Awesome Beauty: The Art of Industrial Britain

Modern Britain was forged in the Industrial Revolution.

It was the furnaces, the factories,

the quarries and the pits

that made us who we are.

Industry shaped our nation's identity and its destiny.

So why is it that when asked to paint a picture of Britain,

we seem to see ourselves in a very different light?

In a recent poll,

the nation's favoured painting by a British artist was unveiled.

And what do you think we chose?

The Hay Wain by John Constable.

Painted in 1821,

The Hay Wain depicts an idyllic view

of Flatford Mill on the River Stour.

Picture postcard Britain.

But is this still the image we should be painting of ourselves?

I mean, come on, Britain!

Let's have a bit of fun.

Even in Constable's day,

this painting was already an outdated and idealized vision.

A Britain viewed through the lens of the picturesque.

Yet this green and pleasant land, free from chimneys,

factories and urban grime,

remains cryogenically preserved in our imaginations.

That's better already.

I should know. As an artist myself,

I've painted many such landscapes,

editing what I see in order to

satisfy a national appetite for copses,

hedgerows and hot-buttered self-delusion.

In art, as in our mind's eye,

it seems that the good life is never smeared in diesel,

but is spent innocently frolicking around in haystacks.

We are addicted to this pastoral idyll.

It's so soothing, so sweet and so desperately dull.

Art matters because it reflects and shapes how we see ourselves.

There is another way of telling our national story which has been hidden

from view and offers us the possibility

of seeing ourselves afresh.

There have always been rogue artists,

seduced by the dark, satanic mills of industrial Britain.

And the images they created were

exhilarating, terrifying, poignant,

anything but picturesque.

Too much of a good thing clogs the arteries of your imagination.

I want to see the world through their eyes.

I want to explore and capture

the hidden industrial landscapes of today's working Britain,

those places that you might instinctively avoid or ignore.

There's beauty to be found there.

There's art to be found there.

Port Talbot, Wales.

The largest steelworks in Britain.

Up to a staggering five million tonnes of steel

are produced here each year.

Ironworks and forges were the very

backbone of the Industrial Revolution,

and they remain, today, explosive and visceral places.

And yet, the paintings that are most often associated

with our industrial landscape...

I mean, they just tend to be so grim.

LS Lowry is widely accepted as having painted

the definitive portrait of industrial Britain,

a weary world of textile mills and soul-crushing routine.

# He painted Salford's smoky tops

# On cardboard boxes from the shops

# And parts of Ancoats where I used to play. #

Oh, give it a rest!

Maybe I am guilty of romanticizing a life I've never had to live,

but Lowry's picture of working Britain simply depresses me,

and I reject the idea that

depictions of industry have always got to feature

a palette of sludgy colours

and a cast of miserable-looking matchstick men.

To my mind, there's a much earlier art world outsider...

..whose vision of industry was far more compelling.

This is An Iron Forge,

painted in 1772 by Joseph Wright of Derby.

And he was the first in a rogue band of artists who,

at moments of upheaval and technological revolution,

placed working Britain firmly in the limelight.

And there was nothing dull or dingy about Joseph Wright's vision.

One inspired by an unlikely source.

After witnessing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius,

he had become obsessed with the possibility of dramatic lighting.

And it became his signature style,

one that was eminently suited to his subject.

And you can see in this painting

how he uses that technique to transform a humble forge

into something much more iconic.

This is a modern nativity scene,

where the burst of one molten ingot

seems to promise a golden industrial future for all.

The fury of white heat and molten metal is still an enthralling sight.

So why are these places and the people that work here

largely ignored in art history's picture of Britain?

As giant ironworks emerged in the 19th century,

vast crowds came to gape and wonder.

But people's reactions varied.

Not everybody was an automatic convert to the church of industry.

Anxiety about the power and the impact of these places

was there from the start.

When the artist John Martin travelled across the Black Country,

he described a landscape in which the glowing furnaces,

the red blaze of light and the liquid fire

were truly sublime and awful.

The Great Day Of His Wrath, Martin's painting of a biblical apocalypse,

was inspired by the Black Country's blazing industrial landscape.

