space.
And in both directions.
The confusion was phenomenal.
And smelly?
Beyond smelly.
There would have been sheep driven in, donkeys pulling carts,
cattle being driven to market, because most markets slaughtered
the meat where you were.
So just imagine the produce of those animals,
and then they were slaughtered.
So the gutters would be running with blood and fat.
Blood and excrement - all those animals.
I read somewhere, I think, that a thousand tonnes of horse dung
a day ended up on London streets.
Does that sound about right?
It sounds a little low to me, actually.
They measured how many cart loads of dung that they picked
up between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus,
just along Regent Street.
And it was dozens of cart loads every 12 hours.
Most early Victorian transport relied on horsepower.
You only need to look at a list of pub names in London from 1851
to realise their importance.
21 pubs were named after Queen Victoria, but 54 were named
The White Horse.
And another 27, The Horse and Groom.
And the list goes on.
But most people couldn't afford the horse drawn transport
that was available.
How did people get around? On foot.
Basically, if you wanted to go anywhere you walked.
In the morning, you have what were called these black rivers of clerks,
shopkeepers all walking into work.
They would walk along, like we have our phones, they would walk
along reading newspapers.
A survey in the 1850s showed that, on average, 200,000 people
walked into the city each year.
The relative luxury of a horse and carriage was not for them.
But for the middle classes who didn't want to walk,
there was another option.
It's one that's far more familiar to us today.
The omnibus.
Omnibuses - the ancestor of the bus.
They were horse drawn.
They could take 12 people inside.
You had a coachman on the front.
You had a conductor, or a cad, stepping up on the back of cabs.
A cad? Hence the word for a rotter.
Yes, exactly. They had a slightly dubious reputation.
And actually they didn't, they had a completely dubious reputation.
You could have two people sitting up with the coachman,
and those were very favourite seats, and he would keep those for the men
who were regulars and who tipped well, because inside was horrible.
It was dark, it was damp, it was smelly.
To make matters worse for the passengers, conductors
would take their money and usher them on board before they'd had time
to realise there was barely enough room inside.
The drivers would, therefore, leap around other buses to try and get
ahead to get the next passenger.
And we see court case after court case of what was known
as furious driving.
As they raced each other to get to the next passenger.
So it was kind of the Wild West of busdom.
Fares started at a costly shilling, but soon dropped to sixpence.
Even then, it would have cost an office clerk more than two days
wages just to get the omnibus to work each day,
forcing them to remain living within walking distance of their jobs.
In just two decades, the population of London had grown by a further
half million people.
This was only set to rise.
And it was all down to one thing - a frenzy of railway construction
that had spread across Britain.
WHISTLE BLOWING
In just over a decade, they were transporting millions of people
across the country.
By 1852, more people could access the capital via major train stations
like Euston, Paddington, Waterloo, and King's Cross.
There was fierce competition to drive even more
lines into London.
A Royal Commission had ruled that no mainline stations could be built
within the city centre.
Anyone arriving into one of these stations had to continue
their journey by road.
The number of omnibuses doubled as a result.
And soon the streets of central London were overwhelmed
with traffic.
One man, Charles Pierce, decided something must be done.
Solicitor to the City of London, and something of a social reformer,
he felt the railways themselves held the answer.
Charles Pearson was a man on a mission.
He had this radical idea for solving the chaos on London's streets.
He put forward a proposal that was to lead to one
of the defining projects of the century.
His idea would transform London, and the way we get round the city,
to this day.
The London Underground.
But creating the first underground railway was a massive gamble,
and no-one had any idea if it would be a success.
During the early Victorian period, inner city travel
was limited to horsepower for those with money,
and if you didn't earn a decent wage, you walked everywhere.
Charles Pearson was keen to improve London and the chaos on its streets.
He put forward a radical idea for an underground railway.
For years his idea was ridiculed.
The Times described it as an insult
to common sense that people would prefer to be driven
through the foul subsoil of London.
Pearson wouldn't give up, and eventually his persistence paid off.
In 1853, the House of Commons approved a bill for the construction
of an underground railway.
The first to be built anywhere in the world.
A company was set up called the Metropolitan Railway.
Construction on the first stretch of line began in 1860.
It was named the Metropolitan Line, and it ran steam trains
through its underground tunnels.
This is North Weald station part of the Epping Ongar Heritage
Railway in Essex.
This centre houses a collection of historic trains and buses,
and is currently the home of a very special locomotive.
It's the last Metropolitan Underground Line steam locomotive
in the country that's still in working order.
Morning, Alan.
Morning, Michael. Nice to meet you. So, this is it?
This is it. 120 years old, nearly.
Welcome aboard.
OK.
That's lovely.
And you've got a wonderful vista along the front.
Oh, yeah.
Alan Coppen is one of the volunteers here at the centre.
And is one of the team responsible
for the Metropolitan steam loco.
Slide over. OK, if you want to screw that off, if you want to.
Here we go.
All the way off.
How's that? Marvellous.
If you want to play the hooter. Oh!
WHISTLE BLOWING
There you go! I've always wanted to do that. Simple stuff.
Clear my side, Al.
Clear my side. Here we go, then.
This locomotive, the Metropolitan 1, used to carry people
through the underground tunnels.
It was still running on open stretches of the underground,
west of London, to Chesham right up until 1961.
So what does it mean to you?
I've always loved railways, and particularly steam. Yeah.
To be on this one, particularly, I always find a great privilege.
Yeah. The early Victorian drivers would have their name in the cab.
Really? It wasn't unusual for them to come in on their days
off just to look after their loco. Really?
They were polished like, well, like your best silver service.
You get a real sense in here of Victorian engineering.
Oh, yeah, it's wonderful.
Can you just blow the whistle there, Michael, for the crossing? Yeah.
WHISTLE BLOWING
You can make them sing.
WHISTLE BLOWING
The first section of the Metropolitan Line ran
from Paddington taking in three major train stations.
Paddington itself, Euston, and King's Cross before ending
at Farringdon.
One of the first underground stations to be built on that initial
stretch was Baker Street.
Is this Baker Street station much as it was as it was built
in the 1860s?
Absolutely. This was part of the original Metropolitan Railway opened
just over 150 years ago in 1863.
And this particular station has been kept,
more or less, in its original condition.
You could practically see the people with top hats, can't you?
Absolutely, absolutely.
To construct the first underground they used a method called
cut and cover.
Where possible, engineers followed the roads to avoid
knocking down buildings.
Sealing off a portion of the road,
they dug a giant trench straight along it.
The sides of the trench were shored up with wooden planks
before being lined with bricks.
And finally, the top was roofed over with a brick arch
and the road reinstated above.
Being just below street level, these shallow tunnels
are called subsurface lines.
What would it have been like down here when they were really
in the throes of building it?
There would probably have been a couple of hundred men at least
on this one station doing very physical things, because they had
virtually nothing to help them mechanically.
They might have had a couple of cranes with steam engines, but other
than that all of it was done by hand.
Some of the spoil was taken to West London where it now forms part
of the embankment at Chelsea Football Club.
The workmen digging these tunnels were called navvies, an earlier term
that was used for the men who built the navigation canals
a century earlier.
A lot of them were Irish, because in the early and mid
19th century the Irish economy was very poor.
A lot of men came over, and the boom activity at the time
was railway construction.
They were tough guys.
It was a sort of hard living, hard drinking area, and there
were lots of reports of fights.
Both between themselves and with local communities.
So their navvies were not popular.
But they did the job in a way that probably nobody else
could have done.
A major challenge was avoiding the maze of pipes, drains, and sewers
that ran beneath the streets.
Disaster soon struck when the wall of the fleet sewer burst.
Its foul contents gushed out, smashing through the timbers
and flooding a section of tunnel to a depth of ten feet.
The setback cost months of extra work, and hundreds
of thousands of pounds.
But eventually, the first stretch of the Metropolitan Line
opened in 1863.
It was a huge achievement.
There was great excitement when it opened.
They even held a banquet down on the platform at Farringdon Station.
Well, there was quite a fanfare there, and there were lots of people
who went on the first trains apart from the celebratory trains
where the notables came.
The general public came very quickly and used it, and they kept
using it, as well.
After the first year, the company receipts showed profits
of over £100,000, which is the equivalent
of around 9 million today.
All testament to the vision of one pioneering
Victorian - Charles Pearson.
WHISTLE BLOWING
But constructing the underground was only half the battle.
The trains they ran on the tracks were leased
from the mainline railway companies.
Trains that were never designed to run underground.
See, there's a red line there, Alan. The ideal... If it gets to there,
we jump! We jump!
I'll be before you, I'll be right before you.
No, you won't!
Take us back to when this wonderful locomotive was actually
on the Metropolitan Railway, underground in Victorian times.
Well, you've got this thing down here chuffing out this stuff,
and it must have been hell.
It really must have been awful. In those tunnels?
In those tunnels.
The soot, the smoke, and the dirt, basically, and the sulphurous fumes.
It must have been Dante's Inferno, you know.
So what they done, the early, the earlier ones than this,
this is a later one, they put condensing apparatus on them.
How did that work?
Well, the idea was to reduce the smoke emissions from the chimney,
obviously, in the tunnels by means of condensing.
So what they did was they put pipes in the cylinders...
On a conventional locomotive, the exhausts are going up the chimney
into the atmosphere.
But in this case they came along the pipes, into the top
of the water tanks on the locomotive,
where the waste was condensed, turned into water.
And it reduced it to a fair extent, but it wasn't very successful.
Clouds of smoke still engulfed the underground tunnel.
WHISTLE BLOWING
And what about the passengers?
Well that was their rotten luck.
That was their attitude on the early days. A lot of the early chemists,
I understand did make potions, you know, the metropolitan mixture...
What, for travelling on the Underground?
Yeah, have buy our potion. We like a little bit of profit.
You know, it was supposed to cure like ailments
and bronchitis and asthma.
I'm not sure it did, but some of the crews asked for leave,
a week's leave to grow beards. Oh, really, why?
Well, they thought that the beards might help sort of... Oh, filter
the sulphur and all that for the... That didn't work.
I can't say that worked, no, no, but that's what they did.
Despite the conditions, being an engine driver on one
of these trains was a good job to have, and one they took pride in.
But it was a hard way to earn a living.
What was it like for the crew?
Long hours.
Very, very dirty work.
I think you had to be...
You have to be a railwayman. I don't think it was a job for people,
"I might try the railways", I think your father was a railwayman,
perhaps, so you went on the railways, and that's the way it was.
But it was a backbreaking job.
I think they were a different breed of people.
I think they were very tough people. Yeah.
And they were very, everything they done was, in my eyes,
I think they were brilliant.
I think they shaped Britain.
The railway shaped Britain.
Certainly the early metropolitan, you know, one of the first.
And here it is, 122 years later.
It's great, isn't it? Marvellous.
There's a contemporary account by a stoker called George Spiller.
He said,
"You could hardly breathe going through the tunnels, it was so hot.
It was enough to boil you on the foot plate.
It was a dirty, hot, sweaty job."
It must have been tough.
But just think back 150 years to the time when wonderful
old locomotives like the Met 1 were transporting millions of people
under the streets of London.
Passengers weren't deterred by the smoky tunnels.
The Metropolitan Railway continued to run steam locos on its tracks
for the next 40 years,
until electric trains took over in the early 1900s.
It was hugely successful.
In the first year after it opened,
that line from Paddington to Farringdon
carried 12 million passengers across London.
It was the first underground railway in the world.
The Metropolitan Railway proved that the idea was possible,
and it paved the way for what was to come.
But the next chapter was to push the success of the Underground
to breaking point, as a bitter feud threatened to jeopardise plans.
And a new rival vehicle came to London
that's largely been forgotten by history.
During the second half of the 19th century,
Britain was in the throes of a major revolution.
The sheer scale of the Victorian buildings, bridges
and railway networks dwarfed anything seen before.
New forms of transport were beginning to shape our towns
and cities across the country.
And none more so than the London Underground.
The Metropolitan Railway had always planned on extending
its initial stretch of line.
But the next stage of construction
wouldn't be as straightforward as they'd hoped.
And the Metropolitan Railway wasn't the only one to see
an opportunity in expanding the Underground.
The promoters of these lines were very entrepreneurial.
So they might see a small town or little village
that was, sort of, two or three miles outside London and say,
"Well, we'll link that into the Underground network".
And so, they spread out in a rather higgledy-piggledy, random fashion.
From the outset, there was always a plan to build a Circle line
that would connect some of the mainline railway stations
and allow passengers to navigate London as a whole.
Two companies were tasked with building it.
The Metropolitan Railway,
and a new company, the District Railway.
Who were the key figures in all this?
There were two key players in this.
Running the District, James Forbes,
and the Metropolitan, Edward Watkin.
