Between the wars, a Bradshaw's was an essential guide
during a golden age of rail travel, when glamorous locomotives
travelled at world-record speed.
I'm using a 1930s edition to explore a discernibly modern era
of mass consumption...
Bravo!
..when Art Deco cinemas and dancehalls entertained millions,
while industrial Britain was thrown into unemployment and poverty,
and storm clouds gathered across the Channel.
My rail journey resumes in Suffolk, the county that inspired
distinctive operatic music that could only come from Britain.
I'll examine influences from Italy and France,
as I cross Norfolk and enter the United Kingdom city
that's closest to Germany.
I'm exploring the east of England.
I started in Kent and visited the suburbs and Docklands of London
and the county of Essex.
I'll visit the cities and towns
of East Anglia,
and finish in Lincolnshire.
On this leg, I'll start
in Saxmundham in Suffolk,
before reaching the coastal resort of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk.
I'll venture inland to the city of Norwich,
the historic regional capital of East Anglia.
Along the way, I'll experience 1930s seaside kitsch...
Do we know why they hit on the Venetian theme?
I think it was typically Yarmouth.
..put my heart and soul into shoemaking...
I think I might try a different tack.
..and meet one of the luckiest lord mayors in England...
Does your mind ever wander for a moment to the splendour
of the architecture?
Yes, and every time I walk into the building, quite frankly,
I have to pinch myself that I am sitting in that chair.
I've alighted at Saxmundham, a small market town a few miles
from the Suffolk coast.
It's the closest station to Snape Maltings.
Situated on the River Alde, the former malt house is surrounded
by marshland and golden reedbeds.
In the year that my guidebook was published, it was a hive
of industry, centred on the malting barley.
The following year, it became home to one of Britain's
greatest composers.
Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft in Suffolk in 1913
and moved to the Old Mill here in Snape in 1937,
before settling in nearby Aldeburgh in 1947 for the rest of his life,
where - according to Bradshaw's - he could enjoy "bracing breezes
"in a quiet little town".
He wrote of Suffolk, "The county is grand. None in England like it.
"I feel I'm infinitely wise in choosing this place."
In truth, it had first chosen him.
I'm visiting the maltings, where 17-year-old Olivia Ransome
studies during her school holidays.
MUSIC: Sailing, from Holiday Diary by Benjamin Britten
Olivia, I'm Michael. Nice to meet you.
Tell me what you were playing.
So this is the second movement, Sailing, from Britten's suite
Holiday Diary, for solo piano.
When you play it, does it bring any images into your mind?
Well, certainly the image of the sea.
I mean, Britten lived by the sea, by the coast,
for a large portion of his life, and I think that really comes through.
There's never any sort of sense of threat from the sea.
It very much feels a friend of Britten's, I think, in this piece.
Benjamin Britten was a renowned pianist.
Are you tempted to compose yourself?
Yeah, I am, actually.
I'm a composer-pianist, a little like Britten.
And I think, certainly being here, his compositional process and taking
inspiration from the amazing scenery and that sort of thing
certainly is a huge inspiration.
In 1930, Britten, aged 16, won a scholarship to the Royal College
of Music, and left Suffolk for London.
In the early stages of his professional career,
he wrote music for television and films.
But he always longed to move back home.
David Edwards is an historian of Snape Maltings, and Roger Wright
is its chief executive.
David, Benjamin Britten came to Snape in, I think, 1937.
What's going on in his life by then?
Well, he's graduated from the Royal College of Music, and
he's already, at the age of 23, becoming quite well-known.
He's had some works broadcast on the BBC.
His parents have died, he's been left with a small legacy,
and he spends a weekend in Suffolk looking for somewhere to live.
And he comes across this old mill in Snape and thinks that
that will make a good home.
So he buys it in 1937.
And what can he see from the windows?
He sees Snape Maltings.
Also in 1937, Britten met singer Peter Pears,
who became his professional collaborator and life partner.