It's an image that took no prisoners.

And yet, this industrial habitat was fast becoming the norm.

By 1850, more people in Britain

lived in cities than in the countryside.

And when they looked out of their window,

they didn't see Constable's utopian Hay Wain,

they saw something resembling this.

Welcome to Dudley.

This is 19th-century Britain,

painted by Constable's greatest rival

and the nation's other favourite landscape painter, JMW Turner.

But unlike Constable, Turner had a real passion for industry.

He rejoiced in the noise, the speed,

the clattering cacophony of this great new world.

And for Turner,

the optical distortion

he loved best in modern Britain, it was the flames, the steam,

the smoke that rolled across the manufacturing landscape.

And to experience that particular kind of visual magic,

he didn't need to go to Venice or Rome,

he just needed to come here to Dudley.

Through a prism of particulates,

coal dust and drizzle,

the Black Country takes on a palette

of entirely new colours.

For me, this is as much the picture of Britain

we fought wars to defend as The Hay Wain.

The art of industry, however, can obscure some harsh realities.

In 1840,

the life expectancy of anyone born here in Dudley

was just over 18 years of age. 18.

And anyone who was employed in the town's workshops and smithies

was liable to experience working conditions

that were pretty barbarous.

But nonetheless, I don't get the impression

that when Turner was creating this painting

he was sort of frowning with disapproval,

this isn't a moral treatise on

the negative impact of industry on society.

Instead it's a kind of romantic celebration

of the industrial sublime,

of the ways in which man has been able to sculpt and shape

and harness the elements,

to transform the landscape of England

in ways that even nature hadn't imagined.

I want to get a better sense of the awe that Turner felt.

And throughout our green and pleasant land,

surprises lie in wait.

This is Penrhyn Slate Quarry in Wales.

And at over a mile long and 370 metres deep,

it used to be the largest slate quarry in the world.

It's a man-made Grand Canyon,

where the inherent power and drama of the landscape here in Wales

has been maxed out by human intervention.

It reminds me of the scree-covered slopes in the Scottish Highlands,

or America's Rocky Mountains.

Places I often visit to paint.

But this environment has those characteristics in spades.

Humanity has made its mark here.

It's carved out the whole mountain,

and it has created something that is apocalyptic.

It's shocking, but it is shockingly beautiful.

For centuries, these slopes were quarried by hand,

with the slate produced shipped all over the world.

Today, men and their machines rule the earth.

It's some spectacle.

I'm not kidding when I say I find these places beautiful,

because as an artist, everywhere that I look here

are intriguing details.

I mean, it's there in the tyre prints that you get in the mud,

the clay mud of the slate quarry.

It's there in the weird,

creamy turquoise water of a pool in the middle of this quarry.

I mean, if it's picturesque you're looking for, it's all here.

And if you open your eyes, you see not grey, you see silver, blue,

you see turquoise and ochres.

This is a landscape that's actually full of colour.

You don't just have to be in a meadow

to paint a delightful landscape.

You can be in a place that might

strike some as desolate, and find great treasures.

I'm not the first outsider to find this place captivating.

A young Princess Victoria, visiting in 1832, wrote...

It was very curious to see the men split the slate, and others cut it.

While others hung, suspended by ropes,

others again drove wedges into a piece of rock.

And in that manner, would split off a block.

Henry Hawkins' painting is a rich slice of Victoriana.

It evokes in minute detail,

but on a biblical scale,

the kind of drama of a working quarry.

I mean, look at these guys there.

They are blasting, crow-barring, precariously dangling off the rocks.

But for the families that, over generations,

actually worked specific segments of this quarry,

life was pretty gruelling.

I mean, the manual stamina that was required to carve out this landscape

was an act of heroism.

But surviving here?

That was going to require another kind of bravery altogether.

Art shouldn't just comfort us,

it should challenge us to consider what's important in life and how we

choose to see the world.

A clear-eyed view of hard work and difficult circumstances

has always been compelling.

In the early 1860s,

an English photographer named William Clayton

arrived in the small Welsh town of Tredegar.