Two rivals who actually disliked each other,
refused to have any negotiations,
and so built, kind of, bits of the Underground
that were not really connected to each other.
Why do you think they hated each other so much?
They were very different types.
James Forbes was urbane, kind of relaxed, kind of witty,
rather charming, an art collector.
Edward Watkin was this very kind of focused empire-builder,
entrepreneur, only interested in money.
And I think their personalities actually clash,
quite apart from the fact they were just traditional,
capitalist rivals.
It took 21 years for the Circle line to be completed.
Largely because the two men never found a way to work together.
And even then, their rivalry continued.
The Metropolitan Railway actually had the contract to run the trains
in the clockwise direction,
and the District had the contract to run them in the anticlockwise.
If a passenger was foolish enough to go to the wrong ticket office,
because they had two ticket offices at each of the stations,
and buy a ticket that might involve travelling around
17 or 18 stations in the wrong direction,
instead of one that might just take you
five stations in the correct direction, they wouldn't bother.
They would just take the money and say, "That's the long way round. That's the way you haveto go."
And what are the consequences of that rivalry
for people using the Underground today?
One of the great examples of this is the fact that where we are,
Hammersmith, at the moment,
there are actually two stations.
And one was built by the District Railway, which is over there,
and the other was built by the Metropolitan, which is over there.
And the two did not connect at the time,
and still, more than 150 years' later, they still don't connect.
And you have to cross a busy road to get from one to the other.
Despite its ups and downs, the London Underground
was still a marvel of its time.
London was the great city of the world at the time,
so it's not surprising that it developed an underground system
30 or 40 years before any other country actually developed one.
So New York, Paris, Berlin,
they all developed systems starting around 1900,
which was 35-40 years after we built our system.
The Victorians deserve their reputation
as the great inventors and innovators of the period.
By the mid 1870s, an estimated 60 million passengers
were travelling on the Underground every year.
As the Metropolitan line expanded,
the company tried to limit the amount of damage
that the construction caused.
Particularly in wealthy areas, like here, in Bayswater.
The residents didn't want an ugly railway
cutting through their elegant terraces.
So the solution was this -
A frontage that's in keeping with the rest of the street.
Around the back...
..it's a different story.
Having demolished a whole house,
the railway company built a brand-new facade to fill the gap
and hopefully keep the residents happy.
New postmen were sometimes handed letters to deliver
to this non-existent address, just as a joke.
The Underground railway opened up travel options around London
and capitalised on offering what they called,
workmen's trains with cheaper fares.
But there were still lots of people who still couldn't afford to use it.
But another kind of transport was about to put in an appearance in the city.
It took its inspiration from the railways
and it would revolutionise transport for the masses.
It's a vehicle that today has largely disappeared
from cities across Britain - the tram.
It's similar to an omnibus, but with a key difference -
its wheels ran on rails that were built along the roads.
An original Victorian example is held here,
at the London Transport Museum.
Tram was introduced in this country by an American called George Train.
Wonderful name. Yeah.
And he set up three routes in London,
but none of them actually prospered.
The rails that carried the trams were slightly raised above the level of the road,
which, for Londoners, was unacceptable.
Other vehicles were constantly bumping over these things,
including the carriages of the mayors and aldermen and MPs,
who actually had the authority to allow tram systems.
They hated the things.
Everything changed in 1868.
A company in Liverpool obtained a local act to introduce tramlines to their city.
They did this by working out a way to lay the rails flush
with the road's surface.
Once that happened, trams had arrived.
So from 1870 is when we have a tram system here, in London.
It actually made it fun to travel across London,
which it had never, never been before.
Pulling the tram on rails created less friction than wheels on a road.
Making them faster and smoother.
A horse-drawn tram could pull up to 50 passengers.
Double the load of an omnibus.
The rails were also simple and cheap to lay.
Unlike the Underground, the tram companies didn't have to buy land,
which meant they could offer much cheaper fares.
It meant that for the first time, and this is a crucial thing,
for the first time, you did not have to live within walking distance
of where you worked.
Just like the Underground railway, trams also offered workman's fares,
making them, overall, the most affordable mode of transport.
More working class people could now move out to the suburbs,
where they could have more space, even a garden,
and a better quality of life.
Paint me a picture of how it would change the lives of an ordinary woman.
All right. Well, suppose she was a milliner working in Oxford Street.
She could actually live at home, travel to work
on a more or less predictable timetable.
Be there on time, come home late
on a reliable form of transport.
Bear in mind also, that these vehicles were very well-lit,
and you have a burly conductor standing right next to you.
They were a safe form of transport.
The tram contributed to the freedom of women, in that sense.
And more predictable?
Absolutely.
It's like being on the train, but it comes down your street
and it stops outside your house.
Tram stops began appearing along residential streets.
Householders soon saw an opportunity
and began selling items like drinks and tobacco
outside the front of their houses.
People would often build this shop over their front garden.
And there are entire districts in London
where you can see that this has happened.
The shop is one-storey high, the building behind is three.
That is the origin of our suburban parades of shops.
They developed from those tram stops.
So, how much do you think did the trams,
and by extension, the Victorians themselves,
contribute to the way we live now?
Their habits
of industry, education, culture, transport...
..are those that we still follow.
We are walking in their footsteps.
They created the modern world, there is no question about that.
In 1875, nearly 50 million people travelled by tram across London.
Elsewhere in Britain, their effect was even greater.
Unlike London, in places like Liverpool, Edinburgh,
Birmingham and Manchester,
the trams were allowed right into the heart of the city centre.
This meant whole tram networks
enabled people to navigate right across town.
Opening up more possibilities for the masses to get around.
Albert certainly looks very happy with his tram journey.
Well, look how comfortable that it is in here.
Feels like a time traveller, sitting in here.
THEY LAUGH
Take us back to the age of the Victorians.
BELL SOUNDS
For Londoners, though, the trams only took you so far.
There was still the problem of how to get into the city centre.
Which, for many, involved getting across the Thames.
Attention turned again to the underground railways.
A young engineer had a radical solution,
inspired by an invention of Isambard Brunel's father, Marc.
This new idea opened a brand-new chapter
for the London Underground.
During Queen Victoria's reign,
Britain was the world's wealthiest nation.
The population of London ballooned from two million to six million.
To help get everyone moving,
the London Underground was about to get a brand-new line.
A young engineer called James Greathead
had a novel solution for how to build it.
More people than ever before were living to the south of the river,
and getting across the Thames had become a nightmare.
And so, work began on the construction
of what we now know as the Northern line,
the first deep underground tube line in the world.
And the first section had to run right under the River Thames.
Starting...there.
In 1886, James Greathead and his team of navvies
began constructing the first stretch
of what would become the Northern line.
Trains still run through parts of that original Victorian tunnel.
A legacy which today, is undergoing a massive modern extension,
with works here, at Kennington.
Bloody hell!
That's the shaft, there you go. Yeah. That's a 25-metre drop.
And that's the way they've been doing it for 100 or more years?
Yeah, absolutely. The only way to do it is going vertical.
Keep talking, you're taking my mind off, er...
THEY LAUGH Off the height. Off the drop.
We're almost there, we're almost there.
So far, so good.
THEY LAUGH
It's the size of a cathedral, isn't it?
It's massive. It's a massive size, yeah. Look at that!
How much earth did you have to shift to dig this out?
It will be around 600 tonnes, more or less.
600 tonnes of earth? Yeah.
Whoo! Wow! Easy.
So, it goes down here, does it? This is where the tube trains will run?
That's where, in so many years, the train will be running, through here.
And connected to the Battersea Power Station.
Let's go. Let's go.
The key difference in 1886 between the Northern line
and the earlier underground Metropolitan lines
was that it went far deeper,
avoiding the shallower pipes and sewers.
In order to dig a deep tunnel, you first have to sink a shaft,
essentially, a giant hole, like this one at Kennington.
It was the same for the Victorians.
Once at the bottom, you could then start digging out the tunnels.
We're right at the end of the line here, eh? Yes.
So, what's the process? Basically, what they're doing right now is exposing clay.
They are digging another metre of tunnel.
How are they doing it?
So basically, what we do is, with hand tools, with pneumatic tools,
we dig all the clay out with spades.
And then, after the face is exposed, we install timber.
In order to construct the original Victorian stretch of tunnel,
James Greathead used what became known as the Greathead Shield.
It was a metal cylinder that protected the workers as they dug the tunnels.
It was based on an earlier model, originally developed by Marc Brunel.
As the men dug the tunnel out by hand,
the shield was pushed forward by hydraulic screws.
Cast-iron segments were then placed behind to form the tunnel lining.
Giving it the distinct look that earned the nickname, the Tube.
Just like here, at Kennington.
But it's astonishing, isn't it, that 150 years after the Victorians did it,
there are some guys with shovels!
There will be always a requirement
for hand-mining and tunnelling. There always will be.
Even with the latest technology, workers today use hand tools
in areas that big machines can't access,
or might damage any existing structures.
How far can they put the tunnel in...a day, a week?
Depends on the guys and how motivated they are,
but they probably do from five to eight metres a week.
Five to eight metres a week? Yeah.
Greathead's original line took four years to complete.
Opening in 1890, it ran from a station called King William Street,
heading south, under the Thames, to Stockwell.
It was initially called the City and South London Railway.
Later, it became the Northern line.
It was the first deep-level tube line in the world.
Do you think your tunnels will last as long as the Victorians'?
I would hope so. At least for 150 years.
You won't be around to see it. I don't think so, no.
When the line opened, they couldn't run steam trains
through such deep tunnels.
They were too narrow, had no ventilation.
Instead, they took a gamble.
For the first time anywhere in the world,
they ran electric trains through the tunnels.
This is one of the original Victorian carriages
that passengers travelled in on the Northern line.
It was called the padded cell.
Partly because of these rather wonderful old cushions,
but also because there were no windows.
these are mirrors.
The designers thought that because they were going through tunnels,
there was nothing to see, no point in looking out.
Nearly 5.5 million people travelled on the new line in its first year.
By the end of Queen Victoria's reign, that had almost trebled.
New modes of transport, like the underground railway and trams,
were changing how people got about.
But it wasn't just the big vehicles that could make a difference.
There's one more vehicle that owes its existence
to those pioneering Victorians.
It's one that's had a huge revival in Britain over the last few years.
The humble bicycle.
Bikes old and new are celebrated in the annual Tweed Run event,
including some Victorian examples.
During the 19th century, they experimented with
lots of designs for a sort of bicycle.
Some were more successful than others.
The penny-farthing soon became a firm favourite.
It's a fantastic experience because you get a great viewpoint from high up.
But the penny-farthing was a little bit hazardous to ride.
If you fell off it, the consequences were pretty serious.
But in the late 1880s, the penny-farthing
suddenly became obsolete.
They'd found something much better - the safety bicycle.
The introduction of the safety bicycle was, really,
one of the most significant things in cycling history.
Probably THE most significant thing.
Because it made cycling much safer for people.
Unlike earlier experiments, the safety bike had some innovative features.
It was lower, had almost equal-sized wheels,
was chain-driven and easier to steer.
It wasn't just men that could ride it.
Lots of women were keen to have a go, too.
Many adopted what was called rational dress,
such as bloomers and specially-designed skirts.
Although not everyone approved.
There's an awful lot of correspondence saying how disgusting it was
that women were wearing these appalling creations.
But there was a sort of hardcore of women that were very happy
to adopt that type of clothing.
Cycling had a huge effect on women's independence.
They could travel wherever they chose, and without a chaperone.
Just like the tram and Underground before it,
the safety bicycle opened up a wave of new possibilities.
People could cycle to work.
And, in rural areas, travel and socialise beyond their communities.
It became a form of transport for the masses.
When Queen Victoria came to the throne,
there was no such thing, really, as public transport.
But by the end of her reign, everything had changed.
People had options. People could get around in a way they'd never been able to before.
These brand-new networks laid down by the Victorians
were fundamental in shaping not just London,
but the country as a whole.
The legacy of the Victorians is everywhere you look.
From engineering triumphs like the London Underground
to simple vehicles like the tram,
that have transformed the layout of entire cities.
Independent travel and our ability to get about
is all thanks to the Victorians' immense determination
to improve life for the people of Britain.
When Queen Victoria first came to the throne,
Britain was in the grip of a public health catastrophe.
Polluted, overpopulated cities
were ravaged by epidemics like cholera and typhoid.
Thousands of people were dying.
The main cause was dirty water and raw sewage.
And it would take the ingenuity of remarkable engineers
to win the battle for the health of the nation.
The solution they came up with was a sophisticated network of pipes
and tunnels beneath our streets - the sewers.
The Victorians spent a lot of time thinking about the dark, difficult
world of human waste and sewage.
