In 1840, one man transformed travel in the British Isles.
His name was George Bradshaw
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later, I'm making a series of journeys
across the length and breadth of these isles
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
I'm at the halfway point of my journey from Portsmouth to Grimsby
and today, I'm going to linger in one of Britain's greatest ports -
London.
Our capital, my home city.
On today's journey,
I'll learn how volunteer Victorian firefighters liked a tipple.
To encourage people to come and help pump the fire engine,
insurance brigades would either take kegs of beer with them to a fire
or they would take beer tokens with them.
I'll discover how even 19th-century sewage pumps
were a celebration of design.
Open this valve here...
And I'll put in a shift at the oldest fish market in Britain.
It's getting boxed up. The man wants his fish today, not the weekend.
HE CHUCKLES
Using my Bradshaw's guide,
I began this journey on the Hampshire coast,
and have travelled up through Surrey to London.
I will then push north east to Cambridgeshire,
alighting finally in Grimsby, on the Humber Estuary.
The third leg of my journey starts in Victoria,
heads east to Southwark, on to Canary Wharf,
and finally, downstream to Abbey Wood.
On previous railway journeys to London, I've noted Bradshaw's view,
which reflected the Victorian outlook on our capital.
"London is the capital of the civilised world,
"the largest mass of human life, of arts, science, wealth, power,
"and architecture that exists.
"Our gigantic metropolis is enabled by the Thames
"to carry on a water communication with every part of the globe."
And, on this trip, I intend to focus on Old Father Thames.
Today's leg of my journey starts at Victoria Station,
which began in 1862 as two distinct sites -
one serving Kent and the other, Sussex.
In the early 1900s,
the brick and stone structures were beautifully rebuilt,
'and, in the 1920s, it became the single station that we know today.'
Victoria is my local station,
but I shed a tear every time I come here,
because the Victorian architecture has become so cluttered
with illuminated advertising hoardings and shopping centres
and what they need to do is sweep the lot away
and reveal the beauty of the original brick and stone.
Leaving the station behind, I'm taking a short stroll to the Thames
to visit one of the most imposing Victorian buildings
on the riverbank - Tate Britain,
a gallery containing the world's greatest collection of British art,
including works by Blake, Constable, Gainsborough, Stubbs and Turner.
But, according to my Bradshaw's, this site at Millbank
was once for those who'd had brushes with the law.
Archivist Krzysztof Cieszkowski should know more.
Hello, Krzysztof. Hello, Michael. Very pleased to meet you.
It's lovely to be back. Yes.
My Bradshaw's guide refers to a penitentiary being on this site.
Do you know anything about that?
Yes, it was variously called Millbank Prison and Millbank Penitentiary.
It was a prison for convicts who were being sent to Australia.
And what brought about a gallery on this site?
Well, there was no gallery of British art
in the way that there was, for example, in Paris.
It was only when Henry Tate, in 1889, offered his collection
of contemporary British art to the nation
that the idea started to become a reality.
Who was Henry Tate?
He was born in Lancashire,
he made his fortune, first of all, in the grocery business
then, in sugar refining.
This is the Tate that later became Tate and Lyle?
Yes, he was the most important sugar refiner
and he introduced the sugar cube to this country.
This is a volume of correspondence
relating to the opening of the gallery.
Here is a letter from the Queen's Secretary, Arthur Bigge,
thanking Henry Tate for the invitation and for an album
in which all the works in the Tate collection were reproduced.
They're wonderful documents.
Henry Tate offered his £75,000 collection to the nation,
but the press snobbishly complained
that "a mere sugar boiler should impose his taste."
So Tate spent £80,000 on building his own gallery,
which contained many works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
an art movement founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
William Holman Hunt
and John Everett Millais.
To create work that explored social, moral and political issues
in a way that was new and often shocking,
the Brotherhood took characters from literature and history
and paid homage to the perfect realism of their hero Raphael
by painting in the open air, directly from nature
and not in a studio from sketches.
Curator Alison Smith believes that their art relied on train travel.
Well, now you're bringing me towards a very famous picture -
Millais' Ophelia,
and you tell me this has something to do with the railways.
That's right, this is because the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
was formed exactly at the time
when the railway network was developing in and around London.
He worked on this for about five, six months,
from about July to November 1851.
This was a place called Cuddington, near Malden,
it's near Ewell, in Surrey.
And so, he would have travelled to Ewell
from either London Bridge or Waterloo.
It's slightly disillusioning telling me now that it was painted
near the suburban railway stations, of course, of the mid 19th century.