He set up a studio,

and instead of producing starchy portraits of middle-class families,

he began to photograph the town's working community.

Tredegar was a crucible of the Industrial Revolution,

but Clayton directed his lens not at the mill owners and managers,

but the women who laboured in the local ironworks and mines.

And the extraordinary thing is that these images were not intended on

being celebratory.

They were used as part of a campaign

that sought to ban these people from working.

The local newspaper claimed

that for these women to work made them unfit to be wives or mothers.

Each person is photographed in their work clothes.

They're shown clutching pickaxes,

holding on to teapots and kettles

and buckets, holding on to each other.

And in some cases,

their dirty garments are ornamented so poignantly

with little beads and headdresses.

When you stare into the eyes of these dignified working women,

they defiantly hold your gaze across the centuries.

You know, art doesn't have to be pretty.

It's there to enlighten us about our history,

and these images do that.

They introduce us to our industrial ancestors,

the very people we could have been but for a twist of historical fate.

They really are some of the most powerful images, I think,

in the history of photography.

And to some extent, I believe that they have been neglected,

rather like the women themselves

during their working lives.

The importance of the human story

to our industrial landscape should never be ignored.

Growing up here in Glasgow,

I was acutely aware of the struggle to keep

the city's celebrated shipyards alive.

I had no family association with the yards,

but in our household it was simply accepted

that shipbuilding was a vital part of the city's history,

and by association our shared heritage.

It was just all part of growing up Glasgow.

Not so long ago, this river, the Clyde,

was where a fifth of the world's ships were built.

It was a vast theatre of industrial pandemonium.

A working environment where people were proud to play their part.

When I was first granted access to paint and sketch here in the last

surviving shipyard on the upper Clyde,

it was the scale of human endeavour and industry that blew me away.

I spend most of my life alone in a studio,

so coming to a shipyard where

the spectacle of activity and industry is so relentless

only sharpens the old drawing senses.

Cos you don't have long to capture the activity here.

It's not like The Hay Wain.

Nothing's standing still.

And if you turn your back on a subject,

you might turn round again to find it completely altered.

You never see anything like this on civvy street.

BUZZING

WHIRRING

BANGING

I've been coming here for years,

but I still get goose bumps every time.

And I think that what I find particularly exciting

about this kind of location

is the contrast between the epic and the intimate,

the brutal and the beautiful.

This is a cathedral-sized project,

where people are busy everywhere in

tiny little alcoves and chapel-like spaces.

They're all coming together to make it happen,

and you catch glimpses of them illuminated by ethereal lights,

or sparks and shadows.

It's brilliant. And the deep bass boom of construction

gets inside you like you're in an industrial nightclub.

REPEATED METALLIC BANGING

I'm always aware there's a danger of

painting over the tough realities of these environments.

But in the shipyards,

I frequently draw people who have

spent their whole working lives here,

and who remain captivated by the sublime power of industry.

The work that you do,

do you just kind of see it as sort of metal-bashing,

sticking bits together,

or is there a craft involved here that people don't notice?

Lachlan, you've no idea how that expression really does my nut in -

metal-bashing. You don't...

These boats are handmade, like a suit.

A handmade product made by hundreds of guys with expertise.

They are not bashed, they are formed.

And there's a lot of,

an awful lot of pride in these boats for the guys.

People think, "Och, it's a shipyard, it's just..."

You were saying metal-bashing,

but just so much pride in building these boats

and putting them together.

We're the hammer men.

We're the most ancient trade outside of potters and joiners.

I mean, we took the raw earth, turned it into metal,

and turned metal into things and things into machines.

I mean, we're pretty primal.

That's how I think about it anyway.

There was an old saying, when you went home a wee bit dirty,

you'd say, "Oh, your mother will give you an extra potato

"from her plate tonight,"

cos you'd deserved it and you've done a bit of work.

Would you feel this strongly if you were making washing machines?

-Probably not.

-Why should a ship engender so much more feeling?

Cos a ship is alive, Lachlan.

That's why you call her "she".

Right, she's alive. She takes on a life.

As soon as she hits that water, just a wee bit before,

you begin to feel her almost springing into life.

