The secrets of the past are all around us,
hidden in our streets, buried under our feet,
and, in this series, I'll be uncovering those secrets
as I explore Britain's most historic towns.
I'll decipher physical clues...
Look at that. It's covered with lizard-like scales.
...and get to know some extraordinary characters
who are often overlooked.
He operated like a spy master.
They lied, they deceived, they cheated.
With the help of Ben Robinson's eye in the sky,
I'll discover which towns across the UK
reveal the most about each period in British history
and find out how those stories still resonate today.
3,880.
More and more individuals are still dying from the plague.
SHE GROANS
Oh, my goodness.
From the adventurous Elizabethans,
to the elegant Georgians,
from medieval knights through to the height of empire,
I'll tell the story of an era through the story of a single town.
Today, I'm in a town that was the white-hot centre
of Britain's steam-driven industrial revolution.
Whoa!
A town whose boom was fuelled by the transatlantic slave trade
and its workforce by the commodities of empire.
Tea and sugar gave them the energy to keep forging forward,
that's what really kept the industrial revolution going.
A place where colossal public works alleviated the misery
of a new and desperate class of urban poor.
92% of those who lived in one-room houses had to share a privy.
Not a flushing toilet, just a bucket.
And where revolutionary leaps in engineering
brought magnificent architecture,
vast wealth and the confidence to take on the world.
On the eve of the First World War,
18% of all ships launched in the world
that year were launched on the Clyde.
That is astonishing.
If you really want to understand how the explosion
of steam power transformed Britain forever,
Glasgow is the place to come.
Glasgow has always struck me as European,
a place with a vision that goes far beyond the British Isles.
It's Scotland's largest and most ethnically diverse city,
home to two of the world's top universities.
There's lavish architecture here, alongside dense urban sprawl.
Music and enterprise, the fine arts and media thrive in this city
beside the River Clyde.
But you don't have to look far for clues of a time
when Glasgow was one of the most powerful
industrial centres on Earth.
It was a manufacturing heyday that lasted long into the 20th century.
I'm concentrating on a period of revolutionary
innovation and vast expansion
that began around 1850 and lasted until the 1930s.
This was Glasgow's age of steam,
when it became world-famous for its ships and trains,
earning the titles "the second city"
and "the workshop of the British Empire."
The first steam-powered industrial revolution
lasts from around 1760 through to 1840,
with a subsequent wave of development,
with steel production, chemical production and ship building
transforming many of Britain's cities.
There's a shift from a largely agricultural economy
to an industrial one, based in cities,
with a huge growth of urban population.
Nowhere was the pace of change felt more keenly than in this city.
But, of course, it's not the start of Glasgow's story.
Evidence shows the present site of Glasgow on a natural,
shallow crossing point on the River Clyde
has been settled since pre-historic times.
The Romans made camp here
and the deep physical roots of the city we know today
can be traced back to the 6th century.
Over the centuries, Glasgow grew in size and importance
and, by the mid-1700s, business was booming.
The economy was dominated by products
pouring in from Britain's expanding empire -
tea, tobacco, sugar -
and this means that Glasgow's success
is inextricably linked to the slave trade
because that provided the workforce.
Enslaved Africans on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas.
Glasgow, like many other British cities of empire,
like London, Liverpool and Bristol,
is now facing up to this difficult period in its past,
this shameful period.
When it came to exploiting the spoils of empire,
Glasgow found itself at a distinct disadvantage.
To find out why, aerial archaeologist Ben Robinson
is taking his drone 20 miles from Glasgow,
to the point where the River Clyde begins to open out into the sea.
It's a gorgeous day and I've got spectacular view
right down the River Clyde.
I'm looking out towards the Firth of Clyde,
it's just round that corner there,
and, if you sail out there, past the Isle of Arran,
around Ireland, suddenly, you're trading with the new world,
you're out into the Atlantic.
Tobacco, all sorts of stuff was coming in
from the new world and landing here,
at Port Glasgow, because this was the premier port on the Clyde.
Right back into the 17th century,
this was where all the action was happening,
not further down the river at Glasgow at all.
I can just see now, yeah. If you pan... Now, yeah, yeah.
I'm looking inland and this settlement
was laid out on a grid plan in the 17th century.
There's still a bit of ship building and ship fitting out
going on here as well, but, as we look round,
there was a problem.
Large ships couldn't get down the Clyde as far as Glasgow.
The Clyde looks wide and mighty, but it's full of shallows,
sandbanks, and that meant that the cargoes had to be taken off here
and hauled over land with carts.
If Glasgow was to grow and prosper,
something had to be done to the Clyde.
And something was most certainly done, and done on an enormous scale.
I've come to what's now a beautiful salt marsh nature reserve,
just 15 miles from the centre of Glasgow.
Today, it's a second home to migratory birds
who've crossed the Atlantic for the muddy banks of the Clyde.
Locally, it retains an unusual name
that links it right back to the heroic foundation of Glasgow's
rise to wealth and worldwide recognition.
It's called Newshot Island graveyard.
I've come here to meet coastal archaeologist Ellie Graham.
There are lots of remains of boats around here.
We've just walked over a couple of old carcasses of boats back there.
What are we actually looking at?
It's where there's the last known survivors of the dredging fleet
that in the 19th and 20th centuries worked to deepen the Clyde.
So, the Clyde really needed to be dredged to get ships into Glasgow,
but who was funding that?
There was a huge amount of impetus from the wealthy merchants
who were trading with the colonies in the 18th century,
who were bringing in tobacco and sugan
so slavery products, essentially, but money was the driver to improve
the navigability of the river so they could get their ships up here,
really allowed trade to flow.
How shallow was it?
It was incredibly shallow in its natural state.
The engineer James Watt actually did a survey
before any deepening work was carried out
and his work recorded depths of as little as
15 to 18 inches at low water.
So, James Watt did this survey,
but presumably also his invention of steam engines,
that would have helped things along.
I mean, his invention of the condensation cylinder
obviously massively improved steam engines.
Is this a steamboat? It's got a stack there.
Um, this is not one of the steam dredgers.
This is the remains of a diving bell barge.
So, essentially, a diving bell is just an open-bottomed box,
and it had a pumped air supply,
and, essentially, just through displacement,
it created a bubble of air and a workable environment underwater.
So, we're standing here in the chamber
that the diving bell would have sat in
and then descended down to the riverbed?
Absolutely, so there would have been two workers in here,
initially, with picks and shovels to hack away
at the hard, rocky areas of the riverbed,
and it was all operated from this support vessel.
It was constructed in 1851 and, as far as we know,
it's a completely unique survivor -
the oldest dive support vessel that we know of anywhere.
Part of that story is this work that was done by hand,
it sounds like a brutaljob to have done,
to have gone down in these diving bells, to hack away at the riverbed.
So, we do have records of some really quite...
...quite nasty accidents.
We talk almost in heroic terms of Victorian ingenuity
and moulding nature to human will
and that kind of underpinning the success of Glasgow as a city,