They had to. It had become a matter of life and death.
The push to clean up Britain's cities and provide good sanitation
and clean water for all
is one of the greatest achievements of the Victorian age.
They got their hands dirty.
Building miles of tunnels like these under our towns and cities.
Designed and built by visionary engineers,
these mammoth projects had an extraordinary impact
on people's lives, and transformed public health.
The first steps in the creation of the sewers
began not in London, but in Liverpool,
the most prosperous port in the whole of the empire.
By the 19th century, business was really booming.
The city had grown even richer,
particularly thanks to the trade in American cotton.
These dock were a vital hub for the import and the export
of cargo and people.
But there was another side to this success story.
Liverpool had become a dangerous place to live.
In fact, Liverpool was now the most dangerously unhealthy city
in the whole of Britain.
People were flooding into Liverpool, desperate to find work.
The population had rocketed from 78,000 at the beginning of the century
to nearly 400,000 by the late 1840s.
The poorest were forced to live in squalid, overcrowded slums.
Whole families were crammed into single rooms.
A couple of filthy privies would be shared by up to 50 people.
Diseases like cholera were rife.
I've come to Liverpool's docks to delve into the dark side
of the Victorian city.
So, what was life like?
Drudge from the moment you got up, I would imagine.
Physical, hard labour.
If you wanted water, you had to take a bucket
to a standpipe in the street.
But the water wouldn't be on for more than two or three hours a day.
What was the system for getting rid of human waste?
Well, people had cesspits in their back yards
and they would be manually dug out maybe once or twice a year.
And the contents would be put in carts and taken out to the fields
and used as manure.
But what was the impact on this cesspit system
of the huge increase in population?
The system breaks down. You have overflowing cesspits
leaking down into Liverpool's water supply.
If the boreholes, where Liverpool's water came from then,
were infected with cholera, it would spread the disease
very quickly throughout the whole urban area.
And it killed hundreds, if not thousands of people,
in each epidemic.
Cholera was the disease Victorians feared the most.
It caused excruciating pain, diarrhoea and vomiting.
It could kill in a matter of hours.
Liverpool's slums were the perfect breeding ground.
The city had the highest mortality rates in Victorian Britain.
Life expectancy was just 15 years of age.
Ignorance was a huge problem.
The causes of this terrible waterborne disease were not understood.
Victorians believed it spread by smell in the air.
But social reformers had established the link between poverty,
poor sanitation and disease.
And they began campaigning for change.
What was the tipping point, when Liverpool looked at itself and said,
"This can't go on any longer"?
Well, sadly, it wasn't the infant mortality,
which, at that time, in the worst years,
one in four babies were dying before their first birthday
in the poorest parts of Liverpool.
You would think that would be enough to convince the town council
to do something, but it wasn't.
The shipping owners were beginning to find
that if they went to New York or Boston
with a Liverpool ship that had an infectious patient aboard,
they would be put into quarantine for 40 days.
And the impact on their business was huge.
So it was the pressure from the shipping companies
saying to the town council, "Clean up your act".
With it affecting their wallets, as well as their health,
the city fathers were forced to respond.
In 1846, they passed the Liverpool Sanitary Act,
which finally opened the door for change.
The scale of the project to save Liverpool would be huge.
Thousands of lives were at stake.
But great Victorians would rise to the challenge,
building the world's first modern sewerage system
right here, in the city of Liverpool.
In 1846, with its slums overflowing with dirt, death and disease,
the city of Liverpool was leading the way
in Victorian Britain's battle against poor sanitation.
The city fathers had just passed the Liverpool Sanitary Act.
It was a revolutionary step forward.
And I'm heading to the city archive
to find out more about this radical turning point.
This is it, Sally, the Act of Parliament itself.
It doesn't look much, does it?
But some of the clauses here are the most innovative clauses
of any legislation from the 19th century.
What this Act did was to let Liverpool Town Council raise money
from the property owners to buy out the private water companies,
to build a sewer system, to pave the streets,
but most importantly, to employ a borough engineer.
And that went to a Scottish man named James Newlands.
Liverpool urgently needed to build a sewerage system,
but all the most-experienced engineers were working on the booming railways,
and the city had to turn to the relatively-unknown James Newlands.
It was a lucky break for someone who would soon become
the saviour of Liverpool.
He was the first person that had the vision
to link up a water system with a sewer system.
And if you link the two, you can then have water closets, WCs,
inside people's homes.
Newlands knew he had to create barriers between people and their waste.
Linking toilets to sewers would flush effluent away from the homes.
And the removal of cesspits would mean they'd no longer seep into the ground
and contaminate drinking water.
What's the first thing that he does?
Well, he looks at the maps that exist of Liverpool and he says,
"These are not good enough". Because they've not got enough detail.
So the first thing he did was to say to the town council,
"I need a new map,
"and I need a map that has a contour
"at every four feet of altitude".
It took a year for Newlands and his team fully to survey the city.
This contoured map would allow Newlands accurately to plot out
what would be the world's first integrated sewerage system.
Taking advantage of the steep natural contours of Liverpool's hills,
he would lay out the sewer pipe so they led to large outflows
down on the River Mersey,
where the water could safely take the effluent away.
He even produced innovations on the absolute basics.
There's a wonderful book of his surveys here.
But it includes these drawings of the sewer pipe.
What's so radical about this is that they are egg-shaped.
But why not just a bog-standard, if you'll excuse the expression,
round sewer pipe?
Because the water would move quickly through the sewer,
and at a speed where it could carry solids.
To get a real sense of Newlands' revolutionary sewer,
I need to head underground.
This modern-day treatment works may seem about as far as you can get
from Victorian England,
but in fact, Newlands' sewer is just metres below my feet.
This is one of the places where Newlands' original sewer
would flow into the Mersey.
Hello, Neil. Hi.
I found you. This is one of your haunts, is it? It is.
Under here is a bit of the old sewerage system, yeah? Absolutely.
It's the original 150-year-old sewer
and all we've literally done is put a new piece on the end of the old existing.
Because ultimately, it's in perfect working condition,
so, why would we want to contemplate touching it?
Working in the sewers is a tightly-controlled activity.
And I'm joining a maintenance crew preparing to go down today.
So, this beeper thing, which is beeping from time to time,
will tell whether there's poisonous or inflammable gas?
Yes. And it'll start to sound and vibrate.
And I shout, "Gas, gas, gas". Yes.
I pull this open, I put the breathing apparatus on.
Yes. And I get the hell out. Yes.
MICHAEL LAUGHS
First time in a sewer.
I've been in the old tight spot.
Not one quite like this.
This, effectively, was the old outfall, was it,
for the Victorian sewerage system, into the river?
Absolutely. That would have completely come
through this new structure,
transporting the raw sewage straight into the River Mersey.
How far can we get down that old Victorian tunnel?
Shall we go and have a look?
Well, after you, I suppose.
The majority of Newlands' sewers are just three-feet high.
Fortunately for me, the tunnels that lead to the river are tall
enough to stand in.
There's quite a lot of drips.
Yes.
Obviously these are the little bits
of the ground water coming in.
Well, considering it's 150 years old...a little leak...
Construction began on Newlands' Liverpool sewer in 1849.
He oversaw the work of thousands of navvies drafted
in to dig the trenches.
Armed with just picks and shovels, they were the powerful digging
machines of the Victorian age.
Without them, giant engineering projects like canals or railways
would have never been built.
25 navvies could dig the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool
in just one day.
It's a bit...
..a bit tricky walking along, isn't it? It is a little bit on the bottom,
it's just slightly... Slightly slimy.
But actually, quite a decent grip on the side, with these bricks.
Once the navvies had dug the trenches,
skilled bricklayers moved in to build Newlands' preferred
oval-shaped pipes.
You can really see...
..the fact that it's an oval shape.
Absolutely. With a bit of a dip in the middle
of it. Walking along it,
you see the sense of it, don't you?
The water is still flowing even though, you know, its way
down. As you can see, the standard and the quality of that workmanship
ensures that it flows free.
It doesn't block, it doesn't get build-up of silt or rag.
I knew about it from the plans, but to actually walk
along a Victorian sewer, and see how cleverly it's been built.
They were clever guys, those Victorians. They definitely was clever guys.
Newlands' choice of material was controversial, earthenware pipes
were much cheaper, but Newlands chose the more durable brick and stone.
Like all great Victorians, he wanted to build a legacy that would stand
the test of time.
The new sewage system can last as much as 50 years.
And yet here we are in a tunnel that was built
more than 150 years ago.
Yeah, absolutely.
What does that make you think about progress?
It definitely puts into perspective what these guys did.
The fundamental purpose of what this pipe does, is key
to our everyday life.
And without, it we can't function and to have this quality
of workmanship still serving that purpose,
it just amazes me every time I see it.
The pioneering sewer took 21 years to complete.
It would transform Liverpool and the lives of its citizens.
By the 1870s, life expectancy had doubled for the poorest
in the city, but Newlands wasn't content to stop there.
What Newlands did was to have a holistic vision of urban health.
He designed municipal boulevards, public baths and wash houses,
he did street paving.
Just about everything that could be done
to improve urban health
at that time, he thought of and he planned for.
The eyes of the nation had been closely
following Newlands' pioneering work.
His success showed the way forward, engineers would be inspired
to follow in his footsteps.
On the road to a public health revolution.
How should history judge James Newlands? If he'd not done this here...
..there wouldn't have been the model for other towns and cities to copy
in Britain, and then worldwide, and it was Newlands
who had that vision and created the first example of what you could
do, how you could make a system like this work.
At the moment, he's an unsung hero.
I think he deserves far greater recognition and thanks
for what he did in Liverpool.
There's no pleasant way to put this - well into the Victorian era,
defecating was downright disgusting and occasionally deadly.
This privy was bog-standard for the time. You do the deed
and it stays there for weeks, maybe months, before the night soil men
come to take it away.
Oh, and you're probably sharing it with 11 other families.
If you were rich, you might run to this, so to speak.
Looks good.
Ceramic bowl. Rather complicated, if ineffective, mechanics but a
trickle, not a flush, and it wasn't going anywhere, except...
..down into the cellar.
By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, her ever-resourceful
subjects had arrived at a practical ceramic flushing toilet
that resembles the ones we know today.
Manufacturers like Thomas Crapper and George Jennings started to make
a name for themselves.
A breakthrough.
George Jennings put public toilets into the Great Exhibition.
Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, commissioned the building of
a giant crystal palace in Hyde Park to house the exhibition.
When it opened in 1851, it showcased the marvels of the Victorian age,
including Jennings' flushing toilet.
He charged a penny a time - spend a penny, of course.
In total, 827,000 people paid to use Jennings' water closet.
Clearly, there was big money to be made in toilets.
By the mid-19th century, manufacturers in the pottery
heartlands of the Midlands were cashing in on the fashion
for flushing. Tough, durable and easy to clean, ceramics were the
perfect material for making toilets. Factories in places like
Stoke-on-Trent were churning them out for the masses.
And I've come to find out more.
Ceramics is the kind of game-changer in the sense that it's so Hygienic
compared to any other material you could use. Ceramics comes
in quite early,
if you think about chamber pots, but where it explodes,
if you like, as an industry, is when the totally ceramic toilet
is developed. To what extent was George Jennings the father
of the modern toilet?
He's an important engineer and is linked forever
with public toilets.
But he isn't kind of the person who made a big step.
I choose Thomas Twyford,
because he's the one who successfully
develops, manufactures, makes it available to everyone.
Twyford was a Victorian industrialist with big ideas.
When he inherited the family business,
he quickly turned it to the mass production of toilets.
He never looked back.
He was able to expand, building more factories here and abroad.
And his most popular product,
the Unitas, sold all over the world.
It was the kind of first
million-selling ceramic toilet, and in Russia
Unitas is still the word for toilet.
What about Thomas Crapper, then?
He is the name that everybody knows.
But he didn't invent the toilet.
He had toilets made for him, that he sold.
But his name is associated with the process, so to speak!
Sadly not - "crap" is a very old word, meaning rubbish.
I think people did find it amusing that it was crap and Crapper.
So he's really caught the public imagination.
To what extent has the development of the toilet that
we use today improved our lives? Well, in our day-to-day lives,
because of its hygienic qualities, linked to a suitable sewage
and drainage system,
the development of the ceramic toilet saved lives.
WATER FLUSHES
By the mid-19th century, the increased popularity
of the flushing toilet was literally putting bums on seats, playing
a vital role in the transformation of hygiene in the Victorian home.
Meanwhile, in London, the largest and most populous city in the world,
the filth and the squalor continued to build up.
Ten years after James Newlands began his sewers in Liverpool,
the great capital still didn't have a proper system
of its own, and it was causing a stink.