After working in the United States, Britten moved back to Suffolk
with Pears and composed some of his most famous works,
including the opera Peter Grimes,
inspired by a grim story concerning an Aldeburgh fisherman.
Then, in 1948, I think, he starts the Aldeburgh Festival.
Now, this strikes me as extraordinary because he's still
a very young man.
It really came about because he and his colleagues, Peter Pears
and Eric Crozier, were abroad at the time, and Peter Pears
famously said, you know, "Why are we having to go on the road
"all the time? Why can't we create a festival of our own?"
They were able to set something up pretty quickly,
using the Jubilee Hall and other places within Aldeburgh as the base
for the first festival in 1948.
And what about this building, the maltings at Snape?
Tell me what they did with it.
The Aldeburgh Festival had felt that they were running out of steam
really in Aldeburgh, so they were on the lookout for larger premises.
In 1965, this building became available, and they came and looked
at it and they had this inspiration that if they knocked down
the internal walls and put a new roof on, they could create
somewhere for music to be presented.
The concert hall was opened in 1967 by Her Majesty the Queen,
but two years later fire struck the maltings and it had to be rebuilt.
Since reopening in 1970, it's grown and is now an internationally
recognised music and arts complex.
Roger, do you feel a great responsibility here today to try and
fulfil some sort of dream that Pears and Benjamin had together?
The vision of Britten, that sense of this place being a place
for international music performance, a place to train young musicians,
a centre in which music is developed in a way which shows what music
can do for the common good, those are all parts of Britten's vision.
But I think what's happening now is that we're making them fit
for our times.
I'm leaving Suffolk for neighbouring Norfolk,
and its largest coastal town.
"No seaside resort," says Bradshaw's,
"more actively concerns itself in providing accommodation,
"amusements and attractions for its many visitors
"than Great Yarmouth.
"Abounding gaiety characterises the holiday season here."
It's true that the town has worked hard to renew its charms.
In the 1930s, tourists were enjoying a new feature which evoked
the city of the Rialto and the gondolier.
Great Yarmouth, with its seafront, theme parks and
glittering amusement arcades, seems a far cry from
the Queen of the Adriatic.
But on reclaimed land between the beach and the town is Yarmouth's
own little Venice.
After falling into disrepair, the gardens of waterways
have recently been restored to evoke their 1930s glory.
Darren Barker is a conservation officer at
Great Yarmouth Borough Council.
What brought about these Venetian waterways in Great Yarmouth?
They were created as an unemployment relief programme for soldiers
returning from the First World War.
The criteria for employment was that you had to be married
and have at least one child.
And the purpose was to try and fill the gap of the fishing industry,
which had collapsed.
So the town had huge levels of unemployment.
I think that just before the park started in 1926, there were over
30,000 people on the unemployment register.
Fishermen couldn't actually claim the dole or register as unemployed
because of the piecemeal nature of their work,
so they were particularly badly affected by it.
But the focus wasn't just about employment.
It was also about the tourist industry.
The town was already a tourist hotspot,
but this really was aimed at prolonging the season,
adding new attractions.
Now, I imagine that these hotels and houses here were already here.
So what were they looking out on before?
It was just sand dunes.
But this was sort of the quiet, undeveloped part of Great Yarmouth.
In 1926, construction began on the boating lake,
followed by the Venetian-style water gardens,
and over 400 jobs were created.
The gardens opened in August 1928, with the Royal Horticultural Society
praising the bold move away from traditional seaside bedding.
ARCHIVE: ..winding in and out of these gorgeous gardens.
Oh, I've never seen anything so lovely.
Look!
Did it work as a job creation scheme?
It worked for the 20 or so weeks to create employment.
But then, post-completion, it led onto a number of other jobs.
There was a team of gardeners, there were activities down here.
And do you know why they hit on the Venetian theme?
I mean, we've got a kind of Rialto Bridge over there.
I think it was typically Yarmouth.
There were truly strange and bizarre things here.
We had classical pipe music, there was illuminations,
we had boats with carved figureheads of animals.
And was it quite successful in terms of tourism?