It wasn't exactly near the suburban railway stations.
He opted to stay in a rambling farmhouse called Worcester Park Farm
and from that, each day, he would walk about four miles to the site
and he, in fact, encountered lots of problems when he painted this.
He was once arrested for trespassing,
he was attacked by sheep and a bull...
But it was fundamentally important to him
to paint nature in nature, not to do it from sketches back in the studio.
Yes, the key point is that this was painted en plein air, in nature.
Are there other examples here of Pre-Raphaelites
who were using the train to get to nature?
We could look at Hunt, who worked in this area, in Ewell, with Millais.
We've got another painting by him produced the following year
which was Strayed Sheep, Our English Coasts,
which he painted near Hastings.
What's the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites?
The Pre-Raphaelites are probably the first modern art movement in Britain
in that they really wanted to break with the past
and the fact that British artists had been indebted to European old masters.
And they wanted to sort of paint in a new radical way
which really reflected modernity.
In Bradshaw's day,
one of the most efficient ways of navigating London was by river.
'He might have taken an elegant paddle steamer.
'I'm impressed by this state-of-the-art catamaran.'
I'm now using a Bradshaw's guide to London, dated 1862.
I'm on the boat that takes us from the Tate Britain
to the Tate Modern Galleries.
My Bradshaw's says, "For the sake of variety,
"we shall proceed to the journey by water,
"which, of a fine day, is not only the most agreeable,
"but furnishing an excellent opportunity
"of seeing the scenery of the Thames."
And to me, of course, the finest piece of scenery on the Thames
is the Houses of Parliament.
The river's popularity as a transport route
may have dwindled in modern times,
but, even on its choppiest days,
there are some who remain loyal.
Oh, hello.
HE CHUCKLES
Are you enjoying your trip on the river? Certainly am.
Would you say, as my Bradshaw's guide says,
that seeing London from the river is really the best way?
Lovely way, it really is, there's so much to see,
the history is there,
the way the town, city has developed over the years. It's all there.
Nowadays, we use the river so little.
Yeah, it's underused. I'm sure, yes.
We've also arrived at our destination,
so we better make sure we don't get left on.
You better get off.
THEY LAUGH
Thank you. Bye!
From Bankside Pier,
home of the magnificent Shakespeare's Globe Theatre,
I'm heading inland to Southwark
to visit a place that was highly significant
for the safety of Victorian Londoners.
My Bradshaw's guide is very concerned about fire in London.
"Sometimes, as many as five or six occur in one night.
"To guard against the loss of life,
"the Royal Society For The Preservation Of Life From Fire
"have been most active in establishing stations,
"where fire escapes, with conductors,
"are ready to be called upon the first alarm.
"No society more rigidly deserves encouragement."
It's extraordinary to think
that our capital city had no publicly funded fire brigade.
With its origins dating back to 1828,
The Royal Society For The Preservation Of Life From Fire
placed mobile fire escape ladders on street corners at night.
'I'm hoping Jane Rugg, Curator of The London Fire Brigade Museum,
'can tell me who was actually fighting fires
'in London at the time.'
Hello! Hello, there. I'm Michael. I'm Jane, nice to meet you. Very good to see you. Come on in.
So when my Bradshaw's guides were written,
at the beginning of the 1860s,
what sort of fire provision was there in London?
We didn't have a public service until 1866,
so, before that time, you would have had insurance brigades
that made up the London Fire Engine Establishment,
so just like house insurance today,
you insured your property and then, if your house was on fire,
the insurance would send their fire brigade
and they would come along to put the fire out for you.
And obviously, it wasn't a fair system,
not everybody could afford to have the fire brigades,
it was not as a public service is now.
The 1666 Great Fire Of London,
which started in a baker's shop in the aptly named Pudding Lane,
destroying over 13,000 homes, is well remembered in history.
Less well known is that, almost two centuries later,
the 1861 Tooley Street Fire was a catalyst
to the formation of a publicly funded brigade.
Firefighters from all over the country attended the blaze,
but couldn't cope with an inferno that started in a warehouse,
and burnt for two weeks.
Five years later, The Metropolitan Fire Brigade was formed.
Chief Officer, Captain Sir Eyre Massey Shaw,
inherited the insurance brigade's equipment.
You have wonderful machines here, what is this one?
This is an example of a manual pump inherited by the public service.
The arms open out, all the way out,
and then, the other one comes out the other way,
and you'd have ten people on this side, ten on the other
and you would pump up and down
working the pistons inside to push the water out.