It's hard to imagine, but walking here by the River Thames in 1850,
you'd be gazing out over a giant toxic open sewer flowing
through this magnificent city. A polluted, stinking
river of excrement.
In 1855, the future Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, famously said
of the Thames - "that noble river, so long the pride and joy
"of Englishmen, has become a pool reeking with intolerable horror.
"The public's health is at stake."
How bad was it? In the 1840s and 1850s...
..London was a very smelly place in which to live and the real killer
was the widespread adoption of the water closet.
The flushing toilet?
Indeed. When you flush the lavatory, what you send round the S-bend
is a small quantity of potential manure, and 10 or 20 times
as much water.
So the cesspools were filling up 10 or 20 times as quickly,
and they leaked into the underground rivers and into the water supply.
Victorian London had 200,000 overflowing cesspits and the city's
smaller rivers had long been used for dumping excrement.
This poisonous mess was finding its way down into the Thames.
The Thames was conveying the sewage of two and a half million people
out towards the Thames Estuary and the North Sea.
But of course, it's a tidal river so it didn't just go away, it kept
coming back with each incoming tide.
All eyes were on Liverpool's pioneering sewerage system but
no-one had the guts to give the go ahead
in London. The cost of a much larger sewer in this sprawling metropolis
would be astronomical.
But with death stalking the streets of London with every
new cholera epidemic,
the press were up in arms.
This cartoon from 1858 powerfully illustrates their fears.
In the end, nature would have its own way of forcing the issue.
London had had a run of some of the hottest summers on record,
and as temperatures soared in the high summer of 1858,
the River Thames became a stinking, stagnant soup.
This time, Parliament just couldn't ignore it.
The foul smell coming off the river quickly became known
as The Great Stink.
There was no escaping it.
The smell got so bad that they ended up soaking the curtains
on the windows of Parliament in lime chloride to try
to disguise the stench.
But by Wednesday June 30th, Members of Parliament could stand
the stink no longer.
They simply evacuated the place.
The Times reported - "A sudden rush from the room took place.
"Foremost among them being the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
"Disraeli, who hastened in dismay from the pestilential odour."
The Great Stink had brought Parliament to a standstill.
This couldn't go on. In just 18 days,
the Members of Parliament rushed through a bill that meant
they could now build a new London sewer.
I've sometimes thought that if the Houses of Parliament
had been rebuilt on Hampstead Heath, we might still be arguing
about it now.
But once the politicians believed that they were in danger
from the smell, they then changed the legislation and by the late
autumn of 1858,
they were digging up Victoria Park, Hackney, to lay the first sewers.
So finally, politicians were forced to act.
The solution was extraordinary in scale.
An epic engineering feat to rival all others.
And the result would transform London.
The man chosen to be chief engineer
of the project was Joseph Bazalgette.
As a young man,
he had cut his teeth working on the railways, and won the respect
of the engineering greats, Isambard Kingdom Brunel
and George Stephenson.
The scale and ambition of Bazalgette's plan was mind boggling.
Like Newlands, he would build a network of small street sewers
connected to homes.
But the Liverpool scheme fed untreated effluent into the Mersey,
Bazalgette's ambitious plan was to build five main mega sewers
snaking across the city, that would feed out to treatment
works in the east.
All this under the most populous city in the world.
Within just a year of The Great Stink, construction began
all over London.
Down on the River Thames he built towering new stone embankments,
to house some of the main mega sewers and also a stretch
of London's first Underground railway, running right alongside it.
Along the way, he re-sculpted London as we know it, creating
a riverside vista befitting a great world capital city.
These now are iconic embankments replaced rank marshland, and
narrowed the river, creating the fast-flowing body of water
we recognise today.
To get a sense of the scale of Bazalgette's great project,
Stephen is taking me down to the Thames Embankment.
We're standing in Victoria Embankment Gardens, which is part
of Sir Joseph Bazalgette's Victoria Embankment,
and this is the York Watergate, from which the Duke of Buckingham,
in the 17th century, used to step onto his boat,
which would have been in the River Thames.
All in all, Bazalgette's scheme reclaimed 52 acres of land
from the river.
But it's 100 metres.
It is, yes. The river came all the way back here? Yes.
If we had been here in 1860, we would have been up to our necks in water.
Up to here! Yeah.
The scale of it's astonishing, isn't it?
I know, it's very hard to imagine
now, bearing in mind that this was done mostly by people
with picks and shovels.
This gargantuan engineering project was Victorian ambition writ large.
By the time he'd finished, Bazalgette had spent £6.5 million
building 1,300 miles of sewers, and in all that, he had used
an astonishing 300 million bricks.
This extraordinary achievement all but eradicated poor sanitation
across the city.
The last cholera outbreak was in 1866.
What do you think is his lasting legacy?
The city was protected by Bazalgette's sewers. When he died,
his obituary
stated that he had saved many, many lives.
So he was, he was a public hero.
I think he's one of the greatest of the Victorian engineers, who made
it possible for us to live safely in cities.
Bazalgette's scheme didn't just change the shape of London,
it eradicated diseases like cholera forever, and it transformed the
lives of London's inhabitants.
Looking at the River Thames today, it's a far cry
from those descriptions of it as a reeking pool of sewage.
For that, and for so much else, we have to thank Joseph Bazalgette.
By the second half of the 19th century, the tide had started to
turn in the battle against disease,
poor sanitation and dirty water.
Fired by the success of Newlands' ground-breaking sewer in Liverpool
and Bazalgette's engineering marvel in London,
cities across Britain were inspired to join in the great Victorian
sewer-building bonanza.
But while some were making their names building sewers,
others were taking on a much bigger challenge.
This is Vyrnwy Dam, built to provide the city
of Liverpool with water.
Its construction was a huge undertaking, and it stands today
as one of the great monuments of Victorian engineering.
The dam is 1,165 feet long.
It's built of stone blocks carved out of Welsh slate, each weighing
up to ten tonnes.
It's supported by 31 arches, and is decorated with towers.
You can just see the turrets over there.
It's beautiful.
Newlands' visionary plan to clean up Liverpool had identified early
on that the city would need not just sewers, but clean water
and lots of it, not only for drinking water but also to flush the
toilets and rinse out the new sewers.
But local wells, rivers and reservoirs struggled to keep
up with demand.
And it would be another 30 years before two pioneering engineers
would come up with a solution.
And they found it in Wales.
Noel Hughes has the job of overseeing the smooth running
of this remarkable dam.
Oh, they are glorious, aren't they? Aren't they just. How old are they.
Almost 140 years of age.
It's so beautifully done, isn't it?
The bridge has been done with such clarity and detail
and delicacy. Notice the signatures?
Oh, gosh, yes, here we go.
Hawksley.
And George Deacon!
George Deacon succeeded as borough engineer
when James Newlands retired. Together with Thomas Hawksley, the
leading water engineer of the Victorian era,
they took on the challenge of supplying Liverpool with water.
Is this what they would have taken to the Liverpool Council?
That's right.
This would have made up the portfolio, to say,
this is what we're going to be delivering.
This is how we can provide water to every citizen of Liverpool.
That's right.
And all you've got to do is pay for it! Quite!
Construction on the Vyrnwy Dam began in 1881.
The scale of the project was far much more ambitious
than anything that had come before.
What are the things that Deacon brought to this dam
that you couldn't do at that time see anywhere else?
The height, the sheer volume of water that was holding behind it.
This 59,000 million litres of water.
But also, the first dam ever to overspill.
Most dams would have an overflow, which goes round the side.
Yeah. Deacon said no.
He wanted it to come over the top. As it's doing now? As it's doing now, yeah.
This is because it's been raining, the dam is really full, the overflow is right
the length of the dam itself.
That's correct. You've got to have a really good dam for this to work, though.
If this isn't strong, this is dangerous, isn't it?
Engineers knew only too well the perils of dam building.
17 years previously,
on the night of March 11th 1864,
the Dale Dyke Dam near Sheffield had a catastrophic failure.
The dam wall collapsed.
And a deadly deluge of nearly 700 million gallons swept away
everything in its path.
240 people lost their lives.
It was one of the worst engineering disasters of the Victorian age.
Engineer George Deacon was determined his dam wouldn't suffer
the same fate.
You've got to realise that this structure is as wide at the
base as it is high.
So as you can imagine, it is really solid, this isn't going anywhere.
More than 1,000 men were employed to build the dam.
Half a million tonnes of stone were quarried nearby, and brought
to the site.
Masons carved the huge stone blocks before they were lifted into place
with the aid of steam-powered cranes.
It was a dangerous enterprise, which claimed the lives of 44 men.
But by 1888,
just seven years after construction began, the dam was complete.
The engineering that went into it, you know, we've got
to just take our hats off to the Victorians, they knew exactly
what they were doing.
To get the fresh water from Wales all the way to Liverpool,
the engineers laid out what was at the time
the world's longest aqueduct.
Miles of underground pipes designed to convey the water purely
by the power of gravity.
The water's long journey starts right here in this tower, perched
on the edge of the reservoir.
It looks extraordinary, doesn't it, Peter?
It looks like something out of Dracula's tower.
It's superb, yeah.
Deacon, as the principal engineer, was really concerned
about the aesthetics of what he built.
So although it was absolutely functional, you know, he wanted
it to look pretty in its environment.
What is the function? It will draw the water off from the lake,
OK? This is one of the deepest parts of the lake.
And then also, it filters it before it moves off towards Liverpool.
Shall we go inside, then? Yeah.
This is great.
And this is Liverpool's water, is it?
Exactly.
We're now in the base of the tower. On the end of this chain...
This whopping chain. Exactly. ..is where your filtration sits,
so the water from the lake is drawn in through the syphon tubes.
And the only place it can go is through one of those strainers,
and off through the pipeline and into the aqueduct itself.
Those clever Victorians designed the tower so they could draw
off water from different depths in the lake, to ensure the best
quality enters the aqueduct.
And the machinery that operates this
is an ingenious Victorian water engine.
So here we are. Wow.
The heart of the tower, the engine room itself. A real Victorian
engine, and it still works.
Not only is it functional,
we actually have to use it for adjusting that draw-off level
out in the lake. All done by water. All done by water.
Might you need to do it today?
Well, I think with all the heavy rainfall that we had, the lake
level has come up and I'm going to have to adjust that draw level!
Great.
Does it make a really big racket?
Actually, compared to a steam engine,
I think you'll find it relatively quiet.
It's gonna make some noise but it'll be quite majestic,
I think. Mm, majestic!
Let's do it.
This engine is powered by water pressure from a pool in the hills
above the tower.
WHOOSH
Hear the pressure now coming into the engine? Yeah.
And this brings the water in through here?
Yeah, you can hear... You can hear it. Yeah.
So that's the water pressure starting to move from the pipeline
up from quarry pool, into the building.
Yeah.
HISSES
Look at that!
Shhhh!
You're right, it isn't that noisy.
It's just a hiss.
But look how smoothly it moves. It's clockwork engineering
on a massive scale! Yeah, yeah.
It's great!
We're right on the top of the tower now, looking down towards the dam.
How far is it to Liverpool?
The pipelines leave the tower now, and they travel 68 miles... 68 miles?!
..all the way to Liverpool. All that way, just by gravity.
That's an engineering feat in itself, isn't it? It is, it is superb, isn't it?
What do you make of the people who built this?
Absolutely innovators -
doing things that we don't even do today.
This engineering masterpiece stands as a glorious tribute
to the Victorians' greatest-ever achievement.
Their victory in transforming health across the nation.
The challenges they'd faced at the beginning
of the century were colossal.
The Victorians set about solving them with an ingenuity and drive
that had never been seen before, and has hardly been seen
since. Public health became a cause to be championed.
Cleanliness was available for all. These stunning feats
of engineering serve to remind us of the debt that we owe
to the Victorians who built Britain.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media
In the long reign of a single queen,
Britain changed the world and was itself utterly transformed.
Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.
By the time she died in 1901,
we had built the modern world.
It was a time of outstanding engineering, remarkable innovation -
all of it driven by ambitious pioneers.
It shapes the country we live in today.
Efficient and fast new transport systems allowed people to move
freely for the first time.
You get a real sense in here of Victorian engineering.
Oh, yeah, it's wonderful.
Giant feats of ingenuity saved lives.
The Victorians had ambition - they thought big,
and they got on with it.
Amazing inventions revolutionised our domestic lives.
What I'm holding in my hand changed our homes forever.
Automation transformed mass production.
Factories could now produce goods at a rate never imagined before.
The change is like a nuclear weapon going off.
This is the story of how the Victorians built Britain.
This time, I learn how the Victorians harnessed the power of
gas and electricity for their home.
This really was the invention that drove electricity into the home.