Now, when she hits the water, you can see that she's alive.

Do you think this place is beautiful?

Yes, but it's a pretty stark beauty, right?

It's not warm.

You don't have nice dreams about it.

It's a kind of place that takes your breath away.

Pride in the making of things,

and the pride artists take in capturing this work

are two sides of the same coin.

Engineering and beauty,

science and art are not really strangers to one another.

And nowhere is this made clearer

than in the drawings of Muirhead Bone.

Bone's meticulous renderings of shipbuilding

fused science and art together on the page.

Muirhead Bone was born just across the river in Partick,

and he trained originally as an architect

before being appointed Britain's first-ever official war artist.

But in 1917, exactly 100 years ago,

he returned here to the Clyde to

document the front line of naval construction.

Like me, today, he was 40 years old.

And like me, he was absolutely in awe of

the energy and activity of a working shipyard,

so much so that he resorted to strapping a sketchbook to his arm

so that he could run around

capturing all the scenes as quickly as possible.

Bone studied his subject with an architect's eye.

No amount of intricate scaffolding could faze him.

Every angle, every detail counted.

Now, I can vouch for how mentally exhausting

scrutinising and capturing such subjects can be,

and I can also vouch for how effective

the solutions that Muirhead Bone exploited were,

because I use the very same carbon pencils that he did.

I find that lead pencils snap too often

and they tend to smudge in the rain.

But with carbon, you're always guaranteed a confident,

dark and velvety line, come rain or freezing cold,

weather conditions that are not uncommon

here on the Costa del Clyde.

The solutions to certain creative problems can be timeless,

but technology moves fast.

Here in Govan, 175 years of shipbuilding tradition

is set to continue,

because the people that work here are keeping pace.

The early 20th century was a brave new world of mechanization,

where art, science and the promise of an engineered utopian future

were set on a collision course.

The blades of this vast wooden propeller

once revolved at speeds of up to 120mph.

Here in the wind tunnels of Farnborough,

aviation designs at the cutting edge of British technology

were once put through their paces.

I mean, this is Disneyland for grown-ups.

The scale is absolutely awesome,

but what I find most powerful is the latent sense of accelerating energy

that remains in this dormant place.

These are genuinely the propellers of history.

But to me, they still look like the future.

And when artists first encountered the new, dynamic shapes of aviation

technology for example, well,

no wonder they felt they needed

a new, modern art for a new, modern world.

Edward Wadsworth belonged to a group of artists

that called themselves the Vorticists.

These young punks celebrated the promise of the machine age

with a riot of geometry and abstraction.

On the eve of World War I,

the Vorticists published their own magazine,

and it was rather portentously entitled Blast.

In it, they shredded the cosy conservatism of English art.

They condemned the picturesquely patriotic, and celebrated instead,

in their own words, the machines, trains and steam ships,

all that distinguishes, externally, our time and that came far more from

here than anywhere else.

And the images that accompanied those words

were equally spiky and unsettling.

None of them was ever going to be crowned

the nation's favourite picture.

I mean, this was the Sex Pistols for the Art Nouveau generation.

The Vorticists provoked a genuine moment of artistic innovation.

A chance for our national art history's story

to take a more progressive and dramatic turn.

So why, every time industry forces its way into the art gallery,

does its influence splutter to a halt?

Wadsworth called this image War Engine,

and it was printed in the second edition of Blast in 1915,

after the war had already begun.

And it actually feels like being inside the magazine of a gun,

inserted into the greased intestines of a killing machine.

I mean, the lines seem to sweep across the page, they swing,

lock and repeat,

almost like being hypnotised by the mechanical process.

I find it genuinely terrifying,

and it betrays a growing anxiety

about the mechanised cogs of industry and war.

"Long live the vortex", declared Blast's first edition.

But within a month, that very vortex would begin to consume hundreds of

thousands of equally idealistic young men,

scythed to the ground by the war machines.

How could you make art any longer out of this?

Farnborough's graveyard of engineering monsters

is haunting and unsettling,

but also undeniably sculptural.

And yet the link between machinery and violence

has often stifled our appreciation for the art of industry.