But you can only pump for five minutes before you're too exhausted
and you need to swap with somebody else.
I'm not surprised, I felt exhausted just standing there.
To encourage people walking past to come and help pump the fire engine,
the insurance brigades would either take kegs of beer with them to a fire
or they would take beer tokens with them,
so you can see an example of a beer token.
You would be given it once you'd helped pump,
and then, you could go to your local public house
and exchange it for a drink.
And they did that because, as you can imagine,
with kegs of beer at a fire,
people were more interested in drinking the beer
than they were in pumping the fire engine.
So did they have lots of drunken volunteers?
They could have done, yes, there was the potential, so that's why...
Sometimes, they would take cash with them to a fire,
but, in the end, the pumping tokens seemed to work the best.
So what else can you show me?
This is an example of a steam fire engine,
so we moved from the manual pumps to using steam,
mainly when we had a public service.
And that would be under Captain Shaw then, would it?
It would indeed. Yes, he was the chief officer
that really wanted the new technology.
He also introduced a new uniform into the fire brigade,
so he introduced a woollen tunic,
and this is a replica of a tunic worn at the time,
so you can get an idea of how heavy it would have been
and what the fire fighters had to wear when they went into an incident.
It is very heavy. I imagine if this was soaked with water,
it would be quite an impractical garment.
Yeah, the water helped to protect them when it was wet,
but they also made sure that it didn't have hems
so that the water could run off the jacket
to try and keep it a bit lighter.
In addition, they also introduced new helmets into the brigade.
So again, this is a replica, but it gives you an idea
of the brass helmets that would have been worn at the time.
Take me to my hose.
I'm keen to find out how things have changed since Massey Shaw's day.
Southwark is also where the brigade trains new recruits.
Assistant Commissioner Dany Cotton assures me
that beer tokens no longer feature in the curriculum.
At what stage of their development are these trainee firefighters now?
They've been here about eight weeks now,
so they're about half way through their initial basic training, which lasts 17 weeks.
And what's the exercise we're watching now?
What do they have to do?
This is demonstrating that they are able to use hoses
in combination with ladders,
so it's a simulation of a fire in a three-storey building.
Do you remember your training? Oh, vividly.
It was... It took place here in 1988.
It was quite different.
It involved a lot of marching, a lot of saluting,
a lot more shiny shoes and shouting and running,
but it was a lot more basic.
But now, the fire-fighting role is so much more complicated.
Why?
Well, technology advances, mainly.
Cars, for instance, were very basic. If you went to cut a car up,
you could cut it anywhere, it didn't matter.
Now, cars have got so many different systems in them to protect us,
air bags and things, that you need the training for that.
Then, you've got things like terrorist risk, chemicals...
You're no longer squirting hoses yourself?
No, sadly not, I did that for a number of years.
I now point at people and tell them to squirt hoses.
What's the proportion of women now in the London Fire Brigade?
Still it seems a relatively low number,
we've got nearly 350 women out of nearly 6,000 firefighters.
And there's no reason why a woman couldn't fight a fire as well as a man these days?
Absolutely not. Best job in the world. I would recommend it to anyone.
I've loved every minute of my 24 years.
In an area where old London meets new,
I'm heading back towards the river through Borough Market,
whose traders have sold food and supplies since the 11th century,
to my final destination of the day.
The George Inn also has a long past,
which historian Pete Brown has investigated.
Pete, hello. Hello. Great to see you. And you.
My Bradshaw's guide to London says,
"The old inns in The Borough, with their wide rambling staircases
"and wooden galleries round the inn yards,
"are pleasant reminiscences of ancient days
"of coach and wagon traffic."
Absolutely, yeah. I'm amazed to find it so brilliantly preserved, here at The George.
This really is an amazing survivor from a previous age.
We're on Borough High Street,
which used to be the main thoroughfare into London
from the south east and from the continent.
London Bridge, just up the road, was the only bridge across the Thames until 1750.
And it was this huge bottle neck.
Everything came here and had to stay here
and so, these inns cropped up all down the street,
there were 20 at one time and this is the last survivor.
Strangely, it's actually the railways that killed off places like this.
Anything in the way of that railway line just disappeared, it was obliterated.
When you look at maps of Southwark from before and after that happened,
it's like a child with a felt-tip pen just kind of came in and just scribbled these lines across it,
completely transforming the geography of the place.
How do you account for the unique survival of The George?