How are brand-new domestic appliances became the must-have
items of the day.
You can't underestimate the effect of the gas cooker.
For the Victorians, this was absolutely amazing.
And how the Victorians laid the foundations for the world
we live in today.
In 1837, at the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign,
there were only five cities in Britain that had a population
of more than 100,000 people.
By the time of her death, there were 49.
In the 60 years of her reign, the population of Britain doubled.
This massive population growth created a frenzy of house-building
in the Victorian period.
A third of all the houses in Britain today were built before
the First World War - most of them were Victorian.
In fewer than 75 years, they built six million homes.
Many different types of housing sprang up to cater
for all different classes.
Back-to-back terraces for the poorer members of society.
Smarter villas on the edge of towns for the more affluent.
Even grand mansions for the new rich industrialists.
Much of this new housing being built was intended for the middle classes,
a group that expanded rapidly during Queen Victoria's reign.
This burgeoning middle class had a sense of what we'd call
being "house-proud", and it was also a time that gave birth to
the phrase "home sweet home".
The Victorian middle-classers loved to show off their new homes.
They saw them as display cases for their taste and wealth.
The Victorians' desire for stuff was aided by
the huge rise in mass production.
The factories across Britain producing things to put
in the Victorian house - for the Victorian housewife to buy.
So, you want to cram your Victorian shelves with all this success,
because that signifies wealth.
An important element in showing off your home was adequate lighting.
At the beginning of the Victorian era, many homes were still
being lit by candles or oil lamps.
But a lot of these new homes that were springing up all over Britain
would soon be able to rely on a brand-new source of power.
Gas - and it came from a surprising source.
The key ingredient in the manufacture of this new gas
wonder fuel...was this - coal.
By the Victorian era, Britain was the world leader in coal mining.
We had lots of the stuff.
It was called coal gas, or "town gas",
and the Victorians began to build gasworks in every town in the land.
This is Gakenham Gasworks in Norfolk.
First opened in the early years of the Victorian period,
it supplied gas to the local people until it was closed down in 1965.
It's the only surviving gas works of its type in England
from Victorian times.
Alan, this whole industry was based on somebody discovering
that you could make gas from coal.
How did they do it?
It's quite a simple process actually.
Underneath here is the furnace, which is heating up a series
of ovens, which we call retorts.
Into each of the retorts, coal is placed, the door is closed,
and then, the coal is heated to about 750 degrees centigrade.
And the coal breaks down and produces gas and other products,
as well as coal.
So, the coal isn't actually burning?
No, it is actually heated in the absence of air, therefore it
can't burn - it's just breaking it down into constituent products
that rise in the form of a thick, brown gas,
up through the ascension pipes here, and into the hydraulic main above.
The first public gasworks opened shortly before
Queen Victoria's birth.
But by the 1860s, there were over 1,000 across the UK,
supplying every town and city.
The gas they produced was stored in these large tanks.
From these, the gas was distributed to the local town
through a network of pipes.
The main pipes were first laid under existing roads, allowing towns to
install street lighting for the very first time.
Remarkably, it's still possible to get a sense of that
Victorian atmosphere today.
In London, a team of lamplighters regularly takes to the streets
to attend to over 1,500 gas lamps spread across the capital.
The warm glow gives us a flavour of how Victorian Britain
would have looked at night.
In the first half of the 19th century, gas street lighting
spread out beyond London to the rest of the country.
And once gas pipes had been laid for street lighting,
it was then possible for homes along the route to be linked
to the supply.
Who were the first people to get gas in their homes?
The first people to adopt it in the homes would've been
the middle classes.
Not the aristocracy, though?
They were a bit sniffy about it? They were.
I think it helped when Buckingham Palace adopted it.
So, Royal patronage was very key to the success of the gas industry.
When Queen Victoria took up residence at Buckingham Palace
in 1837, she had gas lighting supplied throughout the building.
It was soon followed by the House of Commons in 1852.
Such influential converts to gas made it popular,
and the wealthy of the land soon followed suit.
Then the invention of the coin-operated gas metre
in the 1870s opened up this new, wonder fuel to all classes
of British society.
Were their fears about this new fuel?
I mean, after all, it is explosive?
People were concerned that the gas pipes under the street were
transmitting fire, cos they saw that fire came out of the gas fittings.
So, they assumed that it was fire within the pipes themselves.
And people would go along past gas pipes and touch them,
to see how hot they were.
THEY CHUCKLE
Looking back, to what extent did manufactured gas change the way
people lived their lives?
It led to a whole range of health benefits and societal benefits.
The environment was safer, it was brighter, and it gave people more
flexibility over what they could do with their lives.
Gas changed people's lives in Victorian Britain.
Street lighting transformed even the smallest towns.
But soon, it wasn't just a case of lighting up their streets
and drawing rooms.
Gas was about to revolutionise other parts of the Victorian home.
And one room would be transformed more than almost any other -
the kitchen.
In Victorian Britain, the arrival of gas had a profound effect
on the way many people lived their lives.
First, it was used to provide street lighting, and then,
lighting in the home.
But later in the Victorian period, the invention of a brand-new
gas appliance caused something of a revolution.
It was the gas cooker.
Up until the mid-Victorian period, cooking was carried out mainly
on open fires or ranges.
You can't underestimate the effect of the gas cooker on British homes
and kitchens, and meals and diet.
Because what you now have with the gas cooker is you can
control the supply.
It is a straight supply of energy, it won't go off and on,
and also, you can schedule the temperature -
you can make it high, medium, low.
We take that for granted, but for the Victorians,
this was absolutely amazing.
One of the first gas cookers was installed at The Reform Club
in 1842, for celebrity chef of the day, Alexis Soyer.
He carried out early demonstrations of the benefits of cooking with gas.
The arrival of the new gas ovens and gas cookers played a part in the
Victorians' revolution of the kitchen.
Although initially only for the wealthy, one of the major events
of the Victorian period brought them closer to the masses.
The thing that really created a kitchen revolution
was that absolutely pivotal event -
the Great Exhibition, Summer of 1851.
The Great Exhibition was the very first international presentation
of manufactured products.
It was organized by Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert,
and held in a purpose-built crystal palace in Hyde Park.
For the millions who visited, it was eye-opening experience.
Assembled in one place for the first time was everything
that Victorian technology could produce.
And chief among this new technology were the newfangled gas cookers.
After being displayed at the Great Exhibition, more and more people now
installed them in their new Victorian homes.
The Great Exhibition really brought technology into the Victorian home.
On a modern gas oven, you can change the temperature.
It made cooking much easier, much more experimental -
and also, it meant that you could make a more complex meal.
And so, we really do see the Sunday roast becoming more popular
in this period.
It's something that the average middle-class family can manage.
In one house that demonstrates this Victorian kitchen revolution
probably more than any other
is the home of Victorian industrialist William Armstrong.
He was one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and he was obsessed
with kitchen gadgets.
What is it about this kitchen that a Victorian coming in would think,
"Mmm, this is state of the art, it's cutting edge" -
experimental, even?
Oh, it's got - it's full of gadgets,
They're taking advantage of every modern convenience.
All the new mechanical aids.
Probably the most modern kitchen of its time.
What is there in here that will surprise me the most?
Ah! Well, I think you ought to have a look at this,
if you want to be truly surprised.
HE CHUCKLES OK.
What is it?
It's one of the very first dishwashers.
HE LAUGHS
How does it work?
Well, it's quite simple, really.
You stack all your plates into it - but then, there's these bars that
have jets of water under pressure.
So you close the door, so you don't get a good soaking in the process.
HE CHUCKLES
And then, this water would cascade down across the plates.
And this was a time when servants were plentiful and cheap?
They were, indeed.
So, really, it's just a way of showing off a bit.
"What's coming brand-new today? Oh, a Washerup!
"I must have one of those."
HE CHUCKLES
But in the new Victorian kitchen, it wasn't just about the high-end
state-of-the-art equipment.
The Victorians also invented more basic kitchen utensils
that we take for granted today.
Victorians were obsessed with novelty.
They loved gadgets as much as people do today.
And so, they'd invent things like an apple corer,
or a potato peeler.
You know, the potato peeler's a wonderful thing.
You wonder why no-one ever thought of it before.
As new materials like steel became readily available,
mass-producing items like kitchen gadgets was possible
for the first time -
made them available to the masses.
This whisk - surely people before the Victorians had whisks?
Yes, whisks would've been around for a long time.
But it's that manufacturing that they had in the Victorian age -
meant that it was easy to bend the wires, steel was being perfected.
This could all be done on a machine,
which meant they could mass-produce them.
Gosh...the Victorians were fond of garlic, weren't they?
This is not a garlic press, is it? It's not, it's a potato master.
But it just shows, you know,
that they were looking for finer dining.
You know, this was a house that was built to impress.
You had guests coming - you wanted the fluffiest, smoothest mash
that was possible.
And all this lovely technology allowed you to do that.
The Victorians were so ingenious, in fact, that even if the technology
of the day wasn't advanced enough for them, they still found a way
to solve the problem.
In the grandest Victorian kitchens, they were introducing an appliance
that was way ahead of his time.
Here we have one of the very first fridges...
Good gracious me.
..which at stage was called a "food storer".
But this is how refrigeration really started in the home.
So, this is a very well-lined and insulated box?
It is. It's built of timber, which is an insulating material.
There's insulation between the zinc and the timber.
And this would have probably been stored in a scullery, as well,
which is already cool.
And it meant that you could keep things for very much longer periods.
How would they have used it?
Well, the ice goes into the base, and it has a drain hole
in the bottom, as well.
There's various removable shelves, so you can have your ice cream bombs
in here, and your meat in another area.
So, it's all well thought-out and designed.
A fridge in all but name - and of course, of electricity.
Yes, very much so.
The only thing you've got to do is replenish the ice.
That's the only job with it, really.
This brand-new innovation, the fridge, was beginning to appear
in the houses of the wealthier Victorians.
It had long been known that packing food in ice helped prolong its life.
But now, the notion ice in drinks, for instance, and the manufacturer
of ice cream, was becoming popular.
During the mid-Victorian period,
there was a huge increase in the demand for ice.
The industry that grew up to cater for it is one of the great forgotten
stories of the Victorian era.
Such was the demand for ice that a huge import business
was established.
First bringing the ice from America, and then, from Norway.
Although little is known about it now, here at the London Canal Museum
in King's Cross, there's still evidence of this
extraordinary industry.
I'm meeting Ellen Leslie, an expert on the Victorian ice business.
Much to my surprise, beneath the can out Museum are two
enormous cylindrical spaces.
They're huge, aren't they?
Ellen, what is this place?
This is a commercial ice well,
that was built in the late 1850s to store ice.
How much ice would there have been in here? It's huge.
It would take about 2-3,000 tonnes.
Tightly packed in. Why is it here at what is now the Canal Museum?
This was because ice could be delivered from the docks,
brought up the Regent's Canal, and then, distributed from here.
What did they want the ice for?
On a commercial level, restaurants and fishmongers needed ice.
But what about the private consumption of ice from here?
Well, certainly, only the very wealthy would've had an ice box,
or an ice chest.
It took a while for it to be something the masses would enjoy.
But it affected their eating, because it enabled food to be kept
fresh for longer.
It changed maybe the kind of desserts they had,
because they were able to make ice cream and sorbets from the ice.
So, what people were eating in 1840s to what they were eating in 1890s
was quite a big change.
It may have only been the very rich that could now store their food in
a prototype fridge, but the new mass-produce ice cream
was something that was available to everyone.
It was sold in small glass bowls called "penny licks".
But because they were often just wiped clean before being used for
the next customer, they were banned in the early 20th century,
just as wafer cones came in.
When did this industry peak?
Probably about the 1870s, 1880s.
It was short-lived...because, by the end of the 19th century,
they were starting to manufacture ice artificially.
So, this is extraordinary ice trade that I must say I've never heard of,
almost exactly coinciding with the reign of Queen Victoria herself?
Absolutely, yes.
Victorian life in the home was now becoming more sophisticated
at every level.
New inventions were transforming the way the Victorians lived
across the classes.
And for many, it meant the creation of a whole new world
of leisure time.
Throughout the Victorian Age, the house and home was becoming
a more comfortable and pleasant place to be.
New house designs catered for all classes of society.
And new technology was making the lives of the Victorians
more civilised, and standards of living were improving.
One of the biggest breakthroughs was the introduction
of a regular gas supply.
It was literally bringing people out of the dark.
Before gas lighting, you have the candlelight.
But on a dark evening, you only have light in your own immediate area.
And the thing with gas lighting - it could light up a whole room.
CROWD LAUGHS
With the Victorians now being able to extend their day,
there was a boom in games and hobbies.
