I'm a Londoner born and bred.
Three generations of my family have lived
and worked alongside the Thames.
And I want to show you how today, it's even busier
and a bigger part of our lives than ever.
Don't move!
It's very difficult to interview you while I'm counting.
How many have you got in there now? God knows.
My journey will take me to its furthest reaches,
from the Cotswolds in the west...
Cor, some size quarry, isn't it?
...to where the river meets the sea in the east.
They're all laughing over that side.
Keep a straight face! I'm doing me best.
I'll meet people whose working lives depend on the Thames
and who feel as passionately about it as I do.
We love our Thames. We're so lucky.
Best job in the world, Tone. Well, apart from yours, obviously.
I'll go behind the scenes of its most iconic landmarks...
Oh, wow. Bang!
...and discover its hidden gems.
They do look sci-fi, don't they?
This is the River Thames as you've never seen it before...
...hectic, hardworking, breathtaking, awe-inspiring.
I can't wait!
I want to show how the Thames is a vital artery, putting food and drink
on our tables day after day, just as it's done for thousands of years.
My first port of call is a place where food
arrives from all over the world.
It's the Thames' newest container port. It's also the biggest.
This place isn't just big, it's massive.
And all the things associated with it are absolutely ginormous.
This is London Gateway on the Thames in Essex, where the
river widens to meet the sea.
It opened in 2013
and can handle the largest container ships in the world,
giants packed with everything from
flat-screen TVs to our fruit and veg.
ALARM BLARES Now, I'm used to clocks being
smoky and busy
and, yeah, noisy.
But there's only one noise here, and that's warning you that
another of these great mega lifts is going to move slowly towards you.
How does anyone get their head round this landscape of technology?
Andrew Bowen should know. He's in charge.
This site is ridiculously big, isn't it? It is an amazing site,
165 hectares of land, of which 100 was reclaimed from the Thames.
So all this land that we're currently on is reclaimed?
It's all reclaimed. If you got your car here with your sat nav,
if it wasn't updated, it would show you driving in the river.
Well, that's crazy, isn't it?
And the funny thing about it, to me, is that nobody knows about it.
You know, I'm a Londoner, I know Essex so well.
I didn't know it existed.
Cos, yeah, people don't go through ports.
This is the Thames' big secret, isn't it? It is.
Today, almost half of all our food arrives from overseas,
so this hidden hive of activity is a vital link to the world.
I'm off to explore it,
and team leader John Smethwick will make sure I don't get lost...
...or squashed.
These cranes are as high as the London Eye.
Do you want to take the lift or walk all the way? Walk all the way!
Walk all the way? Let's go.
I have this intermittent fear of heights. Oh, really?
VOICEOVER: Yes, really.
I've made it to the first platform, and, for me, that's a major triumph.
These cranes are very impressive, aren't they?
The longer these ships are in port, the less profit they make,
so the goal, get them in and out in just 12 hours -
pretty impressive when you realise most of them
hold about 13,000 containers.
We're moving! Look!
Why are we moving? We've picked up our new containers
and we're now moving onto our next bay to start our work over there.
Just moving to the end of this bay? Just to the end of this one here.
Phew! You might feel a little judder.
Now he tells me...
Whoo, I went a bit funny then.
The engineering that goes into these cranes is amazing,
to realise what you are actually lifting and how you're able to get
it there and the speed and accuracy, as well. But we're still relying on
the eye and the brain of the bloke in the cab. Exactly, that's it.
Actually, she's not a bloke. She's Emily.
Apparently, she took one look at these cranes
and said, "l want to be up there."
And if I want to meet her, I need to go up there too. Oh, heck...
I'm 177 feet up in the air,
and heights is just about my worst ever thing.
But you see I'm pretty relaxed. My hand is just lightly on this rail.
What you probably can't see is that my knuckles are white
and my legs are shaking.
Emily, when you first started,
did you get a bit of a wobble occasionally? Yeah.
It is definitely a lot higher than I thought it was,
looking from the ground. That's the point!
Hold on to that point. That's why I'm so scared, yeah.
Looking up, it looks like it's easy. Yeah. I'm used to it now.
I've been doing it for nearly three years. I'm 24 now.
Are there many crane drivers here as young as you?
No, I am the youngest. Do you get ribbed for that?
Yeah! All the old boys are always telling me all the old tricks.
How many containers do you unload in a shift?
Average shift, probably between 280 to 350.
How long is each shift? It's a 12-hour shift.
Can I just compare my hand with your hand?
Mine's really wobbly, and yours is still and cool! Yeah.
Cut, please.
Bless you. Get him down as quick as possible.
I think I'll take it at my own steady pace, thank you.
Watching all this technology in action is like being hypnotised
by your microwave, but I think I'm getting the hang of what's going on.
So, ship comes in and, jonk, the containers, they
go down there on the quayside, and then these glorious Star Wars
machines with a guy driving them right at the top comes and picks
them up and puts them over here on this great long rib of containers.
From here, the port's high-tech automation swings into action,
moving boxes from quayside to landside.
60 automatic stacking cranes dance mesmerisingly up in the air,
sorting the yard's 50,000 containers, ready to ferry them
onto waiting trucks and trains.
And because they're automated, the cranes can operate in higher
winds and lower light, keeping this riverside port on the go.
I'd no idea the Thames was the stage
for such an epic, never-ending piece of choreography.
Talk about a world in motion!
And it's all here to deliver what we need when we need it.
Everything that goes on here is about managing time
and volume and safety, and it's virtually all done automatically.
But when the containers land here, that's not the end of their journey.
Now they set off into the UK,
and it's that part of their story I'm going to be looking at next.
It's very difficult to interview you while I'm counting.
How many have you got in there now? God knows.
I'm at London Gateway on the Thames Estuary in Essex.
It's one of the fastest-growing ports in the world
and a living illustration of the Thames in action,
bringing fruit and veg to us from all corners of the earth.
There are 30,000 containers piled up here, but what happens next?
How does the stuff inside them
get from the dockside into your supermarket?
Cos that's where most of it's headed.
Just 20 years ago, that process would have meant lorries
driving all the way to distribution centres deep inside the country
and then driving back to the supermarkets they supply.
But not any more.
At London Gateway, the sorting can be done right here.
In Bay 6C, Brad is expecting a container.
I love these little trucks.
But he's not driving a lorry. This is a terminal tractor.
What's your job called?
I'm a shunter, so I'm one of the shunters who moves the boxes around.
Brad the shunter. Yeah. And once that's on, what do you do with it?
Then we will go for a drive with it. Where do you go to?
You can't just go for a drive. We'll be going out of the terminal
and then over onto the logistics park.
Yes, this place has its own logistics park,
so many of these containers are emptied right here at the port,
saving thousands of road miles.
It's a vast complex on a scale like no other in Europe,
the size of 400 football pitches. Crikey, that's big!
Do you know what's in these containers? This one I know will be
fruit, but it could be anything.
I'm being let loose in one of the facilities at the logistics park.
Halo is a fruit and veg ripening and packing facility.
Operations director Wayne oversees all the work here,
from warehousing to quality control.
All right, where are we going first? We're going to head over to the
production line. Yeah. So, here, you'll see us packing some of the
fruit that you're going to see that's come in a container.
First we do a quality inspection.
That QC check will identify the defects for the guys to pull
out, and then either pulling it out for market or throwing it in the bin
as animal feed. And then it goes up there?
The conveyor belt whisks the fruit up to an overhead scale,
which then drops the desired weight into the netting machine.
That's a gorgeous machine. Thank you, Tony. Not you, that! Oh!
They get a heck of a lot of fruit out the door,
so I want to see how fast they have to work.
We put 22 in a box, Tony. So we've got to... 22? 22 in each box.
So you've always got to be counting.
You've got to be counting and check that each time
they have a label on... Oh, yeah, yeah. ..the net's good.
It's very difficult to interview you while I'm counting.