It was incredibly successful.
Its heyday was in the 1930s and '40s, and we would have thousands
of visitors, travelling mostly by rail, to Great Yarmouth,
many of them specifically just to see the waterways.
Unfortunately, throughout the 20th century,
that started to decline.
And so when we started the project a few years ago,
it was really just a very sterile park.
It was still in use, but it was a pale imitation
of what it had been.
The restoration of the Grade II listed waterways began in June 2018
and cost £2.7 million.
It was made possible by a very large grant from the National Lottery
and supported by hundreds of local volunteers, who bedded in thousands
of new plants in the borders.
Ian, permission to blunder in?
Hi. Certainly.
Ian Guest is head gardener.
Ah. So what are you up to?
I'm just giving the beds a bit of an autumn tidy-up,
of weeds, and chopping off some of the dead heads.
I happen to have a spare pair of secateurs there for you.
Thank you very much indeed.
That's it. Yeah. Down here?
No, if you take them down... Oh, all the way to the bottom.
So just above the leaf there.
That's fine.
Now, Ian, I understand you've been replanting.
Yes. In line with the original plan?
Almost, yeah.
I mean, a lot of the plants do reflect that, but there's also some
plants have been added and are a little bit different,
because obviously new species and genuses have come on the market
in the 100 years or so, nearly, since this has been
planted, originally.
Are you able to offer opportunities to apprentices
and maybe to people out of work, in line with the original scheme?
Yes, we do.
We've got young Harry over there who was recently taken on
as an apprentice, and he's working over there with
our regular volunteer, Claire.
Hello.
Claire, you're volunteering?
Yeah. You've been doing that for long?
Almost a year now.
And why? What do you get out of that?
As a child, I lived in Bedfordshire.
This was my holiday destination.
It was magical and beautiful and, moving here,
it had got into a right mess.
And soon as I found there was an opportunity to get in, help to
bring it back, get it better than it was, I was here.
And, Harry, you on the other hand, you're here as a professional?
Apprentice at most, yeah, for about two months or so.
Do you think you might be able to restore some of the magic
that Claire's been mentioning?
Oh, I definitely hope so.
It's one of the greatest gardens around I've seen.
Nice to see you both. Thank you so much.
Bye-bye now.
It may lack the romance of a stroll by the Grand Canal,
and there's not a gondola to be seen today, but I'm eager
to try a spot of boating.
Sculling about in this newly-restored boating lake is fun.
There must be people in Great Yarmouth, though,
who miss the old herring boats.
ANNOUNCEMENT: This train is for Norwich. We will be calling at...
Another day...
..and I'm continuing my journey towards the heart of East Anglia.
The Industrial Revolution dates back to about 1760.
In the years that followed, with ingenuity and new technology,
machinery was applied to an increasing range of products.
Shoes fell into step quite late.
Only in 1792 did a cordwainer spy the opportunities
for mass production.
By the time of my guidebook, shoe factories abounded in his city,
employing a good chunk of the population.
I'm approaching Norwich.
The historic city of Norwich
is centred on a 12th century Norman castle
and a magnificent cathedral,
with one of the tallest spires in England.
During the Middle Ages, 58 churches were built within the confines
of the city walls, financed by wealthy local merchants.
By the 14th century, Norwich was one of the most prosperous
commercial centres outside London.
These beautiful streets hint at Norwich's medieval wealth.
The fields around here were full of sheep
and the North Sea offered easy export markets.
And when wool declined,
the skills with a needle could be applied to shoemaking.
And so, the thread of industry was passed on.
By the time of my Bradshaw's, Norwich had reinvented itself
as the shoemaking capital of Britain.
One of the oldest footwear firms from the city
is Bowhill & Elliott, established in 1874.
Roger Jury owns the family business.
Roger, I'm Michael. Good morning.
Very good to see you.
Now, how big was shoemaking in Norwich at its peak?
It was probably the biggest industry in the area.
Norwich was one of the three main centres for shoemaking,
there's Northampton, Leicester and Norwich.