They played games, such as "charades" and "blind man's bluff",
which became collectively known as parlour games, after the room
that they were played in.
Most parlours also had a piano.
But by the 1870s, the Victorians had even invented one
that played itself.
The pianola would mechanically play a tune.
And for the first time ever...
..you could enjoy music without needing an actual musician
to provide it.
RECORD PLAYS
As the Victorians began to have more leisure time, they got busy
inventing more things to make that time more pleasurable.
The pianola was surpassed by a device called the graphophone -
a precursor to the record player.
The Victorian parlour was beginning to resemble
a modern-day living room.
The concept of home entertainment,
as something canned and packaged arrived with them.
We did not invent it.
One of the most novel inventions in the Victorian era
was a whole new room - the bathroom.
It's impossible to imagine a house without one.
But before water was piped to houses in the 1850s, all of your toilet
business and washing was done in bowls in the bedroom.
This is completely new and revolutionary.
Previously of course, you have to go to the well to get your water.
You have to physically heat it on the hearth, take it upstairs,
and then, use it for your bath.
Now, suddenly, sanitation - keeping yourself clean -
actually became rather easy.
You could have quite a few baths.
You maybe even could have one every day.
Bathing as we know it was now possible.
Because of the marriage of piped water and a regular gas supply,
producing hot, running water.
After all, when Queen Victoria came to the throne,
most people hardly washed at all.
And a bucket of cold water was the upper limit of luxury.
But some Victorians went one step further.
At Cragside, the lavish Victorian home of millionaire industrialist
William Armstrong.
The bathroom he created is - well, more than just a bathroom.
Gosh...it's like a present-day hotel spa. It is, it yes.
This is where you relax, and - a brandy and cigars...
Your every need, fulfilled - yeah.
And Cragside even boasts something that we take for granted every day,
but it was a brand-new for the rich Victorians.
Gosh, it's huge, isn't it?
We'd call it a shower - what did they call it?
They called it a water douche. Ahh.
And of course, you just pulled it like the old lavatory chain,
you pulled the chain -
and then, you got this sustained douche of water.
Which they reckoned you shouldn't have for any more than
a minute-and-a-half, otherwise... Why, because it was so cold?
Yes, and it wasn't good for you to be sustained any more than that.
Oh, right.
But it's still the obvious ancestor of the modern shower, isn't it?
Oh, without a doubt.
It's just the whole embodiment of what a shower is today.
And years ahead of its time. Yes.
The new shower in Cragside was cutting-edge technology
for the time.
But from the 1880s, they would soon be on offer to Victorians
of more modest means.
Cragside's owner, William Armstrong, didn't just stop at the shower -
he created a bathroom of the future.
HE CHUCKLES
Wow!
I mean... it's not Armstrong's bathroom,
it's Armstrong's personal spa.
It is, they called it the Turkish bath suite.
What, in total, has he got here in this vast suite of rooms?
Well, he has a hot room, so you can sweat out all your impurities.
And then, you came into here,
and you, then, went into the plunge and immersed yourself in the water -
you can have it to any temperature you liked.
Or you could take an ordinary bath.
And after that, you, then went out for a vigorous walk onto the moor,
just to finish it all off.
HE CHUCKLES
In the context of the time,
the bathroom suite here at Cragside is breathtaking.
You're seeing the very first examples anywhere of the sort of
thing that you and I now take for granted.
Heating the home had always been a laborious and painstaking task that
mostly didn't work that well.
Running water and the ability to heat it now created the opportunity
to warm the whole house.
The Victorian home was transformed, because now, with gas and with
hot water, you can heat your home.
There are hot pipes going all around it.
And although the actual radiator per se was really introduced very
late in the Victorian period, we do see versions of the radiator
beginning in the 1840s - a mixture of pipes and radiating plates.
And some houses did have these.
So, the Victorian house is beautifully warm.
The poorer members of Victorian society were still having to rely
on open fires.
But for the more wealthy, radiators started to appear in homes.
And the concept of central heating was introduced for the first time.
At Cragside, they developed an ingenious heating system that,
yet again, was way ahead of its time.
There's a hole in the floor.
Down here? Yes, we're going down. OK.
And in order to see it for myself,
Andrew is taking me under the floorboards.
HE GRUNTS
Everyone was much shorter in those days.
HE LAUGHS
Less well-fed. Not this short.
Goodness.
HE GRUNTS
Good gracious, this is absolutely extraordinary, isn't it?
Look at these.
We are actually under Cragside itself now, are we? We are.
In the basement underneath the floorboards.
What are all these pipes for?
Well, these are the grand heating system for Cragside.
You could send this hot water coursing through these great ranks
of pipes, which then emanated the
heat that went up into the rooms through grills,
and also a whole pipe system through the house.
Throughout the lavish and highly-decorated rooms are radiators
hidden discreetly behind wooden panels.
The hot water pipes heat up the hallways, and even provide
under-floor heating in the spa area.
So, you didn't see the engine room of the central heating at all,
when you were in that opulence.
It was all underneath here.
How much of a breakthrough was this in the history of the home?
Oh, it was phenomenal, there was - and nobody had attempted this before
on this scale.
He was really at the cutting-edge of modern living.
He was the first. He was.
The biggest advances in the Victorian home were brought about
by the introduction of gas.
Every town had its own gasworks,
and large gas tanks became a feature of the landscape.
These derelict gas holders are now parts of our industrial heritage -
though their numbers are dwindling as they're being torn down to
make way for redevelopment.
The other great pillar of the power industry that still looms large
today also began in the Victorian era - electricity.
The way we use electricity in our homes now is arguably the invention
of an extraordinary man.
Joseph Swan - a visionary Victorian physicist and adventurer.
He was one in a group of scientists and engineers from the northeast of
England who were at the forefront of developing electricity
as the Victorian era's brand-new driving force.
Swan's special contribution to the great Victorian invention of the
electricity was this - the light bulb.
Or, as he would call it, "the incandescent carbon filament lamp".
He developed it here at his Victorian home in Gateshead,
on the outskirts of Newcastle.
In the heart of the city centre in Newcastle is the
Literary and Philosophical Society.
Built just before the start of the Victorian era, it played a crucial
role in Joseph Swan's career.
It was here that he demonstrated his new light bulb
at a major presentation.
The current chairman of the Lit & Phil, as it's locally known,
is Paul Gailiunas .
Paul, how important was the Lit & Phil to Joseph Swan?
It was important to scientists and engineers in the region,
and had been for 100 years.
Many important developments were announced at lectures here.
And it is here that Joseph Swan demonstrated the successful electric
light bulb for the first time? Yes, that's absolutely correct.
I believe that there was standing room only in the lecture theatre,
which actually held 550 people.
So, there's a lot of interest in the town, and the newspapers
reported it over several days, actually.
And I can read a little bit from it.
"The great invention of the day, Mr Swan's lamp, with its mild and
warm brilliancy, steadiness, and punctual ability, was then shown
"to the delight and astonishment of them all,
"and the room lit up with that.
"This lamp is superior to gas in every respect as a light."
And it goes on and on. It goes on and on.
So, it made a really big impression? Oh, it certainly did, yeah.
Joseph Swan's demonstration was astonishing.
The news of his new lamp went worldwide.
But there was a rival to his invention on the horizon.
Scientist Thomas Edison was developing a similar
invention in America -
although it's now widely agreed that Swan just beat him to it.
So, Joseph Swan was the first.
Why haven't I heard of him?
Why have I only heard of Thomas Edison?
Well, they were working on it at the same time, and Edison claimed to
have solved the problem - but actually, Swan was the first person
to get the thing into production.
Was there a row between them?
Edison sued Swan because Edison claimed that he was
infringing his patent.
And the thing went on for a year or two.
Eventually, it was resolved amicably, and Edison actually
invested quite heavily in Swan's company.
They traded it as Ediswan, and it was the best of all worlds,
I think, for them.
Joseph Swan had come up with an invention that would eventually
light up the world, but now a new race was on to supply the power
to the home to bring Swan's bulbs to life.
In the Victorian period, the new wonder fuel, gas, had transformed
the way people lived.
But as the Victorian Age grew to a close, a new power source
was about to transform the world.
In Newcastle, Victorian engineers were experimenting with electricity
for the first time.
And a local inventor Joseph, Swan, had perfected the first usable
light bulb - but how did he do it?
What have we got here, John?
This is a replica of the very first successful electric lamp
that Joseph Swan built.
This one here? It is - it is, indeed.
How does it actually work?
Well, he key thing is that it's got a filament - a very fine
carbon thread - going from the top to the bottom, connected to these
terminals here and here, which are powered by a battery.
What makes the light?
It's the heating of the electric filaments, and it glows white-hot.
That's 2,500 degrees Centigrade roughly speaking.
And that was the key challenge that Swan had to face.
None of the metals that were known back in the Victorian days would
stand anything like white heat - they would melt.
So, Swan was a chemist - he knew the properties of materials,
and he settled upon carbon as the material.
So, non-metal, but it does conduct electricity.
Why doesn't it burn up?
That was the other challenge, of course - to create as high a
level of vacuum inside that bulb as you could.
With the technology available at that time, it was very difficult
to create a complete vacuum in the bulb.
But Swan discovered if you switch the light on as the air was being
sucked out, it burnt off all the remaining oxygen.
This resulted in the sealed bulb lasting much, much longer.
The bulb he went on to mass-produce also had a more resilient coiled
filament, instead of a straight one.
So, this is what he came up with - the first commercial example
of the incandescent filament electric lamp.
Can I hold it? You can, yes.
It is very similar to a light bulb today, but am I holding in my hand
something that actually changed our homes forever?
Yes, you are, because the predecessors of the electric lamp
all involved burning something in the home.
You had to burn oil or you had to burn gas,
or you had to burn a candle - now those were all in Victorian times,
quite dirty materials.
And this was an opportunity to have light inside a room
without burning anything noxious.
What I am holding in my hand brought cleanliness, light, and convenience
to our homes? Absolutely.
Swan's light bulb harnessed the new power of electricity
on a relatively small scale.
There was obviously novelty value and more in being able to light up
his little lamps, and it must have seemed like magic to Victorians -
who up until then had to rely on candles and gas lights.
But the electricity industry was starting to grow -
and the Northeast was crucial to that, too.
When Joseph Swan perfected his light bulb, the only way of powering it
was with crude batteries.
But around the same time, a team of engineers also from the Northeast
designed a generator so large, it could provide electricity on a
commercial scale for the first time.
This resulted in the construction of the world's first power station
in Newcastle.
They received parliamentary permission to build it in 1899.
It was finally opened the year of Queen Victoria's death in 1901.
This was the spark that would eventually lead to the national grid
and the widespread distribution of electricity for all -
and it was all down to the Victorians.
Here at Cragside, the lavish Victorian mansion in Northumberland,
William Armstrong was also experimenting with
generating electricity.
But he came up with the way of doing it that was a century
ahead of its time.
He invented hydroelectricity -
generating energy for his house using the power of water.
Here at Cragside, Armstrong was intent on filling his home with
the latest advances of the day.
Joseph Swan was a friend - he worked and collaborated with him.
He was first in line to have his greatest invention installed
here in this room.
How did it work out, then, in his collaboration with Joseph Swan?
Here at Cragside, it meant that this was the first house in the world
to be lit by hydroelectricity.
And it's in this very room that Joseph and Lord Armstrong
worked on these very lamps.
And Lord Armstrong's genius in all of this is taking that light bulb
and powering it by water power - something we talk about today,
an alternative form of energy.
And here, they were perfecting this in 1880,
and were able to light the house through water with the new -
brand-new incandescent lamp.
So, we're not just looking at the past here -
we're looking at the future? We certainly are.
This really was the invention that drove electricity
into the home.
It's the light bulb that drives electricity in the home.
William Armstrong and his fellow Victorian engineers, scientists,
and inventors profoundly affected the way we live our lives.
During the 64 years of Victoria's reign, the Victorian home changed
beyond all recognition.
As with so much else, the Victorians created the world in which we live.
The mod consonant that they introduced are the thing that
identifies us most closely with them.
The bath, the shower, the lavatory, those things.
We couldn't live without them.
We have the Victorians to thank for those.
The Victorians created Britain as we know it today.
Everything that we are and use is thanks to the Victorians.
Our towns, our transport, our construction, our homes.
They made everything that we have.
It's all thanks to them.
The home, probably more than anywhere else,
is where the Victorians felt the impact of those massive advances.
Cragside was the ultimate test bed for those changes.
But the new-fangled ideas and gadgets
would eventually reach down to the rest of us.
From the top down, the Victorians changed our lives forever.
At the start of Queen Victoria's reign,
the nation she inherited stood on the brink of a revolution
that would transform Britain and the world.
It was a revolution built on machines
and on a new idea called mass manufacture.