How many have you got in there now? God knows.
You've got to make sure there's 22. ..six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
How many do you reckon you do a day of these little bags?
We do about 120,000 nets per day.
Wow, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of fruit.
I started off as packing, as you are now, Tony. just this?
Yeah, absolutely. I've probably been in directorship for the past seven
years now. That's brilliant, isn't it? It's great. ls your mum
proud of you? Er, I'll ask her, Tony. I THINK that's 22.
No, you've got to make sure these ones don't go in.
They've got to go into the other tray. Oh, right.
They have to go into the grey box down here as a reject.
I guess I'd better stick to the day job.
I think that's 20, 21, 22.
Can I give this one one extra, just in case I've undercounted?
No, I think that'll probably upset
my importer, if I do that and give their fruit away. Oh, all right.
I think we need to take you off this line now and put this lady back.
22 or 23. No, it needs to be 22, Tony.
Well, he's the big boss, and you've got to admire how efficiently
he runs the place.
Produce is going from shipping container to supermarket-ready
in mere minutes.
There's a few fruit bowls
going to be filled tomorrow from this lot, isn't there?
All that's left to do is to load the pallets of fruit
and veg onto waiting lorries.
Out of the 200 containers that we receive per week,
each week we'll then turn that into about 2.5 million
packs of fruit to go back out to the retailers.
And the fact that the Thames
is right outside your door isn't a coincidence.
No, it's not a coincidence at all. That's the whole reason why we set
up home here, at the port,
because it allows us to get fruit to the customer a lot quicker,
a lot fresher. And there's the whole question of the environment.
Yeah, we've saved 650,000 kilos of C02.
So by not shipping containers all the way around the country
and bringing them straight from the port into Halo allows us
to take them containers off the road. One final thing.
Ask your mum if she's proud of you. For you, Tony, I will.
For hundreds of years, the London clocks have been
full of working people lifting things up, heaving them
back down, pushing, pulling, doing their backs in, getting hernias.
Now, thanks to modern technology,
all our freight can be moved about much more flexibly, much more
economically and in a much more environmentally friendly way.
But the Thames isn't just about super-modern production lines.
It also provides us with food the old-fashioned way.
I'm heading across the estuary
and travelling about 50 miles further east.
This is Whitstable, a quaint seaside town on the Thames Estuary in Kent.
Once upon a time, this was just muddy banks,
but in 1832, they dug this harbour.
Now, today it looks like a cute little fishing port, doesn't it?
But originally it was for coal, which came down from the north
in ships and then it was off-loaded onto trains.
There was a big terminaljust here, where that ice-cream van is,
and then it went off to Canterbury, and from there to London.
Around the same time as the coal train arrived,
another industry was at its height - oysters.
They've actually been harvested in Whitstable
since the Romans were here 2,000 years ago.
Graham West is a sixth-generation oyster fisherman.
His great-great-great-grandfather began the family business
in the early 1900s,
and it's been passed down from one generation to the next.
Why is Whitstable so famous for oysters and not somewhere else?
So, this is the area where the river meets the sea, where the
fresh water meets the salt water. It feeds the plankton.
The plankton love it.
The oysters eat plankton, so they grow really, really well here.
These clays, oysters are farmed in the shallow
waters of Whitstable Bay, but they still grow wild here, too.
Here is a proper Whitstable native oyster.
We can only catch them when there's an R in the month,
so we're not allowed to fish until the 1st of September.
What's the "R in the month" thing about?
Why can't you fish them in May, June and July?
Because they're spawning. There's a time of year when the water's
warmer, the algae is really thick, so the oyster will spawn, fatten up.
They can have a million babies, so if you eat them
when there's a million babies, we'll wipe the population out.
For Victorian Londoners, oysters were part of their everyday diet.
They were cheap and nutritious, and the Thames Estuary was full of them.
By the 1860s, over 100 boats were bringing in 8O million
oysters a year to be sent to London's Billingsgate Market.
Then there were a lot of hard winters and disease and pollution
and overfishing, and the industry collapsed.
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, it was at a really, really low ebb.
After that, it began to come back again,
and in the last ten to fifteen years,
that growth's accelerated, until now,
three million oysters are harvested from the mudflats around this
part of the Thames Estuary every year.
It's all thanks to higher standards and a cleaner river.
But the greater costs and smaller output have pushed prices up.
The once abundant oyster is now a luxury item.
Is it still important to Whitstable? It's important to Whitstable, yes,
because it's our heritage. They are the only oysters who've got PGI
status, which is Protected Geographical Indication.
So you can only call it Whitstable oyster if it is born, bred
and lives in Whitstable.
Whitstable oysters are one of only 88 foods with this status in the UK,
so the annual festival here has gained an international reputation.
With visitors flocking to the town,
Graham processes 20,000 oysters in a single weekend.
I guess it's a good marketing tool now.
Everybody knows about Whitstable just because of the oysters.
That's right. But I've been told that there are more oysters coming
off these banks now than there were, say, ten or fifteen years ago.
Oh, yeah, because there's a higher demand,
not so much in England, but in Europe, France.
Italy like the really big oysters, France like the small oysters,
the Netherlands like them,
so there is a very, very massive market at the moment for oysters.
And I, for one, am a VERY big fan.
Mm!
In one. Gorgeous.
Next, I'll be continuing my tour of culinary delights
and washing it all down with a pint...
...or maybe a few.
How many pints would that make? 92,000 pints. 92,000 pints?!
The Thames is loaded with treats.
A couple of miles east of Whitstable is the village of Seasalter.
Here, you'll find a pub that's one of the few in Britain
with a Michelin star.
The Sportsman sounds a pretty modern name, doesn't it?
But it isn't. It's Victorian.
In those clays, people used to come and stay here
when they were going down to the Thames Estuary to blast
the living daylight out of a duck for sport.
I don't think duck's on the menu today, though.
The chef isn't in, but I know where he'll be.
On the seashore.
Oh! It's really idyllic, isn't it?
You'd never guess that this place, amongst all these mudflats and
marshes, has been a source of food for London for over 1,000 years.
There he is. That's the chef, Stephen Harris,
gathering ingredients for today's menu.
He's trying to get his food for free this morning.
Stephen? Hi! Can I give you a hand?
Yeah, grab a bucket.
What we are looking for? Today, it's seaweed.
What sort? This is sea lettuce.
I would call this the king of seaweed.
Oh, it's quite big, isn't it? It's like a little scarf.
It's fantastic. There's another one here.
This is called gutweed, or angel hair, if you're romantic.
Oh, I know about angel hair. ls there much of it around?
Yeah, there is. I mean, you know... just behind you there.
You find it in clumps. Yeah. This is not rigged. No, no!
Just behind you, a whole load of seaweed.
This is a huge source of umami.
Now, umami, I know theoretically what that is.
The fifth taste, isn't it? That's right.
I don't even believe it exists.
We always thought in the West that there was sweet, sour, salty
and bitter. Meanwhile, in japan in 1905, a scientist isolated a fifth
one. It's savoury.
It's that kind of... You know when you eat those cheesy biscuits,
your cheeks salivate and you can't wait to have another one?
It's that. That is umami.
How much do you rely on the food that you actually
get from these beaches? We use a lot of what's around us.
My cooking is kind of inspired by the landscape.
It's the sort of thing that chefs say.
"My cooking is inspired by the landscape." I know. The terroir.
Well, exactly, yeah. We got enough, do you reckon?
Yes, we've got plenty, but we also are going to make some salt.
MAKE some salt? Yes.
Of course. Seasalter, salt.
The village began producing it way back in the Iron Age.
This water's settled, because the tide's been out since one o'clock
this morning and is on its way in, and you get a really nice, clean...
Can you see? Yeah. You see how clean that is?
Is it actually worth making your own salt?
It's a lot of work, and salt isn't that expensive.
But it's about the kind of story behind the food. Mm.
We're in a village called Seasalter, and I always say
if you haven't made your own sea salt and you live in Seasalter
and you're a chef, you're sleeping on the job. You know?
Stephen doesn't just forage on the beach for ingredients.
He wants to know all about their history, too.
Just 20 years after William the Conqueror landed,
Seasalter's shellfish and marshland produce gave the village
a place in Britain's earliest record, The Domesday Book.
And Stephen also found mention of a farm that supplied him with meat.
The Domesday Book, you know, obviously 1086, it says that this
land is owned by the kitchens of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Really?
Yeah, and this over there is the Monkshill Farm.
I was using it for five years before I realised, "Ah, the monks!"
And the story just started to appear.
So, for example, we're walking on an earthwork.
This mound was built to protect the marsh by the monks
in the 13th century.
It was probably pretty wealthy around then with
lots of activity going on then. Yeah, there was commercial.
I mean, the Domesday Book said there were eight fisheries
just along this short bit of coast. And now there's just your pub?
And now there's just my pub.
We're whipping up a fish dish cooked with a seaweed butter
and seasoned with the home-made salt.
So that just goes on there.
Basically, the process is that you heat up the salt
and you evaporate off the water. Yeah.
And that's when you get your salt that you would be familiar with.
The salt takes about four hours to make.
There you go. Oh, yeah. You've already got it.
You can feel. Oh, my goodness, I didn't realise there was quite so
much salt in there. I thought it was just on the top.
Yeah. Ah, wow! That's basically how we make sea salt.
The seaweed is dried for 24 hours.
Ooh, yeah, that's beautifully done.
That's part of the River Thames. It is. Dried.
Do you feel an affinity with the Thames? Very much so.
You know, I grew up here, so it's the sea I swam in as a boy.
Run that through your fingers and tell me if you can smell vanilla.
I can smell all sorts in there.
Oh, it's an incredibly complex series of... It is. ..smells.
When you asked me what it smelled like, I was going to take the mick
and say it smells like Southend, but it doesn't at all.
It doesn't, does it?
Get me, helping out in a Michelin-starred kitchen!
That looks pretty even all the way through now.
Put that onto there.
One, two, three, four! Well done.
There we go. Excellent.
How professionaPs that?
And that's it. And we'll wrap it up, put it in the fridge,
and then we will cook your fish in it. OK.
We're going to cook a local fish, a slip sole,
and we're going to grill it.
I always think the fish and the seaweed and the salt
are kind of reunited in the dish as they all
come from the same water and all from the Thames. Great.
I'm not a big fan of sole. I find it a bit rubbery.
But I'll see if Stephen can work his magic on it.
Normally, if you go out to eat, the food will have come to you
via container ship or plane or by road, or whatever,
so you might have a relationship with the restaurant,
but you're not going to have a relationship with the food itself.
Here, though, they've been producing food for thousands of years,
so it's like you're eating history.
Right. Oh, lovely. Here you go. Oh, thank you.
There's your slip sole in seaweed butter. Yeah.
Thanks for doing this for me. Let's have a taste. Yeah.
And after some "sole-searching"...
Oh, see what I did there?
It's very nice, isn't it? Do you see what I mean about umami,
the kind of savour? I do. I do.
I thought it would be much more seaweedy than this, but it's not.
It's just another taste or tastes
that inform the taste of the fish. Yeah.
That was such an amazing experience.
I've never, ever been to a restaurant before
where the food came from the beach a couple of hundred yards away,
even the condiments.
The Thames provides for us every day,
not just delivering up tasty treats,
but the water of the river itself is a valuable resource.
I've now come to west London to see how
they turn H2O into something rather special.
The Thames has been the lifeblood of brewers for centuries.
It had the perfect business model. It transported their barley and hops
and the coal for their power. And, of course, there's the water.
In Victorian England, the river was dirty and full of disease.
Beer was a way of making the water safe to drink.
Before long, there were eight huge breweries along its banks.
The last of those brewers is this one,
which became Fuller's Griffin Brewery in 1845.
Today, they brew a staggering 50 million pints a year here.
So water from the Thames is vitally important here.
It's their basic ingredient, the foundation for all their products.
So how does all that water turn into beer?
Well, it begins with the right combination of malted grains.
Behind this enormous, corrugated wall up there are four vast
30-tonne silos containing malt,
which is a kind of barley that's been germinated.
It's them that gives the beer its sweet, malty taste.
But for the more subtle, distinctive notes, you have to look in here.
This is where special grains are added to create each unique beer.
The man with the flavours is Guy Stewart.
What are you tipping in, Guy? Speciality malt.
So we have Cara Gold.
So, this is quite sweet. Bit of a toffee sort of chewiness.
Yeah, yeah. It is. Yeah, toffee. Toffee.
So we put this into beer to give it sort of a sweet,
caramelly sort of notes.
We now have crystal.
So, this, after the barley's been made, is sort of roasted a bit.
Yeah. And if you bite into it, it's quite...quite crunchy.
It tastes very different from the other one, doesn't it? Yeah.
And it'll add a nice sort of sweetness to the beer
and a lovely sort of red hue to the beer, so this goes in ales.
And this one? And then in the last one, that is chocolate malt.
So, that is roasted. It doesn't taste of chocolate.
Oh, that's disappointing. But it'll add chocolate coffee notes
if you're making a porter or a stout.
How do you mix this in with the malt that comes from the big hoppers?
We tip it into the hole there. It looks so...
So 19th century, isn't it? It's not, like, shiny and...
Oh, yeah. ..21st century at all.
Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
So this needs to go in. Yeah. Feel free.
The next step is to mill the grains.
These beautiful machines! How old are these?
They're over 100 years old.
They were reconditioned a few years ago.
They grind the malt so the starch stored in it can be
converted into sugar later on in the brewing process.
The malt gets ground into grist. And that's grist? That's grist.
As in "grist to the mill"? Grist to the mill, yes.
Which means adding something tiny to make the whole thing better. Yes.
I never knew where it came from before. Yeah, yeah.
I love all the reminders of the
history that they've kept here.
Isn't this great?
The last vestiges of the old brewery with those magnificent
cauldrons, compared with the modernity of this.
This high-tech room is where Hayley Marl mixes the grist
and the water together to make what's known as mash.
And that's not the mash you get with your pie.
It comes through here and then goes into the mash tun through there.
What's it like in the mash?
It looks a bit like a...dark porridge.
The mixture's gently heated.
In there, it will stand for a while.
And that's a sort of steeping action,
so it's a little bit like making a giant cup of tea.
With the solids - or teabag, if you like - removed,
the liquid is pumped into these giant vats.
And guess what, it's got a new name.
Wort.
So, we've now got 596 hectolitres of wort in here.
You've just skated through that. 590 hectolitres? Yes.
How many pints would that be? 92,000 pints. 92,000 pints in there?!
Yeah, yeah. What we're going to do is add the bittering hops to the
copper, and that's what brings the bitterness to the beer.
HE STRAINS
Heyyy! Like a pro_
Yeah, if I'd messed that up, I would have destroyed 92,000 pints.
And now for the important bit,
where the beer becomes alcoholic in the fermenters.
This is where the yeast is put in. This is where the yeast is put in.
What is it that's so magical about the yeast?
We've been using this strain since 1976, and it's just the way it
ferments and the flavours it produces in the beer.
Can I have a look? Yeah, have a look. DON'T breathe in.
Are you serious? Yeah.
Cos of the CO2 atmosphere.
So I could pass out without going near a pint.
This tank is finished fermenting. I can see it bubbling now.
Yeah, yeah. lt'lljust be ticking over. But this yeast is like
the fingerprint of our beer.
At last, the beer's ready.
Michael Richardson gets to seal them up and roll out the barrels.
Oh, Michael, this is the bit I've always wanted to see.
No problem. I'm going to show you how it works. Yeah.
I'm going to do this one, then you can do the next one.
Can I? All right.
Glue to go.
Push it down as hard as you can.
Stand back as the Incredible Hulk leaps into action.
Perfect. Last one. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot.
Oh! I stink like a brewery!
But it's nice to think there'll be beer out there
I had a hand in brewing. And now the important bit.
Tasting. Cue Zoe Edwards and her sensitive taste buds.
Hmmm, one sip's not enough.
I think I should take another sip just to make sure.
Turns out two sips aren't enough, either.
It's good, isn't it? Best when it's fresh.
Actually, it does taste very fresh.
Yeah, I'll just check.
VOICEOVER: I'll catch you later.
Next, I think I say the wrong thing in St Paul's Cathedral.
There's a lot of dirty monks' fingers on this page, aren't there?
Yeah. Or should I say there's a lot of, er,
monks' dirty fingers on this page? Yeah!
The Thames is a superhighway, transporting our food, drink
and other everyday items.
But over the centuries, it's also played a vital
role in the construction of many of the icons that lie on its banks...
...like St Paul's Cathedral.
Sir Christopher Wren's famous design
is at least the fourth building to bear the name,
after its predecessor burned down in the Great Fire in 1666.
When the fire was over, the great and the good of London decided
they needed a brand-new cathedral, one which would be big
and impressive and make London feel like a really modern city.
And they got the stone for it from Dorset, from Portland,
brought it all the way upriver to here, what was known as Paul's Dock,
and loaded it, lashed it to horses and drove the horses up this
hill and started work.
VOICEOVER: ..on what was to become a national treasure.
This river access helped construction, and St Paul's was
declared officially complete on Christmas Day 1711.
As you can imagine, over the last 300 years,
every part of that building has been renovated on different occasions,
some of it quite dramatically -
all of it, that is, except for the library.
Only now is it being beautifully restored, and I've been given the
unique opportunity to go and have a nosy around while they work on it.
Oliver Caroe is overseeing the three-year project.
Welcome to St Paul's Cathedral. Come in. Thank you.
But rather than showing me through those famous front doors,
he's meeting me round the side.
Oliver, this isn't like a church, it's like a palace.
So, this is the secular entrance into the cathedral.
It gives you a sense of power, doesn't it?
Like a palace, as you say. It does, yeah.
And a sense of staircase. That is absolutely gorgeous.
These are huge slab of stone,
but they only go into the wall... Do you want to guess how much?
Well, looking at them, I would say they probably went in the same
length as the outside bit that you can see.
They go in two inches. TONY LAUGHS
Still want to come in?
My cameraman's up there, perched on them!
How do they do that?
So, that's a complicated story of structural mechanics.
It's all thanks to mathematics, each step resting on the one below.
We're heading for the library, with its 12,500 theological texts.
But before we get there...
Oh, wow. Bang!
Yourjob is... Let me see if I can get this right.
Is it Master to the Fabric?
Surveyor to the Fabric.
So, in direct descent from Christopher Wren in title,
I'm the 13th surveyor. And there have been architects and
surveyors who've looked after this gorgeous building ever since Wren.
How do you feel about being in the steps of the great man?
Does it weigh heavy on your shoulders?
It's like being a parent of...
Of the fabric? ..of the fabric.
And the latest chapter is the library? Yes.
It's very understated, isn't it?
QUIETLY: This is a really intimate space in the cathedral,
and when it's full of books and some of our beautiful collection,
it's a place of calm and sculpture.
Why are we whispering when we have no need to?
Yeah, but it's... It makes you whisper. It really does, yes.
It's reverence, isn't it?
So, what is the project here?
So, books are made out of organic stuff, leather, which rots.
It has to be stable for temperature and humidity.
So light is our enemy, water is our enemy, humidity is our enemy.
When we get sweaty, we get a bit fungally.
Just one point. I'm old and a bit tired, but I'm not fungally.
Has everything that's been added since Wren's time
now been cleared away? Absolutely.
Very little has changed in this room.
The library's due to open to the public in summer 2021.
It hasn't been seen like this for 300 years.
I think the thing that my eye's drawn to all the time is
the subtlety of all this elaborate carving.
It's not in your face, but my goodness, it's complex.
So, Wren really knew about craftsmanship
and he knew about craftspeople and getting the best.
And what's wonderful is we know the names of every single
craftsperson who worked here and what they did.
This floor was by Richard Jennings,
and it's in the accounts, a naked oak floor.
The latest name to add to that list is Emma Norris.
Her team will restore the paintwork. But to decide how much to remove,
they have to discover every layer
that's been added over the centuries.
And I'm going to join in.
I feel a little bit like a mad scientist!
The different paints are uncovered by extremely careful scraping.
You're looking for a slight colour change or a change in texture.
It is archaeology, isn't it? Oh, completely. Yes.
Combining this with written records builds a picture of what's
happened in different areas of the library over the centuries.
That's as far as you want to go. Yeah. You're doing really well.
I just think maybe this might take a while.
Are you being slightly ironic in that I should be working faster?
No, I'm trying to save you
and tell you we have got one we prepared earlier. Ah!
HE LAUGHS
Emma, this isn't kids' telly!
Would you like to look at it? Yes, let me have a look.
So, this is the colour scrape that was carried out
by our conservator earlier. And that's the one that I got down to?
That is, yes. That's the first layer.
And then you go down subsequently to all the layers.
So the original Christopher Wren paint is this one?
The early grey, Yes-
How wonderful. Paint from 300 years ago.
This is a complete conservation, taking in paint, woodwork,
masonry and, of course, the books.
I know the library looks pretty austere right now -
there's the main body of the cathedral -
but it'll really spring back to life again once the books, which
are currently being stored off-site, are put back on the shelves.
There are one or two of them, though, that are still here.
When the library opens, selected rare books will be on display.
Simon Carter's deciding not just which books
but which pages those books will be open at.
Yeah, I'm just looking at a book of psalms that's going to
be on display in the library when it's totally preserved.
What sort of date is that? It's from about 1200,
so it's actually the earliest book in the cathedral library.
How come it survived the Great Fire of London?
Well, fortunately, it was off-site at the time.
It's one of only three surviving
manuscripts from the pre-fire library.
This book predates the printing press,
so everything was done by hand.
I noticed that you were actually handling it, but not with gloves on.
There's a big debate,
isn't there, about whether you should wear gloves or not?
That's right. Some people prefer the cotton gloves,
the Paul Daniels look. Yeah! But that can snag on pages... Yeah.
...and sort of pulls, so we tend to go for the clean hands option.
Is it all right? I have washed my hands. Yeah, no, absolutely.
Turn it over and have a look at a few pages.
There's a lot of dirty monks' fingers on this page, aren't there?
Yeah. Or should I say there's a lot of, er,
monks' dirty fingers on this page? Yeah!
I mean, the pages, which have been opened a lot,
particularly ones with a decoration, tend to be the darker ones just
because they've had much more use.
Oh, look, there's a face! Who do you think it might have been?
Well, I mean, it could be the person who wrote it.
He was putting his face in his own book.
I mean, that'd be a nice way to sign it, wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah.
It looks so modern.
That's an original 1200 haircut, I think we can say.
...whose owner would be proud to think that their book is being
taken care of so meticulously all these years later.
For centuries, the Thames has been a vital means of transport,
linking us with the rest of the world
and providing access to the very heart of this capital city.
And it still is. It's working harder than ever before,
keeping London and beyond fed, clothed and watered.
Good on you, Thames.
Next time:
This is fantastic.
...behind the scenes at an iconic Thames attraction...
It's like painting the Forth Bridge, isn't it?
It's a job that will never, never end.
...insight into a unique craft...
Wow! That hits you full in the face, doesn't it?
...and I help out at a thriving riverside business...
Hey! That was a nice one. Put a spring in my step, that did.
...all on the river that keeps me on my toes.
My Fitbit's going off the scale.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media