Partly, it's because the Great North Railway Company bought it, demolished a lot of it
and kept some of it for office space and partly, it's because, at that time, the landlady was this lady,
Agnes Murray, who was this formidable woman.
She basically appropriated the mythology of all of Southwark's coaching inns
and sort of centred it here.
So, on this side, for example, stood The White Hart
and The White Hart played a pivotal role in Dickens' first novel,
Pickwick Papers, this is where Mr Pickwick meets Sam Weller.
And Agnes Murray basically said, "Well, no, that happened here,
"Dickens might have said The White Hart, but he meant The George."
And she would show people the bedroom where this meeting supposedly took place
and she'd show the table where Dickens supposedly sat
and kind of built up this mythology around the place.
And does the pub still have a warm hearth and warm beer?
It's got a warm hearth and pleasantly cool beer. Let's go in.
'With an early start tomorrow, it's just one for the road.'
Well, Pete, cheers. Cheers.
A delightful way to end the day. Absolutely.
I'm up too early to catch the Jubilee tube line
or the Docklands Light Railway to Canary Wharf,
because to get the full flavour of my next destination,
Billingsgate Fish Market, requires a pre-dawn start.
My Bradshaw's guide says
"Billingsgate, situated chiefly at the back
"of that cluster of buildings by the Custom House
"has been, since the days of William III,
"the most famous fish market in Europe."
In Bradshaw's day, the fish used to arrive by train.
Now, they come mainly by lorry
and the market has been relocated to Canary Wharf.
But here, at five in the morning, it has lost none of its bustle
and the change of location has made Billingsgate no less famous.
Billingsgate became synonymous with fish
when a 1699 Act of Parliament made it "a free and open market
"for all sorts of fish whatsoever."
Originally situated on the river adjacent to London Bridge,
the market was supplied by boat,
but the coming of the railways revolutionised the fishing industry
and, as it satisfied the new demand for affordable fresh product,
ports like Grimsby boomed.
Billingsgate customers are still buying the freshest fish possible
at a price that suits them.
Excuse me, I see you are buying fish this early in the morning,
are you in the business or are you buying it for yourself?
No, it's for my personal use.
Do you do that a lot? Yes, very often, it's good value.
You come down here at five in the morning and buy your fish?
Absolutely, great value for money. Are you looking for anything special in the fish line?
Well, I tend to look for sea bream... Sea bream.
..which is extremely good value, and salmon as well.
How do you cook your sea bream?
First of all, I prepare the sauce,
and then, put the sea bream on top,
and then cook it for about five, ten minutes to steam it.
It sounds absolutely fantastic. Beautiful, Caribbean style.
You enjoy that, mouthwatering. Thank you.
Most orders placed here are wholesale.
At busy times, the larger firms
can sell up to two tonnes of fish each morning.
Mark Morris works for the market's longest-established family business
and he's offered to show me the basics.
Has your family been in the business a while?
We're the fourth generation, we go back to the early 1900s.
My great-grandfather founded the business.
We bring our fish in from all over the UK, all over Europe.
We've got pollock and coley there, mackerel.
Beautiful mackerel there.
If you'll have a feel on that and a pinch on that.
Oh, beautiful fish.
And if you turn it upside down, open up its gills,
you see the lovely, thick, rich red rug colour in there.
That's what we're looking for - bright-eyed, nice and firm.
Lovely hake here. We pick it up by the eye,
because if you can see the teeth, they're absolutely razor sharp,
we don't want to be getting our fingers caught in there.
Thumb and forefinger...
So thumb in one eye, forefinger in the other.
And lift it straight up.
Oh, there we go! That's a nice, safe way of picking up a hake.
So I'm avoiding these sharp teeth,
I'm avoiding the sharpness round the gills.
And it's a rather yucky feeling
sticking your fingers in the eyes of a hake.
Having got a handle on his fish, I'm set to work.
Michael, I need two hake, please.
It's getting boxed up. The man wants his fish today, not the weekend.
HE CHUCKLES
Michael, we need a headless cod there now please. Headless cod.
One of those large headless cod, please.
3.88 of headless cod. Thank you.
And two salmon fillets, as well, please.
No, no, fillets, Michael. Michael, the fillets, please.
Thank you. Yes, of course, fillets.
Yeah, I do apologise. New boy on the firm today.
Oh, it's got to go on the weighing machine first.
3.46 of salmon fillet!
Thank you, Michael. We'll make a salesman out of you yet, sir.
OK, lovely. Thank you very much.
Yeah, sorry about the delay. Thank you. Bye-bye.