Norwich was more specialising in ladies' shoes.
And my theory around that is that...
In Norfolk, you've probably heard of the term wool churches?
Lots of big churches were built around the wool industry.
A by-product of the wool industry is sheepskin and sheep leather,
and they're more suitable for ladies' shoes,
as opposed to men's shoes,
which were generally made in Northampton.
In Norwich, should I be thinking about big shoe factories,
historically, or am I thinking about lots and lots of small ones?
Well, I think on their scale, they were big factories.
There was a huge number of people employed in the city at that time.
10,000 in the 1930s.
It may have been more than that at its peak.
After the First World War, the growth of the industry in Norwich
was fuelled by a change in women's fashions
and the increasing popularity of dancing.
Previously, skirts had been full length, but in the Roaring Twenties,
hemlines climbed, and shoes were on show.
The Louis heel, once designed for King Louis XIV of France,
became fashionable again.
Norwich factories did well by specialising in the production
of this popular design.
Is there anyone left in Norwich making footwear?
Yes. We make a product on the premises here,
and I'd love to show it to you. Thank you very much.
Follow me.
Satin lining, a quilt satin lining, so it's very, very comfortable.
And the soles are leather, with brass slugs in here,
so that when the heel wears, it wears nice and evenly.
So you can wear it in your house.
You don't get marks, nasty marks on the floor.
You can wear them with your tuxedo.
You can wear them for parties.
And, of course, on sleeper trains.
And on sleeper trains.
So, Michael, this is where we make our slippers.
Everything is made by hand.
So it's a hand-lasting process.
Oh, a last is the kind of mould.
The last is the mould, traditionally made of wood,
but these are made with plastic, they're more durable.
Although some of the lasts we've had here are over 60 years old.
So, we're going to get you to have a go at part of the process.
This is called seat lasting,
because we're lasting the back part the slipper.
And the idea is you have to pick a tack up with the pincers.
Yeah.
And then put it into the seat.
You have to pull the material tight.
Just picking up a tack is quite tricky. It is a skill.
Ah, I've got a tack. Where should I put that?
Put it in there, yes. You need to push the fabric over,
so it's tight. Push it in.
Hm, not as easy as it looks. No.
Traditionally, people used to keep tacks in their mouths,
but they're not allowed to do that any more.
Has this process changed much,
or has it lasted from generation to generation?
This is a very traditional way of making shoes.
But in a modern factory, this would be done by a machine.
And it would be done in...
..quicker than you can pick one tack up.
Fantastic. Now, we need about another ten in there.
I think I might try...
..a different tack. THEY LAUGH
"In the reign of Edward the Confessor," says my Bradshaw's,
"Norwich was one of the largest towns in the kingdom.
"The splendid cathedral possesses some of the most impressive
"Norman work in England. Antiquity abounds in this Old World city."
So, this might seem a strange place to come in search
of outstanding 20th century architecture.
But maybe because of the quality of its historic buildings,
the city of Norwich demanded excellence in design, too.
Norwich City Hall, which overlooks the famous covered market,
was opened in 1938.
It's one of the finest examples of British interwar architecture.
It's a privilege for me to be shown around the building
by the Lord Mayor of Norwich, Councillor Vaughan Thomas.
My Lord Mayor, what a magnificent council chamber. Yes.
I'm wondering, how did Norwich take the decision that it was going
to have a big new city hall in the 1930s?
Basically, the responsibilities for the local authorities had become
really quite immense. We needed more space, more office space,
and we were about ready for it.
But it was a long time coming,
from the early 1900s to when it was actually built in 19...
..or finished building it in 1938.
It was really quite controversial, not everybody wanted it.
And there was quite a few protests from quite distinguished people
who were against it. The design was pared back a little bit.
The original one had an angel on the top of the tower.
And somebody didn't even want the tower. But we eventually got there.
It strikes me as very bold of Norwich. I mean, Norwich is famous
for its cathedral and its castle, its ancient architecture,
its medieval streets. So bold to go for an Art Deco building.
Yes, it certainly was. It's about making a statement.
And also facilitating functioning local authority, the city council.
For the previous five centuries,
the city's administrative departments
were based at the medieval guildhall.
On the 29th of October, 1938,
the new Art Deco city hall was inaugurated by King George VI
and Queen Elizabeth, witnessed by large crowds.
Now, what strikes me - I've just taken a short walk through
the building - is that everything is perfect. So, the fenestration has
been maintained, these glass panels, the columns, the chandeliers.
Everything is in perfect condition.
Yes, it's a Grade II listed building, we can't touch it.
We wouldn't want to touch it.
And when you sit, as I imagine you do in that big chair there...
Yes. ..paying attention to the debate, of course.
Of course. But does your mind ever wander for a moment to the splendour
of the architecture? Yes, it certainly does.
And every time I walk into the building, quite frankly.
And I have to pinch myself that I am sitting in that chair!
I'm aware that Norwich was quite badly bombed during World War II.
Presumably, a building as big as this must have been hit?
No. We were very lucky. It was just like St Paul's.
It didn't get hit at all.
During the war, there was a rumour, a rumour that Hitler wanted
the city hall as his regional command centre. But the city itself
did suffer severely with bombing, I have to say.
Now, one thing I did notice...
..an incredibly long balcony on the facade of the building.
Yes. And I thought I might take a little promenade along there.
OK, yeah. We'll risk assess it first, of course!
Let's do that!
The building's exterior design
was influenced by the national romantic style,
popular in Scandinavia in the early 20th century,
and comparisons are often made with Stockholm's City Hall.
The balcony, stretching almost the entire length
of the front of the building, is 61 metres long.
Wow! I don't think I've ever seen a balcony like it.
No. It's one of the longest in Europe.
The market is, indeed, very, very beautiful. So colourful.
Yes. And it's quite controversial, actually,
when the city hall was being constructed,
there was a proposal to move it out of this area
during the construction phase.
But there was a fear, a doubt that it would never come back.
So there was protests and it stayed where it is today.
So there's a good dab of scepticism
in the Norwich population, you think?
Yes. I'm not the only doubting Thomas.
And having seen your wonderful balcony,
I think I might take a walk around down there. OK.
BELL CHIMES
May I intrude at this vital moment?
Can I just pop in here?
Hello. Hello, mate.
My name's Michael. Nice to meet you, Michael. Mark. Heather.
Hello, Heather.
So, playing backgammon in the market,
are you part of the market?
Yeah, I've got a stall over there.
That's my stall over there, look.
Oh, so you're rivals?
Friends. Yes.
Rivals and friends. Friends.
And you get together for backgammon? Yeah, we do.
When we're idling in the afternoons.
THEY LAUGH
Are you proud of your market?
Oh, ever so. We've just won a national award
as the best outdoor market in the country.
Country. Not just England. Country. So that's nice.
That's very nice. Yeah, very nice. Why do you think you won?
I think there's a good range of stalls on here now.
They're quite diverse. There's lot of street food.
And you get to see people playing backgammon.
I think you're about to win.
Hey! I think he is. Bye.
When ships were the main form of transport,
East Anglia flourished.
Norwich was a major city.
Great Yarmouth had substantial medieval walls.
But the railways changed the terms of trade.
London became the hub
and Norfolk and Suffolk were left out on a limb.
Those counties have had to repeatedly reinvent themselves.
Shoes came to Norwich,
but then waned to be supplemented by financial services.
Great Yarmouth followed the changing tourist fashions.
Benjamin Britten, the Suffolk lad who never left,
bequeathed a cultural centre of global repute.
Next time, I'll open the floodgates...
Engineering on a big scale.
And I wouldn't want to raise that by hand, I don't think.
..I'll say "hi-de-hi" to the Redcoats...
You look great! Ta-rah!
..and witnessed the phenomenal power of a Typhoon.
The Typhoon has started its journey along the runway.
Within a few seconds, it is airborne!