The Victorians invented the concept of the factory,
making goods on an industrial scale and selling them across the globe.
It would make Victorian Britain
the richest nation the world had ever seen.
At the forefront of this technological revolution
was one city in particular - Manchester.
These new mills and factories in Manchester
were built for one simple commodity
that almost everybody in the world wanted and soon needed - cotton.
The mass manufacture of cotton cloths
would change Victorian Manchester and would change the world.
In the early 18th century,
Manchester was a small market town of around 10,000 people.
It was surrounded by rolling hills and farmland.
By the end of the Victorian age, it was a sprawling metropolis,
home to over 900,000 people and England's second biggest city.
It was packed full of dark Satanic Mills,
churning out cotton by the millions of square metres.
The export of this cotton would help make Britain
the greatest trading nation in the world.
When Victoria came to the throne,
Manchester was already a successful cotton town
thanks to local engineer James Hargreaves,
who invented the spinning jenny.
Cotton cloth is created from raw cotton bolls
and Manchester received the third of its supply
from America's southern plantations.
The initial cargo was shipped across the Atlantic Ocean
to the port of Liverpool, emptied at the docks,
and carried by horse and cart
to land locked Manchester 36 miles away.
The final leg of the journey took 12 hours
and needed an expensive change of horses.
To reach its full potential, Manchester's cotton trade
needed a new method of transport to cut the journey time
from Liverpool to its cotton mills.
Fortunately for the Victorians, the railway was now coming of age.
I've come to the East Lancashire railway to discover how an engineer
called George Stephenson used the latest Victorian technology
to bridge the gap between Liverpool and Manchester
and become known as the Father of the Railways.
Few know more about Stephenson than Erin Beeston,
the curator of Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry.
George Stephenson was a pioneer of the railways
and he engineered the line between Liverpool and Manchester
and he was brought on board just to create the railway itself,
rather than the locomotives that would run on it.
How did they decide what kind of pulling power they would have?
They had a competition the year before the railway opened in 1829
and one of the locomotives to run was designed
by George Stephenson's son, Robert,
and that was the famous Rocket Locomotive.
They were looking for a few different things
and rocket was by far the fastest and most reliable
and I think it hit speeds of about 30mph.
Stephenson's Rocket was the first steam locomotive to bring together
several innovations to produce the most advanced engine of its day.
The Rocket was so successful,
it became the template for steam locomotives of the future
and caused a stir when it was first unveiled.
The opening ceremony itself was a complete spectacle.
All of the MPs and important, notable, famous people of the time
wanted to ride at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
We tend to focus on the passengers on the railway.
But is that where an economist would regard the significance
of this first intercity railway?
Initially, the idea was really to get goods quicker from the port.
They would pull things like raw cotton,
materials that needed to be brought into Manchester
and then redistributed amongst the Lancashire cotton industry
to be produced and made into products
that could then go back out to the Empire.
Cotton could now be transported from Liverpool docks
to Manchester in just two hours,
knocking an astonishing 10 hours off the old journey time.
It's remarkable to think that it was cotton, humble cotton,
that spurred those great northern cities Manchester and Liverpool
to build the world's first intercity railway.
And as the new railways started to crisscross the country,
they transform Victorian Britain, slashing travel times.
In fact more than that,
opening up a whole new world of travel for rich and poor alike.
When the Liverpool to Manchester railway line opened in 1830,
it was the culmination of a mammoth construction project.
The 36 miles between Manchester and Liverpool
were crisscrossed with rivers, canals and swamps.
Huge feats of engineering were needed
to conquer an unforgiving route.
The Manchester to Liverpool railway
was the first to tunnel beneath a city,
the first to have signals, the first to have a timetable,
the first to carry mail.
But that wasn't all.
It also had to transport all that cotton
to and from Manchester's factories and mills.
Manchester was booming.
A new revolution in manufacture was about to make it explode.
Here we have a Lancashire loom,
the workhorse of the Lancashire cotton industry.
But while the mill owners were drowning in money,
the workers weren't so lucky.
The conditions for the new workers were grim.
Many were dying before they even reached their 20s.
Could Manchester change its ways and get the royal seal of approval?
This was a major event for Manchester.
At the very beginning of the Victorian era,
Manchester was on the way to becoming the centre
of the world's cotton trade.
Thousands of tonnes of raw cotton flowed into the city,
through the port of Liverpool
and along the new Manchester to Liverpool railway.
If Manchester's mill owners wanted to keep growing,
they needed a new generation of machines
to take productivity to the next level.
I've come to Queen Street Mill in Bury,
just eight miles outside of Manchester.
One of the very few cotton mills left,
where you can see surviving examples of the inventions
that revolutionised Victorian industry
and made this whole area a powerhouse of mass manufacture.
In we go.
Curator Philip Butler has fired up the steam engine for me,
so I can see one of the last working Lancashire looms in existence
running in all its glory.
It's the machine that made Manchester the king of cotton.
You can barely hear yourself think.
Imagine how much noise 900 made.
Here we have a Lancashire loom running as you can see
from a belt from the line shafting overhead.
The Lancashire loom was made in Burnley and was the staple,
was the workhorse of the Lancashire cotton industry,
in terms of weaving.
The revolutionary Lancashire loom
was invented by James Bullough and William Kenworthy in 1842.
Instead of needing a factory full of people,
working one person on one machine,
the Lancashire loom meant one 15-year-old
could operate eight machines at the same time.
As soon as the new looms came online,
productivity went through the roof.
A mill like Queen Street was now eight times more efficient.
It was a remarkable transformation.
How did machines like this change the cotton industry?
Once cotton could be woven fast on power looms like these,
then goods could suddenly be exported around the world.
And Lancashire actually became and exporter of cotton goods
to places like India,
which was a complete reversal from the century before.
Thanks to cotton, Manchester was now in the driving seat
of the mass manufacturing revolution.
By 1871, almost a third of global cotton production
came from this small area of Britain.
At its peak, the Lancashire cotton industry
had over 250,000 powered looms.
OK, I'll steer clear of it!
This kind of Victorian innovation came with great rewards
and no one man made more money
than the inventor of the Lancashire loom, James Bullough.
The first cotton millionaire and the Bill Gates of Lancashire.
In just over a decade, he went from being a humble engineer
to part of the landed gentry.
His family's wealth was staggering
and in the course of Victoria's reign,
the Bulloughs would build vast mansions,
buy their own Scottish islands
and commission luxuries like a 221 foot steam yacht, named Rhouma.
But not everyone was as lucky as the fabulously rich Bullough family.
The mill workers lived a grim life.
A typical working week would be 14 hours a day for six days a week.
And most workers were expected
to clean their machines during meal times.
What sort of people were the people who worked here?
You would get all working age members of the family
working here in the mill, from young apprentices
and both the female and male members of the family.
And in Victorian times, children?
There where children here between nine and 13, certainly.
Was it dangerous as well? It could be.
They were building a large, heavy cast iron machines
and that entailed rotating wheels and cogs and fast-moving belts.
And everything was in danger of being caught or trapped,
so it could be very hazardous.
This could be dangerous work.
Health and safety simply didn't exist then.
And terrible injuries were common.
The mills relied on child labour.
200,000 children worked in Manchester's cotton industry.
They were paid a fraction of what adults earned
and were punished far harder.
A child worker would be beaten or fined for falling asleep,
making a mistake or being late.
As Manchester's boom continued,
the welfare of its workers could no longer be ignored.
The conditions for the new workers were grim.
Many were dying before they even reached their 20s.
The suffering was bad for them but bad for the mill owners too,
who saw the productivity of their factories being held back
by illness, injury and death.
So, philanthropy and self-interest.
The civic leaders came up with a novel idea
for improving their workers' health and quality of life.
Manchester had grown so fast it now had its own separate borough,
Salford, home to thousands of mill workers.
And this is Peel Park, the pride of Salford.
It may not look that remarkable today,
but almost two centuries ago this was so cutting-edge,
people could hardly believe it was real.
Welcome to one of Britain's first free public parks.
Within a decade it was being copied all over the country
and then the world.
Peel Park opened in 1846.
It was, in the words of the time,
for the enjoyment and recreation of the public
without charge or restriction.
A revolutionary Victorian concept.
It was paid for by local cotton industrialists,
by dignitaries like Sir Robert Peel himself,
and from contributions from working people in the area.
Peel Park is a fitting tribute to one of Lancashire's finest sons,
Sir Robert Peel.
Born in nearby Bury, he founded the Conservative Party,
went on to become Prime Minister twice
and most famously of all created the modern police force,
known then as Peelers.
Unlike other parks,
Peel Park was free and had no restrictive dress codes.
It was a place for workers and bosses alike.
Just on the edge of the park came another Victorian first.
Creating the first public park wasn't enough for the cotton elite.
In their urge to educate the working class,
they set up a new kind of library.
It was to be the first unconditionally free
public library in Britain, maybe the world.
It's now a gallery and houses a remarkable collection of paintings.
One of which documents a milestone in the city's history,
a visit by Queen Victoria in 1851.
This was the first time a ruling monarch
had visited the area in over 150 years.
I'm here to meet the gallery's heritage manager, Ceri Horrocks,
to discover how Her Majesty's visit,
officially to open the park and library,
went down with the locals.
This was a major event
to mark the Queen's visit to Salford and Manchester.
So Salford decided to gather 82,000 schoolchildren in the park
to sing for her on her arrival.
So this is in 1851 and she arrived from Worsley New Hall,
where she had been staying,
with great pomp and ceremony for this wonderful reception.
And there were 82,000 young children there? Absolutely.
They had to be over the age of eight and they came from Sunday schools
throughout the area, not just Salford.
Each school was given a marshal, a route they had to come by, a time they had to leave.
It was all very, very precise
and the benches that had been built for them
were apparently allocated with 21 inches of bench per child.
And how did the visit proceed?
They left around ten o'clock.
The route was lined by lots of cheering crowds,
but also by an ingenious human telegraph
which was a way to make sure that the children sang at exactly the right moment.
Gentlemen in top hats lined the route and when the first carriage passed them
they waved their top hat in the road and then the next one, all the way along the line.
The last hat was waived and apparently they all started singing perfectly.
They did only manage one verse of the national anthem.
They just started cheering afterwards.
Why was it so significant?
I think it was a recognition for Salford and Manchester
and the region of just how important they had become
as centres of generating wealth, generating a lot of income
and the industry that was being developed.
Salford itself was the seat of many innovations
in the Industrial Revolution.
Queen Victoria's visit really was a royal stamp of approval
for the pioneering plan to improve the health and condition of the local people
with a ground-breaking new kind of library and park.
But most of all, the Queen was recognising
that it was northern cities like Salford and Manchester
that were helping to make her kingdom
the richest the world had ever known,
and it was all on the back of businesses like cotton.
Land locked Manchester was set on even greater domination.
They now wanted a port of their own
to cut out their greedy neighbour, Liverpool.
Mancunians thought that the Liverpool merchants
were extracting too much money from them.
To become masters of their own fate,
they built one of the wonders of the modern world.
There are those that think that the Manchester Ship Canal
is the finest feat of engineering of the entire Victorian era.
In 1861, cotton was king
and Manchester was making the cloth that dressed the world.
Great fortunes were being made and ordinary families
were being dragged out of rural poverty into the towns and cities.
Manchester imported three quarters of its cotton
from American southern plantations, where it was hand-picked by slaves.
Then disaster.
Civil war in America pitting the Northern Union
against the Southern Confederacy.
The Union president, Abraham Lincoln,
called on the mills and factories of Europe
to stop using slave picked cotton
from the Southern Confederate states.
At great personal cost,
Lancashire mill workers sided with President Lincoln
and refused to touch American cotton that had been picked by slaves.
A year into the Civil War,
the effects of the cotton embargo began to bite.
60% of Lancashire's looms lay idle,
leaving tens of thousands out of work.
Yet still, the Lancashire workers
refused to use American slave picked cotton.
With the cotton industry on its knees, President Abraham Lincoln
acknowledged the self-sacrifice of the working men of Manchester
in a letter he sent them in 1863.
He praised them for helping to end slavery in America
with what he described as a selfless act of sublime Christian heroism
that has not been surpassed in any age or any country.
The end of the American Civil War in 1865
allowed to Manchester's mill owners
to concentrate on making money again.
They identified a problem closer to home
that was damaging their bottom line.
Their noisy neighbours, Liverpool.
What Manchester did next started one of the most bitter and famous feuds
the world has ever known.
Nowadays, most people think Liverpool and Manchester
hate each other because of football.
But they'd be wrong.
The real reason is cotton.
Manchester resented paying what they thought were excessive charges
to Liverpool merchants to use their docks and railway line.
They calculated that as much as 60% of their profits were taken
in over inflated charges by their Liverpool neighbours.
The only way Manchester could become independent
was by cutting Liverpool out of the cotton equation.
To do this, they'd build the largest ship canal the world had ever seen.
In 1882, the idea of the Manchester Ship Canal
was championed by Manchester manufacturer Daniel Adamson.
And the man he trusted to make it happen
was civil engineer, Edward Williams.
Their plan was for their cargo ships to sail past Liverpool docks
and head to Eastham on the Mersey estuary.
From here, the brand-new canal would head north-east for 33 miles,
passing Frodsham to Runcorn until it reaches Barton.
Here, the ship canal would somehow have to cross the smaller,
but still important, Bridgewater Canal.
Finally, ships would sail the remaining three miles
to the brand-new port of Manchester with its nine docks.
The world had never seen anything like it.
Historian Liz McIvor is a recognised expert on the ship canal
and understands how it kick-started the feud
between Liverpool and Manchester.
The rivalry goes back quite a long way.
In the 1700s, really, Liverpool had the upper hand over Manchester
because it was where the gentlemen merchants were.
It was where all the money was being made, all the transactions.
Because, of course, it was a port
and that was how all the raw material that Manchester might use would come in.
So once Manchester started to grow in terms of large factories
and manufacture, there became almost a rivalry of class.
So what did they decide to do?
Well, they broke one monopoly by essentially creating another
and building the ship canal and building the port and docks.
Give me some sense of the scale and ambition of a project like this
in the 19th century.
The ship canal's been described by historians, certainly,
as the greatest feat of engineering in Victorian Britain.
It was creating a man-made waterway where none existed
and creating an inland port,
something that just couldn't have existed naturally
without a massive engineering project
that would involve not only huge amounts of workers,
but mechanical machinery for the first time.
The building of the Manchester Ship Canal
was a massive engineering endeavour,
the likes of which had never been attempted before.
Every great project has to start somewhere
and the first shovels hit the earth here
on the banks of the Mersey at Eastham.
If the canal was to be a success, they were going to have to build
a channel big enough to carry oceangoing ships 36 miles,
all the way to land locked Manchester.
The first big engineering challenge was to separate the canal
from the tidal waters of the Mersey estuary.
To do that, the engineers came up with the Eastham locks,
still the biggest in the United Kingdom.
The entrance to the Manchester Ship Canal is through these huge gates.
They weigh 300 tonnes each
and are built of demerara greenheart wood,
which is more durable than iron
and less liable to damage if hit by a ship.
When Edward Williams designed the ship canal
he had to deal with the problem that geographically
Manchester is 60 feet above sea level.
So, when a ship enters at Eastham locks, it's lifted 55 feet up
so it can make the journey safely to Manchester.
Edward Williams' plan was to dredge a channel
between a set of retaining walls.
It was back breaking work.
A team of around 12,000 Irish navvies
dug the canal almost entirely by hand.
To enable oceangoing cargo ships to sail directly to Manchester,
the channel had to be 120 feet wide and 28 feet deep
for the entire 36 miles.
For those watching its progress, it became known as the big ditch.
By the time the canal was finished, the navvies had excavated
around 40 million cubic metres of rock and earth.
For the first two years construction went according to plan.
But then Edward Williams died suddenly
and the project began to unravel.
The big ditch was scheduled for completion by 1891
but a terrible winter that year was the final straw
and the company formed to build the canal ran out of money.
It looked as if it might never be finished.
Almost bankrupt, the ship canal company
went cap in hand to Manchester Council
and was bailed out to the tune of £3 million.
That's a quarter of a billion pounds in today's money.
The build was back on, but before the canal could be completed
there was one giant engineering problem to overcome.
There are those that think that the Manchester Ship Canal
is the finest feat of engineering of the entire Victorian era.
If they're right, then this is the best of the best.
It's an aqueduct that carries an older canal over the ship canal.
And the astonishing thing is
it opens, water and all, to let the big ships through.
When the swing aqueduct is in this position,
it's linking both sides of the much smaller Bridgewater Canal.
It's now safe for barges to sail across the aqueduct,
which holds 800 tonnes of water.
But when an oceangoing ship sails along the Manchester Ship Canal,
then the aqueduct swings 90 degrees into the middle of the canal
to allow the larger vessels through.
It sounds complicated, but it's really quite simply marvellous.
The grade two listed swing aqueduct opened in 1894
and remains in regular use.
It's not only the first swinging aqueduct in the world,
it's the only one.
True testimony to the ingenuity
of the Victorian engineers of Manchester.
They solved a seemingly insoluble problem and they built it so well
it's still in use well over a century later.
After six long, hard and expensive years,
the people of Manchester had fought to build their ship canal
and finally, on the 1st of January 1894, it was opened.
The total cost was over £15 million.
And it made Manchester Britain's third busiest port,
despite the city being 36 miles from the sea.
Mancunians thought their future looked secure.
Now, they had a direct link to the rest of the world
and could finally bypass Liverpool docks.
When it opened, was there a big fanfare? There was.
There was a huge party, great decoration, bands,
lots and lots of well-dressed people.
Huge crowds of ordinary people as well,
partly here to see Queen Victoria,
who opened the ship canal officially.
And was all Manchester thumbing its nose at Liverpool?
In short, yes. At the beginning when the ship canal had first opened,
a lot of people who hadn't believed it could happen
were suddenly full of the joys of spring at the fact
that they had this fantastic engineering project
that was going to employ so many people.
Liverpool didn't take Manchester's challenge
to its supremacy lying down.
As soon as the ship canal opened many Manchester traders,
in an act of regional treachery, snubbed it because Liverpool docks
and the railway line dropped their prices drastically
to stop the canal becoming a success.
The Manchester Ship Canal was only in commercial operation for around 80 years,
so you could see it as maybe it wasn't that successful.
But if you look around now, this area has been redeveloped
and the ship canal is potentially going to be used in the future in different ways.
When you look at the ship canal now,
what does it tell you about the Victorians?
When I see it, I think of tenacity, I think of forward planning,
future thinking, being able to think about more than just the 10 years
in which it will make a difference to you and your business.
These are people who plan for their grandchildren
and great-grandchildren's prosperity,
and that's something that's quite hard to think about these days.
Manchester was now making more cotton
than the world had ever known.
Then along came the final piece in the cotton puzzle.
The sewing machine.
The change is like a nuclear weapon going off.
And it was going to change shopping forever.
Everything was on a bigger scale than anyone had ever seen before.
Manchester's mills had made the laborious process
of turning cotton into cloth a fast and highly efficient process.
Now, the economic impact of cotton started to ripple through society,
from rich to poor, affecting everyone's life.
Manchester's cotton revolution was about to spark a change
in the way we dressed and how we shopped.
The next step was to move down the process
and do the same thing for the mass manufacture of clothing.
In 1850, a simple dress shirt had to be sewn by hand,
14 hours or more of painstaking labour.
The pace of life was quickening up.
Those thrusting Victorians wanted something far faster than that.
I'm meeting Alex Askaroff,
an expert on the invention that would change the way
we dressed forever - the sewing machine.
Before the sewing machine,
since humans started to wear clothes,
they had to hand stitch everything.
And they would actually get two pieces of fabric,
animal skin or whatever,
and they would do this laborious stitching one after another.
And you would spend all day doing this.
Along comes the sewing machine.
How great is the change?
The change is like a nuclear weapon going off.
All of a sudden you've got a piece
of mechanised mass produced machinery
that takes this job and just turns it into this job.
And it makes it so easy, it's astonishing.
You know, I'm not skilled at this. This is what's doing it all.
It's not just a brilliant machine, it's a thing of beauty as well, isn't it?
Next door, if you want to see beautiful machines, let's go and have a look. OK. Lead on.
My goodness! Yeah.
It's just crammed with them. Hundreds of them.
Who invented the sewing machine?
The first known invention, 1790, British, Thomas Saint.
He put plans in at the Patent Office for a leather working type machine.
It took 60 years of refining Thomas Saint's original idea
before the American Singer company produced
a mass manufactured sewing machine in 1851.
In 1868, they turned to Britain once again
to build the world's biggest factory.
Glasgow was selected for its iron making industries, cheap labour
and because Singer's general manager, George McKenzie,
was of Scottish descent.
With nearly a million square feet of space and almost 7,000 employees,
it was possible to produce 13,000 machines a week.
Over the next 60 years, Glasgow produced over 36 million machines,
selling them all over the world.
Everyone could now get in on the cotton revolution
and it changed the way we dressed.
People just looked better. Everybody just looked better.
They made their clothes, they altered their clothes.
We were in a society where you could look as you wanted,
and that is an extraordinary thing.
Before the Victorian era, shopping wasn't the fun pastime it is today.
Shops where austere places - small, dark, poorly ventilated.
All the goods were kept in drawers or cupboards or under the counter.
Absolutely no browsing.
If you wanted to touch or even see the goods,
you needed permission from the shop's clerk.
Most goods didn't have prices on them.
One had to ask how much it cost, and then the haggling began.
But haggling was a little too common for the new Victorian middle-class.
They wanted a better way to spend their money.
Changes were afoot.
This is the Burlington Arcade in London's Piccadilly.
Perhaps the United Kingdom's first shopping mall.
It's a pedestrianised collection of small shops under a single roof
to protect the customers from rain.
And to this day,
it's still patrolled by the Burlington Arcade Beadles,
who still wear their traditional uniforms,
including top hats and frock coats.
Morning. Good morning.
Historian Michael Paterson has studied
how the Victorians' love for retail changed the way we shopped forever.
So, there were several things that created
the consumer climate of Victorians.
There was more disposable income than there had ever been.
Secondly, goods were manufactured more cheaply.
Thirdly, stuff was much better displayed.
The Victorians had plate glass and they had gas lighting.
The result was that window shopping became a widespread activity.
You could have a lot of fun just browsing the windows.
The shops themselves then became bigger
because everything the Victorians did
was on a bigger scale than anyone had ever seen before.
During the Victorian period, a new addition to the high street
was about to transform the simple shopping arcade
into something recognisable the world over.
The son of an East End grocer
decided to move the family firm up west
and expand the operation to start selling medicines,
perfumes, stationery, food and off the peg clothing.
His name was Charles Digby Harrod
and he gave us one of the first department stores.
What would Charles Digby Harrod think about our shops today?
The notion of a shop that is the size of a cathedral
or a railway terminus had never been seen before.
That was a Victorian innovation.
If a Victorian in a time machine came here,
they would recognise the names of half a dozen stores
that are still trading.
Here are some actual receipts from the 1890s.
William Whiteley, John Lewis, DH Evans.
We all know those names because they are still in business.
It's a fantastic commercial legacy.
As the Victorian consumer revolution gathered pace,
new department stores opened up and down the country
catering to the demand for new clothes
and anything else you could think of.
100 years on, cotton had all but gone from Manchester
and its last mills closed.
However, the story of Manchester and cotton still lives on.
I've come to Tower Mill, a Victorian mill building in the city centre,
to find out more about a new cotton revolution
built on Victorian foundations.
General manager Andy Ogden has created a state-of-the-art factory
inside a grade two listed Victorian mill.
we're the UK's only cotton spinning facility.
Started two years ago, a very new enterprise.
And what's your point of difference?
Well, we are the highest quality spinner in the world,
so we're taking the best of the raw materials from California,
spinning it into superfine yarn for the really high-end
luxury markets and the manufacturers that are still left in the UK.
What does cotton mean to you?
It's one of the most important things in my life.
I'm from this community.
When I grew up, there were 1,000 mills in my area.
To come back and actually bring back the original manufacturing process,
I'm very proud of that.
Extraordinary that Manchester,
which once produced 90% of the world's cotton,
should have lost it all.
And heart-warming, in a way, that cotton should be back.
Perhaps the spirit of those Victorian innovators is still around here
and being tapped into by a new breed of mill owner.
The Manchester of today has been profoundly shaped
by its Victorian cotton past.
Everywhere you look in the city you can see the legacy of cotton,
from huge mills like this to the Manchester Ship Canal
and the grand civic buildings which were paid for
by the money made from cotton.
The Victorian age was a period of profound change.
Almost every aspect of people's lives was transformed
during the 64 years of the Queen's reign.
And cotton was a key driver of that change.
It helped build the railways
which connected every corner of the country
and it built the huge factories that changed the way we lived
and the way we worked.
The cotton industry also had some surprising
and unexpected consequences.
It led to the creation of free public parks and libraries.
It changed the way we dressed
and turned us into a nation of shoppers.
Each and every Victorian, from the humble factory worker
to the greatest industrialist and engineer,
all played their part in forging the modern world we live in today.
Without the Victorians, the Britain we know and love would not exist.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media