Except when our very survival has depended on it.

I've been told 35 degrees.

It's going to be bloody boiling.

The outbreak of the Second World War placed industry

firmly in the crosshairs of a new generation of artists.

Unlike the Vorticists,

Graham Sutherland chose to give industry a human face, and to do so,

he descended underground.

RUMBLING

There is no industry more deeply woven

into the mythology of working Britain than mining.

And there is surely no environment more alien to the creation of art,

but, in spite of my kind of claustrophobia,

I've always wanted to journey to the centre of the earth.

Here at Boulby in North Yorkshire,

I'm now over a kilometre underground,

in the UK's deepest working mine.

A labyrinth of tunnels extend 10km out under the North Sea.

There's a whole world down here,

it's a kind of spooky subterranean landscape

that was formed by an ancient and now long-vanished sea,

about 230 million years ago.

The walls are closing in, they are undulating,

they're not even and symmetrical.

It's like being in sort of a goblin's grotto.

At the business end of things, they are mining for potash,

a pink-hued mineral used as fertiliser.

You know, your ability to create images

is really enhanced by the thrill,

the energy of a new sort of industrial workplace.

Everything here is brand-new to me,

and this kind of dinosaur of a machine,

this beast that is churning towards me is absolutely terrifying.

And it's energising the marks that I'm making, but weirdly,

although I find this thing really intimidating,

I'm turning my image into something really colourful,

because I'd never have expected that down here

there's a wonderland of pinks, golds and oranges.

And that's what I'm putting into the drawing

of this great, earth-chewing beast.

The sounds, the noise, the energy, well, it's inspiring.

The artist whose footsteps I'm following in

was one of Britain's most innovative painters.

Graham Sutherland was known for his brooding abstract renderings of

England's landscape.

But with the dawn of World War II,

he was appointed an official war artist

and sent to document the work at Geevor Tin Mine in Cornwall.

Now, Geevor Tin Mine has long since closed,

much like every other mine in the country, and Graham Sutherland,

rather like myself, was absolutely terrified of the proposition of

descending into the mine.

On his first trip down he recorded how his legs trembled,

the pitch dark and vertiginous ladders almost causing him to faint.

He even wrote in a letter, "The sense of remoteness was tangible,

"the distances seemed endless."

To Sutherland's surprise,

he found himself deeply moved by

the underground world that he discovered.

Experiences were intensified,

his senses heightened,

and here in this magical place, I can begin to understand why.

In the dark tunnels of the mine,

Sutherland's imagination was transported.

One of my favourite works from this period is Emerging Miner.

Emerging Miner really does evoke

that oppressive feeling of confinement that you get

right down here in the mine.

But it also disorientates and confuses your sense of direction.

It's unclear whether this figure is actually climbing a vertical ladder

towards us, or moving along an elevated horizontal tunnel.

And there's no doubt there's a real air of magic to this scene too.

The golden glow, for example,

that surrounds the miner,

begins to imply that what he's digging is

actually a lot rarer than tin.

And there's even a kind of fleshy pink hue to the stone here,

which I think gives the impression he is almost in something organic,

an artery perhaps, at the very heart of the earth.

It's a very poignant picture, I think,

because this lonely miner evokes the battles that are actually happening

at this point above ground in World War II.

And yet he is engaged in his own conflict against the darkness,

against the claustrophobia,

against the elements that surround him.

In Geevor Tin Mine, Graham Sutherland,

artist of the British landscape,

had discovered an even more potent distillation

of the nation's identity.

Its people.

And today, I think his work conduces a certain nostalgia for a rapidly

vanishing way of life.

So, Robin and Pete, what do you make of it when you look at this drawing?

-Have you seen it before?

-I haven't seen it, no.

-No, I haven't seen it.

It looks good.

Very good. You can see where his light is.

You can see where his light is, you can see the blackness behind him.

The tunnel section is there, which is what we see, obviously.

Exactly the same that way.

When we switch our lights off...

-You just can't see anything.

-That terrifies me.

I mean, I thought if I'd fallen off that van today,

you'd never have found me again.

That's why we keep our lights on.

I get a sense that here, almost a kilometre down under the sea,

you guys really have to rely upon each other.

-That's what we do.

-That's part of it.

Everybody relies on everybody.

-So you've got the trust.

-The trust, yes.

We're like a band of brothers.

That sounds like a bit of a stereotype,

and to people who don't come to these places, they might think,

"Oh, it's just romanticism."

-But it's true.

-It's true, definitely true.

It's an alien environment.

It's an environment most people never see.

And do you ever think of this environment

as the kind of ancient place it is?

Because every step you take further into the wall,

you're like burrowing in millions of years.

Does that come into your thinking?

Yes, at certain times, yes.

You're seeing a face line there that no human eyes have seen before,

apart from yours when you cut it.

So, you know, there is something there that is unique.

-Don't you miss the sunshine?

-Yes.

-Yes.

When, at the end of World War II,

the miners of Geevor emerged blinking into the light,

they found an exhausted nation.

But life had to be rebuilt, the people motivated.

And crucial to this was the promise of industry.

The future looked like this once.

A strange geometric kingdom.

When Fawley Oil Refinery on England's southern coast

opened in 1951,

it represented the optimistic spirit

of a post-war industrial boom.

The largest oil refinery in Europe.

That's the title given to the gleaming metal city

that has sprung up on the edge of the New Forest at Fawley.

The writer HE Bates described it as,

"A city of spires and spheres and

"ovoids and towers and tubes of swanlike grease, endlessly curving."

Fawley represented a vision of Britain

that was fit for the Jetsons,

a country that was throttling towards

the outer reaches of scientific possibility.

You know, 70 years on,

and we really should have inhabited those cities in the sky.

Tomorrow's world was something to have faith in, a cult of confidence,

and one of its high priests was

a photographer called Maurice Broomfield.

During the 1950s and '60s,

he captured the golden age of British industry.

Through his lens the mundane routines of the factory floor

became truly cinematic.

For many years Maurice Broomfield lived here

in this 19th-century flour mill.

And his son Nick, the renowned documentary maker,

is custodian of his father's estate.

Wonderful. She's great.

Your first reaction to so many of these photographs is,

"What the hell is actually going on?"

It's so peculiar.

He would spend nearly all day setting the picture up,

maybe one or two pictures.

And then he would just take the picture.

And this charming lady in that photograph,

is this someone he would have looked for particularly?

Was he careful to find elegant models sometimes?

Yes, I think he would have scoured the factory

until he found someone he thought looked rather nice.

That he wanted to look at in his picture.

She might have a completely different job

somewhere else in the factory,

and he would put her there and stylise her.

I'm sure the lipstick is something he arranged.

But he probably painted that wall and, you know...

-That much of an intervention?

-Oh, yes.

So he was kind of romanticising the work,

and also making an image of something that is a powerful image.

I think that was what he was trying to do.

My father was always a bit of an adventurer.

He loved taking pictures from dangerous places,

so if there was a ladder or something to climb up

or this incredibly hot blast furnace,

you could be sure that's where he would be.

As a child, Nick accompanied his father on factory visits.

I remember, we went to a lead works, where they would fold the lead.

You know, they would flatten it, fold it.

And then when they were pushing it again,

this piece of lead the size of a fist

would just fly across the factory floor.

And everyone would go sort of like that, there was no safety,

it was like kind of Dante's Inferno.

And people in the lead works looked green, I remember that.

People had green faces.

So this was like a world completely outside my experience.

Something that he had grown up with.

Because he left school at 15, worked making copper pipes for Rolls-Royce.

So he had experienced industry at first-hand?

Oh, yeah, that's how he started, that's how he knew industry,

that's how he understood the people.

He would establish a real relationship with them,

and then people would put up with

being bent over double like that for probably a couple of hours.

You know, being like this.

And look at this perfectly clean uniform, but also

just at the right position.

Everything is kind of perfect about it.

There was one he did of a stocking, have you seen that one?

-It's brilliant.

-It's quite sort of erotic. A picture of a leg.

And he's very carefully lit it so that

it's just the leg and the guy looking at it.

He was sort of amusing himself too.

But it was important to him to present

industry in a kind of theatrical light, because these seem pretty...

I mean, these seem cinematic.

You know, he studied art.

I think his first love was painting.

Who was the artist, somebody Wright?

Joseph Wright.

-Joseph Wright.

-Of Derby.

Who was also from Derby.

So when he studied at night school,

it was Joseph Wright who was the sort of guiding inspiration,

who played a lot with light, very dramatic light.

So the cinematic quality is almost coming out of 18th-century painting?

It is, yes.

A different Broomfield image

appeared in the Financial Times every week.

And he was photographer of choice for industrial corporate clients.

Yet his work retained a uniquely personal vision.

I think it was almost like a Soviet thing of like, men, and industry,

you know, of progress, "This is progress."

And of course it was progress in a way.

I mean, I think he regarded industry as creation.

It was an incredibly creative form.

The solutions it comes up with,

the patterns that it throws up in creating its products.

And I think that was the thing that fascinated him most.

This is an industrial Arcadia,

where workers become starlets, and the sweat,

toil and hardship are airbrushed from the picture.

He was very much somebody who composed pictures,

he wasn't somebody who took snaps.

So he would have acknowledged that these images

were projecting pride,

optimism, and perhaps that not being the whole story

-of the industrial landscape?

-Yeah, I think so.

And I think that was a real conflict in him.

He couldn't wait to get out of industry when, you know,

he managed to get out when he was about 20.

And then became a photographer,

being employed to make it look romantic and fantastic.

I think he had a real love-hate relationship with industry

because he saw all these people kind of

giving their lives up for a pretty thankless task.

In Broomfield's images, there is, beneath the glossy surface,

a tremor of uncertainty.

These workers were not really stars,

just human cogs serving a vast machine.

It was a new atomic age,

a world far removed from the ideal industrial paradise.

Fawley oil refinery was supposed to make us dream,

but the promise of a brighter tomorrow never quite delivered.

In Britain today,

you don't have to travel far to get

a taste of post-industrial apocalypse.

Redcar steelworks on Teesside produced steel

that helped build the Sydney Harbour Bridge,

the new World Trade Center and the Shard.

But its towering blast furnace,

once the second largest in Europe, stands idle.

3,000 jobs lost,

and the fiery core of this Teesside community extinguished.

Paul Warren worked here for over 30 years

before the plant's closure in 2015.

It was just, it's the heart, it's the heart of Teesside,

it's the heart of the community.

Someone within your family that you knew was attached to the steelworks.

It was a brilliant feeling of coming together as a community.

I remember coming to see this plant

when it was sort of a belching beast with flames and smoke.

How did that feel for you guys working in there?

Just the smells and the noises and the whole velocity of making steel

gave you that sense of achievement.

You were working towards something.

As well as your break. You were working towards an end product.

But, yes, at the end of the day, after your 12-hour shift,

to know that you contributed was a good self achievement.

It was just a great atmosphere of work.

Should you still be making steel here?

Definitely. Definitely, yes.

We should still be making steel on Teesside.

And if we were, we'd be making it well.

As I said that, water came to my eye.

It's tough. It's tough to reflect upon what obviously this means...

I left school at 16. I left school at 16, I went straight into there.

It's really, really sad to think that we've ended in this way.

Across the country,

industrial sites that helped build modern Britain are in disarray.

And it's become much harder for us to imagine

that these places belong any longer at the heart of our identity.

Industry has largely been redacted from our national self-portrait,

its ruins are rarely included in those lists

of Britain's most cherished heritage sites.

And to some extent,

we all do bear some responsibility for that neglect.

As an artist I've manufactured paintings using artistic license

to sell a romantic picture of our landscape.

And together we do collude with those who want us to buy into a

picturesque and prime-time vision of Britain.

You know, that view you get from the towers of Downton Abbey.

Politicians would have me believe that this is a tombstone,

but I can still feel the pulse of something big here.

It's like stumbling across a beached whale that's hopeless,

helpless, but still radiating an aura

of power and dignity in spite of its death.

Today, in this brave new world where we order up our life online,

in the lonely glow of a computer screen,

there is apparently no room for this any more.

And I, for one, I don't buy into that.

We are in the north, and this, this was once a powerhouse.

We are surrounded by monuments we should no longer ignore.

When engineers built our infrastructure, they created,

sometimes inadvertently, great industrial sculptures.

Icons of enlightened and functional beauty.

This is the Finnieston Crane in Glasgow,

and it's an object which has fascinated me all my life.

I've drawn it repeatedly.

It was designed with a purpose,

in order to load steam locomotives onto ships

for export all across the world,

but now it stands like a glorious Glaswegian Eiffel Tower,

a genuine work of industrial art.

I find that when we build modern monuments to our industrial past,

they're always a bit self-conscious, sentimental even.

I'm no great fan of the Angel Of The North or the Orbit,

they look to me like ostentatious pieces of industrial bling.

But this, the Finnieston Crane, is the real deal.

If we could begin to cherish

these neglected parts of our national heritage,

and the art that engages with industry,

then perhaps we might learn to see ourselves anew,

to recast our image of Britain.

And when we embrace the bond between art and industry,

creativity and science, then the future looks pretty extraordinary.

Don't mistake this for a cast-off from an episode of Robot Wars.

This is the very frontier of space technology.

And one day the sisters of this very rover will drill

their aluminium limbs deep into the surface of Mars,

a mere 429 million miles away.

They'll be searching for life,

and that's a picture of industry to blow your mind.

The laboratory where they are being tested

has been painstakingly created to match

the terrain and light conditions of Mars.

Yet it's situated on the outskirts of Stevenage.

It's just one part of a remarkable complex

where pioneering interplanetary space projects

are engineered and constructed.

It's the future as Maurice Broomfield imagined it

in his photographs.

One where the promises of a better world

are matched by the bizarre artistry of modern industry.

These creations wouldn't appear out of place

in a conceptual art gallery.

All of the projects we work on here are really inspirational,

they're all going to do incredible things,

and they're all going to space.

But the rover is just another level,

it's going to leave tracks on another planet

and touch another world, that's just incredible.

When I wander around here,

I can't help but think that all these satellites and rovers

look really sculptural, even down to the minutest little pipework.

Yes. A lot of the things that we design

you could put in a museum and nobody would know

if it was a sculptural piece or a technical, functional piece.

Engineering always has an aesthetic side of it.

If you can have something that fits the function but still is beautiful,

then absolutely, that's the best thing to have.

So they do become really quite beautiful sometimes.

I only became an engineer because I love art, I love making things,

creating things. Having an idea and seeing that built in real life.

And what I find quite amazing is

that so much of this process is not in itself robotosized,

it's individual people labouring quite intensely,

like monks, over specific parts.

Yeah, it never ceases to amaze me how manual all the processes

that go into making a rover are,

because we're only making one of them.

It's not like a mass production of a car.

The fact that it is handmade

just gives it such a human aspect that

you're not just sending a machine into space,

you're sending the heart of all those people that made it.

I think it is just extraordinary to hear directly from a space engineer

that art, artistry,

art history, creating beauty has a place amongst all of this.

I find that really life affirming.

And I think that these two elements should be brought closer more often.

Fortunately, a new generation of budding artists

and engineers are rising to the challenge.

So this robot is called the Scuttle Bug.

My rover is called the Rock Buster.

This Mars rover is called Peake Box, inspired by Tim Peake.

The name is Rocky.

And it has, like, solar powers.

So my robot is called Dust Walker.

My robot is called Mars Dog 2.0.

He's got wheels that he rolls on,

but then if they break down, he can walk.

And then I've got a thermal imaging camera,

which can see if there's any life hiding in the rocks.

The main body is based on an anteater.

The whisk on his nose is a drill.

I find the art of industry endlessly inspiring

because it's not just about the past and who we've been,

it's about who we are and where we're going.

It's about human ambition.

And sitting here on Mars,

it feels to me that it's actually about

reaching out and grasping at

the furthest limits of human possibility.

You'll have to forgive me for painting at least one landscape.

And after all, Mars does present me

with a curiously picturesque panorama.