HE LAUGHS
Lovely, Michael, great job. Well done, sir, thank you very much.
Oh, dear. I don't think I could get used to this.
What I could get used to is travelling on Old Father Thames.
I'm heading east to Abbey Wood,
and my route takes me past
one of the most famous of all London landmarks.
My Bradshaw's London guide says,
"Greenwich presents a striking appearance from the river,
"it's hospital forming one of the most prominent attractions of the place."
I've always loved Greenwich, its wonderful architecture,
its spacious buildings,
its association with one of my heroes, Horatio Nelson.
And now that the Cutty Sark has been restored, it is complete again.
'I marvel at the river's wonderful views of London landmarks,
'old and new,'
but one should always remember
that the river is a potent force to be reckoned with.
In Bradshaw's day, and indeed until quite recently,
the Thames posed a mighty danger of flooding
and the erection of the Thames Barrier has much reduced that risk.
In Bradshaw's day, there was another peril from the Thames as well -
the water was filthy.
The final destination of this leg of my journey
lies six miles further downstream at Abbey Wood.
The Crossness Pumping Station was opened in 1865
as an essential element of one of the largest engineering projects
ever undertaken anywhere in the world.
Author Stephen Halliday should be able to tell me more.
Stephen, hello. Hello.
I've just travelled here on the river and it was very nice,
but I believe it was not always that pleasant on the Thames.
Indeed. The sewage of 2.5 million people was flowing into the River Thames
and, of course, the Thames is a tidal river, so it never went away.
Why hadn't that happened before?
Because, until about 1800, if you wanted to spend a penny,
you would go into the basement of your home,
you would do what you have to do in a cesspit,
which would be emptied at intervals by a night soil man,
who carted it away and sold it to farmers.
And what happened AFTER 1800?
The importation of guano from South America,
solidified bird droppings,
gave a better form of fertiliser.
But the real killer was the introduction of the water closet.
When you flushed, what you sent round the S-bend
was a very small quantity of potential fertilizer
and a huge volume of water,
so the cesspit filled up ten or 20 times as quickly
with liquid which people didn't want to buy and which leaked.
And they leaked into surrounding water courses,
wells, sources of drinking water,
and dysentery, cholera and typhoid started to spread throughout London.
That's the so-called Great Stink.
Indeed, in the summer of 1858,
you would not have wanted to be on the river at all.
After the 1853 cholera outbreak had claimed over 10,000 lives
and the hot summer of 1858 created the Great Stink,
action was finally taken.
As chief engineer to London's Metropolitan Board Of Works,
Joseph Bazalgette oversaw the building of 82 miles of mains sewers
under the streets of London,
which intercepted existing sewers
and despatched the capital's human waste out to sea
via two steam-powered pumping stations like Crossness.
It's currently undergoing restoration.
It's absolutely glorious,
it's as highly decorated as the House of Commons.
Yes, for a sewage-pumping station, they didn't stint, did they?
What a fantastic restoration. Hello, I'm Michael.
I'm Mike Jones. So when was the pumping station restored?
Well, we're still restoring it,
but I suppose the trust really started around 1988.
It was, in fact, scheduled for demolition for quite a while
and wasn't demolished because the engines are so large,
so it's very fortunate that it's still here.
And I think people would be amazed, overwhelmed
that the Victorians decorated a pumping station like this.
I think it's a reflection of the Victorian pride
in what they were doing.
And I believe one of the engines actually works.
That's true, Prince Consort has been in steam since 2003.
And if you'd like to, you can start it.
I would love to, it'd be a privilege.
Crossness has four gigantic steam engines,
each boasting 47-ton beams
and 52-ton flywheels.
We normally blow the whistle before we start the engine,
give it a long blast.
WHISTLE
Open this valve here...
My Bradshaw's guide is right -
the best way to see London is by boat.
From the Tate Gallery,
past the Houses of Parliament to Billingsgate Fish Market,
the Thames was London's highway to the world.
But when, during the Great Stink,
it began to carry more sewage than exports,
those magnificent Victorians engineered a solution
on a grand scale, as usual.
On the next leg of my journey,
I'll discover how derelict Victorian London
is being rejuvenated to its former glory.
This is to be called Granary Square
and will be bigger than Trafalgar Square. Amazing.
I'll put in a shift at a Cambridgeshire brick factory
that helped to rebuild post-war London.
Hey, new boy! Come and have a go!
Always one for a challenge.
And I'll meet a brick-built immigrant community.
THEY SING
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd