The Blacksmith's Tale Metalworks!

This is the story of one man...

one man central to society,

a man who has had many faces over the centuries...

often misunderstood, sometimes feared, but always called upon.

He'd be making every single tool for every other craft.

No other craftsman could work without the products of the blacksmith.

From his earliest beginnings, the blacksmith's creations in iron,

wrought by hand, drove society forward.

In the Industrial Age, both the blacksmith's wrought

and the founder's cast iron would be harnessed for their unique strength

to lay the foundation of our modern world.

But this story is not just one of industry and practicality,

it's the story of man's urge to embellish, decorate

and bring beauty to the objects he crafted.

Once you get inside and you look up at this dome,

it's almost like St Paul's Cathedral itself.

It's fantastic. Absolutely amazing.

From this ancient craft have sprung some of the most awe-inspiring aspects of the world around us.

That man is the blacksmith, and this is his story.

Ancient people first discovered iron in meteorites

and began to work objects from this seemingly heaven-sent metal.

But soon, they discovered the means of smelting iron from ore,

and with this discovery, the foundation of our civilisation was laid.

The Iron Age was born.

The method of making iron hasn't changed over the centuries.

First of all, you need your iron ore.

With that, you then need charcoal, and you put the iron ore

and the charcoal in the furnace.

You create the heat by putting a blast into the furnace with bellows,

and you eventually end up with a bloom of iron.

That...is a bloom of iron.

From the bloom, impurities are hammered out to make a billet,

and from there, the blacksmith's art can begin.

Well, wrought iron has that huge advantage of being strong,

really, really strong.

METAL CLANGS

Before iron was used, it was woodwork.

It was timber. Timber fences, timber gates,

and those could be hacked down or burnt.

Iron is super-strong, and wrought iron is quite bendy, too,

so that it will give a bit but it won't break under hammer blows.

-HAMMER TAPS

-It's like plasticine when it's hot.

It bends in a very elegant way.

BIRDS CHIRP

With fire, hammer, tongs and anvil,

the blacksmith could make whatever he could forge.

The only limit was the amount of iron available

and the blacksmith's imagination.

Then, as today, the smith's craft offers the possibility of both

practical purpose and artistic ambition.

When you've got a piece of yellow-hot iron under the hammer,

it will move, but you've got to make it move the way YOU want it to,

because it will go anywhere it wants otherwise,

so you've got to get that hammer to come down on the metal at exactly the right angle,

and to stop working it when it gets too cold.

HAMMER TAPS

A blacksmith will put his character into his work, because that's his personality.

Their work becomes individual,

and this is the nice thing about, you know, being handmade.

We are so used today of taking things off the shelf

and they are always the same.

Well, years ago, they weren't.

METAL THUDS

As early as 800 BC, the blacksmith in Britain

was making domestic knives and cooking implements,

cutting edges for farming tools...

..and powerful blades for war.

The man behind these creations would become society's most important craftsman.

Respected and feared in equal measure,

the blacksmith was the most useful man in any medieval village.

I think the blacksmith was a central figure in society,

certainly in the Middle Ages and right through,

probably, in villages, until the 19th century.

He was there for all the people in the community,

right from the Lord down to the lowly serf.

If the lowly serf wanted a couple of nails to nail something together,

he would go to the blacksmith. Everybody had access to him.

We made not just our own tools, but everybody else's tools as well.

Without their tools, they couldn't work,

so you daren't upset the blacksmith.

The blacksmith was the man you went to if you needed a tooth pulled out.

He was strong and had the equipment. Doesn't really bear thinking about.

METAL CLANGS

In early village society, the blacksmith's skills appeared almost supernatural,

and it was these "magical powers" that were often misunderstood.

He did everything, and you've got to remember,

the blacksmith was also seen in a mystical light.

The fact that he could control the fire was magical.

They were suspicious of the blacksmith.

You know, he had these magic powers.

Some people thought they were magicians.

It's probably where the thought of the devil in burning hell started.

You go into a blacksmith's shop, is dark, it's dingy,

there's the smoke, there's the flames,

there's the sparks when he hits the metal, so it can be quite frightening.

Way back in myth, you have Hephaestus,

the Greek god of smithing, who becomes Vulcan, the Roman god.

They live in Mount Etna inside a volcano,

and in the Scandinavian legends and Anglo-Saxon legends as well,

you have smiths like Wayland and Alberich the dwarf

and Volund and so on,

who are all slightly supernatural characters with magical powers.

Swart smith smirched with smoke

Drive us to death By the din of the dints

Such noise a knight Will ne'er heard, never

Such clashing of cries And clattering of knocks

The craftsmen clamour For coal, coal, coal!

And blow their bellows Their brains, to burst.

The blacksmith was an alchemist, transforming base metal into invaluable objects.

But his strong, practical products

could also be highly embellished pieces of beauty.

I really love making decorative work, more traditional pieces.

The majority of these techniques are passed down from generation to generation.

This is called a ribbon scroll

and it's just like a ribbon of iron, that's all.

So I'll just start to bend the very tip.

There are seven basic principles of wrought iron work -

fire welding. I don't think you can call yourself a blacksmith

if you can't fire-weld two pieces of wrought iron together.

So we've got welding, we've got punching, punching holes,

we've got splitting with a chisel...

It's my theory that the first two tools ever invented were the hammer and chisel.

Twisting, we grab hold of it and we turn it round when it's hot.

Then we've got bending. The scroll is a perfect example.

Number six is drawing down.

You've heard the expression "long and drawn out."

This is where we might have a bar that's, say, 25mm square,

an inch square, and we forge it down to a nice, sharp point.

So I'm just changing the cross-section of it, drawing it out.

METAL CLANGS

The reverse of that is upsetting the bar. Jumping it up.

You might have heard the term,

somebody might be "a little bit jumped up."

This means they're appearing bigger than they truly are.

You can see how that's much thicker than it is on there.

These techniques, the blacksmith's craft,

allowed society to power forward.

Medieval objects like hinges and grilles offered strength

and support, but they weren't just practical.

At its best, smithing could be the harmonious realisation of function and decorative form.

But in the mediaeval era, iron was precious and expensive.

It was only when patrons of wealth and power commissioned work

that its full potential could be realised.

And the biggest patron of iron in the 12th century was the Church.

This is St Helens in Stillingfleet, near York.

In this unassuming village church,

survives a piece of blacksmithing that was truly miraculous.

This iron hinge opened the door,

but it's also one of the earliest examples of the metal being used

for much more than its strength alone.

Here, for the first time, iron is being used to tell a story -

Noah's Ark, Adam and Eve and The Fall.

This religious iconography instructed local villagers

to remember the lessons of the Bible at a time when they couldn't read the holy book written in Latin.

In this hinge, iron's purpose was not merely strength,

but spiritual sermon, as the iron reached out to local parishioners

and showed them that the way to salvation was through this door.

We don't know how much this impulse to tell a story came from the smith or his patron,

but this rare example of storytelling in iron

shows the breadth of possibility and imagination of the time.

But sometimes, for the smith, it was as simple as decoration purely for decoration's sake.

It would also, often, go into curliewurlies, as I call them.

S-scrolls and C-scrolls seem to be very naturally suited to iron.

I think it's the shape iron assumes when it's hot, and then it goes cold.

One of the first manifestations of this curlywurly scroll work

can be seen in this ornate hinge dating from around 1160,

and originally from St Albans Cathedral.

It's thought that it was one of the big doors,

the so-called side door to the Abbey.

And it's enormous because it would have covered this very large, Romanesque door.

Obviously, these hinges from St Albans with their lovely S and C-shaped scrolls

were serving a function, but, above all, they were decorative.

But they weren't just decorative - they covered the wood,

and that meant they strengthened that oak door against hammer blows

or whoever was trying to break into the cathedral or abbey.

That was their purpose.

These elaborate objects reveal the medieval blacksmiths' urge to decorate,

but they don't reveal their sources.

We don't know who made these.

In the mediaeval era, the blacksmith was largely anonymous -

a craftsman who rarely signed his work.

But in the 13th century, towns and cities were evolving,

and the English craftsman starts to emerge from the shadows.

From coinmakers to bookbinders, masons to hammermen,

each had its own craft guild to regulate apprenticeships

and ensure the highest quality.

Named artisans began to appear, and amongst them,

the master smiths of the day.

One such name can be found in Windsor.

In the 1240s,

King Henry III commissioned a church in honour of Edward the Confessor,

today, part of St George's Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle.

Part of that commission was for the splendid doors, which, even today,

are reserved solely for use by the monarch and royal family.

These doors really provide the impact that one would expect

from medieval decorative ironwork.

In the Middle Ages, colour was an incredibly important part of all architectural decoration,

and this use of the red and gold is completely appropriate,

and I think it makes an enormous difference to see iron painted gold,

because it emphasises the precious nature of this metal.

This design is The Tree of Life.

The smith behind this is using a revolutionary new stampwork technique

to create these uniform leaves,

but amongst the leaves lie two other stamps

that could actually reveal its maker's secrets.

Here, we've got a circular stamp with a long-cross coin in it here,

and we also have an oval stamp three times over,

with the name Gilibertus on it.

Coinmakers are the only craftsmen in the Middle Ages

who systematically have to put their names on their products.

Sure enough, here is the only door we've got from the Middle Ages with the name, a name, on it.

Here, in all its gilded glory, we may be looking at the very first

piece of ironwork that we can attribute to a named smith.

Now, obviously, the name Gilibertus could refer to anybody.

It could be the patron, but it could also be the smith who made it.

And it so happens that amongst the very small number of smiths

who were commissioned to make the long-cross coinage,

there is listed Gilbert the Bonnington,

who was the royal coinmaker working in Canterbury.

And he would have had precisely the skills to make this work.

He knew how to do stamps, he worked in gold, he made the long-cross coin,

AND his name was Gilbert, and he was known by the king.

What we are seeing in these 13th century doors

is our most visible early example of fine skills from other crafts

crossing over into iron.

This rich cross-pollination of trades would shape the future of smithing.

In the late mediaeval era,

specialist skills would push the blacksmith's art

to the very pinnacle of achievement.

In this 15th century abbot's cupboard from Whalley in Lancashire,

we see the smith using elaborate techniques

to embellish beyond necessity.

But beneath the decoration,

iron was still being depended upon to strengthen and protect.

Ironwork is always associated with protection and fear,

and therefore security. You want to secure your valuables.

We think that keys start to be being made in the west in iron in about the 14th century.

This is one of the earliest 14th or 15th centuries, very simple.

Rather nice little diamond shape,

and the bit at the bottom, perhaps the earliest mediaeval key.

This one might be about the same date, 15th century,

but it's more elaborate.

I think the decoration entirely depends on the amount of money

the patron wanted to spend on that particular object.

By the end of the 15th century,

wealthy patrons, such as the church and monarchy,

were handpicking known craftsmen at the top of their game

to match a commission's requirements.

When King Edward IV commissioned the Cornish smith John Tresilion

to make these Gothic gates here in Windsor in 1497,

he did so with good reason.

These gates are one of the most astonishing pieces of craftsmanship

ever to survive from the Middle Ages.

They are the gates which were going to protect the tomb of King Edward IV.

They were intended, and they were actually covered in gold plate,

so the whole thing would have seemed like the entry into celestial realms.

When you look at the refinement of all these tiny pieces of tracery,

it's quite clear that this is the work of a master craftsman.

At the top here, you're dealing with really miniature architecture

that is more like a jewel than a gate,

which is, after all, a piece of serious protection.

No blacksmith, ordinary blacksmith, who was used to making horseshoes

could ever dream of working to this standard of perfection.

The precision that comes in with the cold bench work and the files and the chisels and so on

is partly being driven by advances in science

because, at the same time as blacksmiths were trying to create architectural features,

there was another range of the whole craft skill, still smiths,

who were working at mechanical clocks.

It appears like a completely unified structure of immense complexity

but it's actually made out of lots and lots of very small component units

and they are simply held together by pegs.

Exactly what they use for making clocks.

The introduction of mechanical clocks

seems to be happening in the late 13th, early 14th centuries

and obviously these are requiring ratchets and wheels made

with very great precision in order to make clockwork operate properly.

And these are being made of iron and by blacksmiths.

The royal building accounts show that actually John Tresilion

also worked elsewhere for the king as his clockmaker,

and that's crucial because clocks were made of iron,

but in order to make a clock work, you needed to be able to design cog wheels

of scientific precision, and I think that completely explains what we're seeing here.

We're seeing a craftsman who can work with the precision of a scientific toolmaker.

From the solitary image of the mediaeval smith in his village forge

to the highly sophisticated craftsman sharing specialised skills

within organised trades, the blacksmith had come a long way.

This piece is testament to his journey

through the scientific progress and artistic advances of the time.

But over the next horizon, iron was about to enter a golden age

where its decorative potential would be exploited like nothing before.

In this era, what would drive ironwork forward

would come from beyond the country's shores.

This is William III's Hampton Court,

rebuilt in 1689 by the country's leading architect, Sir Christopher Wren.

William and Mary had crossed the sea from Holland

to take the English throne earlier that year, and settled here.

They wanted a magnificent palace to compete with the baroque palaces of Europe

and to impress their foreign rivals.

To realise this, the royal couple employed not only the country's greatest designers,

but the best craftsmen in Europe

and the exceptional iron work that they commissioned here

would raise the bar for blacksmithing in Britain once again.

Jean Tijou is probably the greatest worker in iron,

certainly of the 18th century.

His work is totally flamboyant.

It is really ironwork taken to its absolute limit.

I mean, some of it you wouldn't believe you could do with iron.

The skill Tijou brought across the seas

was a fine new technique called repousse -

the delicate hammering of sheet iron from the back

to create decoration in relief which could then be overlaid onto a main iron structure.

Now welded joints were clothed in acanthus leaves, masks,

and luxuriant vegetation.

And decorative motifs were given more prominence than structure.

Much of Tijou's repousse work here has been restored,

but some of his original work survives.

Well, he must have worked at some high status building

to have acquired this repousse work that he was a master of.

Little is known of Jean Tijou, the man.

What we do know is that he was a French Huguenot

who may have trained at Versailles,

and his work was so fine that the monarch himself may have recommended him to Wren.

In the 21 years he worked in England,

he elevated blacksmithing to a fine art and became THE sought-after named smith.

But Tijou's gift to British iron,

and the British blacksmiths to follow him, was not his ironwork alone.

In 1693, he published a book of groundbreaking designs

that would revolutionise blacksmithing

and spread his lavish baroque style throughout the land.

The frontispiece to the new book of design has an image

which we think may be the only image of Tijou.

He's described as being dressed in a riding coat, so this must be him.

Whether this is Tijou or not, with this book his legacy was forged.

In Jean Tijou, the blacksmith had become a designer.

And in the burgeoning British economy of the 18th century,

the designer in iron would be crucial.

England's power balance was shifting.

Wealth and power was spreading from the church and monarchy into the hands of the landed gentry.

Wealthy landowners were the new patrons

and the gardens of their country estates became major statements

about money, sophistication, and power.

For the new breed of blacksmith designers,

this was their professional playground.

Some of the most spectacular wrought iron was produced in the 18th century.

There are very good examples by named blacksmiths in various parts of England,

whether it's Oxford, Cambridge, London, the west, Bristol, Wales,

very good examples where wrought iron was used to its full advantage.

Regional landowners commissioned the finest local smiths they could find.

Their appetite for iron allowed master smiths, inspired by Jean Tijou, to develop their own style.

Thomas Robinson had worked under Tijou at St Paul's

but now made his own mark in gates for Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

William Edney impressed in Bristol

and the Davis brothers captured the market in Wales.

It's hand worked and in many of these examples you can really visualise the iron being pulled and twisted

and fantastic effects of acanthus leaves, of scrolls, of twisted stems.

It was recognised that an enormous amount of skill was involved

in producing these creations in wrought iron.

If Tijou brought a continental baroque across the seas,

now these named smiths were heading up the British baroque

and their subtler application of Tijou's designs

was more suited to a restrained British palate.

The 18th-century really was the golden age for ironwork.

Simon Grant-Jones is a specialist blacksmith who draws heavily

on the styles and techniques from this golden age.

Today, Simon is busy working on a baroque style wheel for Kingston Maurward in Dorset.

The ironwork was beautifully done

and then it was further enhanced by laying over the top

these acanthus leaves which we call faced acanthus leaves.

They're actually on the face of the ironwork.

Simon draws much of his inspiration from one blacksmith

now recognised as perhaps the finest of the 18th century, Robert Bakewell.

It was the unique and ambitious piece Bakewell made here

at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire that helped make his name.

In 1706, the right honourable Thomas Cook

was modifying the family's country residence at Melbourne

and wanted to design a splendid garden with the latest features popular on the continent.

Impressed by the work of a local blacksmith, Cook commissioned a young Robert Bakewell

to make him an arbour directly opposite the hall.

The idea came from the wooden trellis work arbours

which were popular in England and France,

but no one had attempted such a structure in wrought iron before.

This is just absolutely overwhelming.

Once you get inside and you look up at this dome,

it's almost like St Paul's Cathedral itself.

It's fantastic, absolutely amazing.

You can see that it's all got its purpose.

Very, very busy, and I think the real art to ironwork such as this

is that you can't see everything in one look.

You've got to stand here. I could stand here for hours

and look at this, and see something different every time.

I can see some of the repousse work.

This in particular is really well-defined

and you can see how the design just jumps out at you.

These acanthus leaves, they're all beaten out of wrought iron

and they're riveted into place, but they look as if they are growing from the design,

which is how they're supposed to look.

This is just oozing life.

These water leaves, bearing in mind they're really thin,

they're probably only a couple of millimetres thick

and they would have had to have been fire welded onto this main bar which is a really difficult thing to do.

I'm sure he must have messed up quite a few of these,

as we all do when we're making these because it's got to be just right.

Too hot and you melt the lot and it's gone, just like that.

A lot of people criticise this mask as being comic on the front,

and Bakewell was obviously a very well accomplished repousse worker

and I'm sure if he'd wanted to do something more spectacular, then he could have done.

It's well within his capabilities.

My personal feeling is that he was probably having a little bit of a dig at somebody.

Sometimes it's what craftspeople do.

We have a bit of a sideways snipe at somebody and it's my opinion

that Bakewell was probably having a bit of a snipe at somebody.

Maybe his rich patron?

Robert Bakewell lived and worked on this estate for seven years.

The birdcage was his masterpiece, but his time here was busy.

His contract included making all the ironwork in the grounds

and he made it all here

in this small cottage in the shadow of his master's house.

This would have been his hearth.

There would have been a set of bellows somewhere externally fed into the fire

and there would have been a handle at easy reach somewhere around here

that the smith could work the bellows and control the fire.

And, when you're quenching in here,

you would have had the steam mixing with the smoke from the fire.

The smoke from the fire, the fumes from the fire,

the heat from the fire, the glare of the fire.

It must have been quite unbearable at times to work in such a confined environment.

Here in the hall, a fragile handwritten letter from the time

tells us that, as this craftsman scaled new heights of elegance and sophistication,

his skill was still grossly undervalued by his master.

What we've got here is a really interesting letter from Thomas Cook's sister, Betsy,

who was actually running Melbourne Hall when he was in London.

"He's got a shopfitting up at Derby and is so miserable poor

"that I believe he can't remove without some money."

This suggests to me that he was actually still owed money for the wonderful work that he did.

The blacksmith had come a long way from village toolmaker

to celebrated designer of magnificent ornamental work.

But the time-consuming efforts required to handcraft everything

meant that not only was the finest work reserved for the richest of society,

but the smith himself could never produce enough work to make a substantial fortune.

But with the dawning of the industrial era,

ironwork would be mass produced and fortunes were about to be made.

The age of the engineer and the entrepreneur was about to begin.

Those who grasped that growing molten metal on vast new scales

of quantity and size would move the story of metalwork forwards apace.

In 1779, when Abraham Darby built the world's first iron bridge here in Shropshire,

he built it from an entirely different kind of iron - cast iron.

Now iron could not only be used to decorate the houses and gardens of the very rich,

it could also be used as a structural material on an unprecedented scale.

This bridge was the first step in showing iron's huge structural and industrial potential.

It's the epitome of what you could do with iron on a large scale.

There's 378 tonnes of iron in that structure.

Iron wasn't used in those quantities 70 years before,

iron was the reserve of the fixtures and fittings

in a different world that was made out of wood, stone, and dead animals,

but now you could use iron in its own right to produce huge dramatic structures.

This is Coalbrookdale in Shropshire.

Today it's a World Heritage site

but at the start of the 18th century this coal-rich village on the River Severn

would give birth to the modern industry.

Darby's bridge was a monument to the dream started here by his grandfather 70 years earlier.

When Abraham Darby I came here in 1707, he wasn't making bridges.

He started out with the humble cooking pot.

If you look at the cast iron cooking pot, it's quite a simple thing.

This was a time when people roasted things or boiled things,

there wasn't much else to do, so everybody wanted one of these things.

Up till now, cast iron was used to make specialised heat-resistant products

like cannon and firebacks,

but Abraham Darby had worked in the brass trade

where they were perfecting fine casting of cooking pots.

Now the young innovator saw the potential for the mass production of everyday objects from the metal.

There's no new technology here, all the technology was around,

but what he then does is bring iron to it.

Cast iron had come to England in 1496 with the arrival of the blast furnace from Europe.

It was iron with a higher carbon content than pure wrought iron,

superheated until it melted in the new hotter furnaces.

Casting is the quickest way of making quite a complicated shape.

You make the mould, you pour the liquid metal in,

the liquid metal freezes off, and there's your finished product.

Traditional charcoal furnaces could only produce small amounts of iron

but the scale of Darby's ambition needed something with a bit more kick.

Coke, the new wonder fuel, burnt at higher temperatures

and for longer than charcoal.

Coke came from coal and Derby knew he would find plenty here.

The whole point about the gorge is it cuts through the bottom, along the Shropshire coalfield.

This... Leafy, as it is today,

it was one of the busiest coalfields in the world at the beginning of the 18th century.

It all happened here because you've got all the ingredients.

Not only have you got the raw materials, but you've also crucially got that river,

and the river was essential because it's the river

that brought the entrepreneurs up and allowed them to get their raw materials down.

It's all here on the coalfield.

This is how the iron bridge would have been made. You can see inside the mould

because you haven't got protection from the top half of the mould,

but that should solidify now and leave you with an open cast.

Today, furnaces at Coalbrookdale are still active,

part tourist attraction, part working foundry,

they're using age-old methods passed down from Abraham Darby's time.

This is the coke that Abraham Darby discovered.

This is going to be the heat source

that will melt the iron into a liquid.

From two seemingly modest innovations,

casting iron pots and smelting with coke, Darby had invented an affordable means of mass production

and the seeds of Britain's industrial revolution were sown.

It's a small step then. If you can make a cooking pot,

you can make engine components, you can make machine components.

Moulding those in sand, you can mass-produce them

so all of that comes together in Coalbrookdale by the middle of the 18th century.

They kind of write the book on how to make iron on a large scale.

In the 18th century, men of industry and ideas would thrust iron forward.

In 1796, Charles Bage designed the world's first iron framed building.

Paintings of the time put the cast iron foundry at the heart of Britain's new industrial landscape

and reflected the ambivalence of a population both excited by and fearful of their changing world.

But Coalbrookdale had sown a seed that was to grow and grow.

In the north, a Scottish powerhouse of cast iron was emerging.

Manned to the hilt and just as innovative in their approach,

the vision of the Carron Company was somewhat different.

The Carron company was established in 1759

and it was the first large-scale industrial concern in Scotland.

It was incredibly important.

It really established the possibilities of cast iron for decoration.

They produced the most amazing variety of works

so their output was vast and various.

Everything from pots and pans to these very elegant pedestal stoves and hob grates

which were the top end of their domestic products.

From the breadth of their products to their early use of trade catalogues,

the Carron company pioneered high-end mass produced cast iron.

And when they teamed up with the most extraordinary designer of the day,

they would transform Georgian architecture.

Robert Adam was the most celebrated and prolific architect of his day.

He was producing works in the style that had become so fashionable.

It was light, it was elegant, it was sophisticated,

it was the high end of design and in terms of ironwork,

the partnership between a very successful designer

and this extremely effective and efficient production company,

which the Carron company was, was extremely successful in the 18th century.

With mass production came the mass market,

and where before there was one patron commissioning bespoke wrought iron, now there were many.

The new urban chattering classes had money

and wanted style that spoke of their status, but for an affordable price.

Adam caught that style, he caught that view that people wanted to have a elegant houses

and yet not have to pay as much money as they would have had with other materials.

Adam's design was all about unity

and it's when we look at the exteriors of his Georgian terraces

that we can appreciate the full effect of his ornamental cast iron.

Cast iron was perfect for identical multiples,

so in a Georgian terrace of houses, you wanted each balcony to look exactly the same.

You didn't want the individual flair of wrought iron,

you wanted a unified look, a unified appearance

of a whole row of houses together,

and so the whole idea of replicating an object again and again

exactly the same, but using these wonderfully elegant designs,

was really what the architects were after.

Without cast iron, the streets would be pretty bare.

We take for granted sometimes the balconies, the railings,

the lamp holders, the brackets.

There's a whole range of different objects where cast iron has been used across the country.

It's the combination of function and ornament which is cast iron's real strength.

The Georgian era brought the finest mass produced iron to a broader swathe of society.

The vogue for cast iron on our streets would last well into Queen Victoria's reign

and change the visual landscape of our cities.

Now, iron was everywhere.

Cast iron brought decorative metal to the masses

and also offered strength in compression

that lent itself to bridges and supporting columns for buildings,

but wrought iron, too, would find a very important role of its own.

It was bendy and offered far greater strength in tension than cast iron.

And those who discovered how to make wrought iron on an unprecedented scale

helped thrust Britain forward into the industrial age.

The smith has always been at the forefront of technology and industry.

Once he'd learnt how to smelt iron, he's always wanted to make more,

but he was limited by his knowledge of the material

and the size of the furnace that he could make, and also the blast.

The amount of air that he could pump in.

In the 19th century, new, better smelting processes could produce more iron

with large blooms heated in powerful furnaces.

Now, alongside cast, wrought iron, the original blacksmiths material,

had scaled up and could be rolled out with the new industrial machines.

We were conquering the world, if you like, at that stage

and iron was the wonder material.

This stronger iron was now needed to be rolled to make rails for the railways

and beaten and pulled into sheets for panels to make warships.

An iron boat could actually carry more than a timber boat.

It was more robust, would have a longer life.

Wrought iron was in higher demand than ever before.

The new blacksmiths were technicians and engineers,

making big strong structures for industry.

As the 19th century progressed,

the great architects of the high Victorian era would recognise the immense potential

for wrought and cast iron in new forms of civic architecture.

The first iron and glass buildings were greenhouses for Victorian botanical collections,

like the Palm House at Kew. When this was built in 1844, it set a precedent.

Cast iron was used for the uprights, and wrought iron used to span large horizontal widths.

But the greatest feat of Victorian iron architecture

was Joseph Paxton's giant glasshouse for the great exhibition of 1851,

a network of iron poles sustaining pains of clear glass

that became known as the Crystal Palace.

The innovation of the Crystal Palace

is the employment of a modular construction

which is completely prefabricated.

It's made of many different units, replicated over and over again,

cast and wrought.

In Crystal Palace, the architect and engineer

finally understood how to make structural ironwork on its own terms.

Their breakthrough allowed them to create

this unprecedentedly huge exhibition space from glass and iron.

I think one of the most astonishing parts of this story

is that Joseph Paxton is always credited as the creator of the Crystal Palace,

and famously he drew it on the back of a napkin.

What is forgotten is that his partner, and the person who actually make this dream come true,

was the ironmaster, who is Charles Fox of Smethwick.

Paxton, sent by penny post the minute he'd won the competition for the exhibition hall,

he sent a letter to Charles Fox to start making the multiple pieces

that were required, and Charles Fox managed in less than a year

on time, on budget, to get the whole thing assembled.

Tragically, Fox's masterpiece was destroyed by fire in 1936,

but the technology he brokered in Crystal Palace didn't die in the flames.

It was also deployed to hugely impressive effect

in the new style railway station architecture.

Fast and dignified train sheds needed to serve the new railway age.

Railway stations are probably the best example

of cast iron and wrought iron being used together.

You go into any Victorian or Edwardian railway station for that matter

and have a look up - cast iron columns, wrought iron beams.

By the Victorian period, the design of the structures was really cracked.

Crystal Palace had been twice the size of St Paul's Cathedral,

but in 1868, St Pancras made it look small.

The new station became the largest enclosed space in the world.

William Henry Barlow's triumphant train shed

had a single span of 74 metres

rising 30 metres high in a wrought iron arch

with the undercroft area spaced by over 800 cast iron pillars.

These are the great glasshouses of Victorian Britain.

Here, wrought and cast iron are used harmoniously together for their strengths.

In architectural terms, they're the cathedrals of their day.

In 1850, Britain was the centre of the Great British empire

and the centre of modern industry.

A place the rest of the world could only aspire to,

but in the Victorian age, Britain would sell her image of progress across the world.

Walter MacFarlane was the man behind Saracen foundry,

the greatest cast iron exporter of the late Victorian era.

By 1871, his prolific foundry in Possil, Glasgow

had turned a tiny suburb into a thriving hub of global industry.

But it wasn't only a factory.

Saracens was also a vast showroom, where prefabricated goods,

from gutters and bandstands to entire railway stations,

were proudly displayed.

What Walter MacFarlane did was take the vision for marketing,

and this concept of, you know, the IKEA of the day,

the cast iron catalogue, hundreds of pages long,

and being able to put structures together and order them from the other side of the world.

That was his gift.

Saracen baths and bandstands, fountains and even whole building facades,

are still to be found the world over from Madras in India to Mendoza in Argentina.

If you were an Indian prince and you wanted to have a state-of-the-art building,

you would use cast iron to demonstrate how up-to-date you were

and there was a cachet about having a structure made

from the famous Saracen ironworks and shipped to your country, overseas.

Today, Saracen is no more, but Laing's foundry is a small family business in Edinburgh

doing its best to keep the traditions alive.

Using Saracen's original designs, they cast iron in the traditional way

and are still exporting ornamental iron all around the world.

We are producing the cast iron griffin,

which is from the Drayton Fountain of Walter MacFarlane's design.

McFarlane's castings, volume number two of the catalogue.

Here we are, here.

The 21.

You can see here at the top above the arches, the griffins,

which we've been working on today.

Nothing here is different from in MacFarlane's day.

A three-dimensional wooden pattern is still used to make the mould out of sand.

The only difference is that on the Saracen's shop floor

a large workforce was busy making a huge array of objects.

Walter MacFarlane had a vision of a world full of iron.

Street scene of Walter MacFarlane's, which they envisaged.

You can clearly see the cast iron lamp columns and lamp posts.

The horse trough with a column on it

and even a cast iron urinal in the centre.

A great age it was within the Victorian time.

It was the material of its time. You can only compare it now to plastic.

When you think of all the items we use in plastic today,

it was the equivalent back then, but all in cast iron. Phenomenal.

The blue flames coming from the mould is just hydrogen gas,

which was formed by the molten metal coming into contact with the damp sand.

At one point we had 500 foundries in Scotland doing architectural iron

and they were all competing against each other.

Not necessarily on price, but on the quality and standard and what they could supply.

I'm just trying to break open the mould while it is still warm like this, just to let you see it.

Everything looks fine. You can see the shape of that coming through.

It looks good.

Today, Laing's foundry is doing its best to keep the tradition of Great British cast iron alive.

A throwback to the days of the Empire, when Britain was in the business

of exporting its ideology to all corners of the globe.

Back home though, the market was more sophisticated

and all was not lost for the individual, designing and crafting in iron.

The idea of bespoke pieces with great skilled smiths behind them

would be resurrected in the work of the most prolific architect of the day,

George Gilbert Scott.

Scott was an impassioned trailblazer for the Gothic revival,

a movement which looked to the mediaeval past for inspiration.

He was commissioned to make this screen for Hereford Cathedral

on the strength of his work designing new churches

and restoring traditional choir screens.

The Hereford screen was a luxuriously extravagant exhibition piece

with a whole host of techniques working in harmony.

A jewel in the story of iron.

It is made of a huge variety of different metals - copper,

electroformed copper, brass, and, above all, iron,

wrought and cast iron, and painted.

The cast iron, rather like lamp posts,

are the bases of the columns, covered now in stencilling, rather colourful.

Those are definitely cast iron, rather like drainpipes.

Fancy drainpipes.

The wrought iron are the lovely grills, four on each side,

and the gates, in part.

Those are all wrought iron with the little leaves and the passion flowers

in the middle of those quatrefoils, all painted now and gilded.

All of that is wrought.

When George Gilbert Scott was given the commission,

he called on the skills of Francis Skidmore,

an exceptional metal smith and a Gothic revivalist

who worked iron using the traditional craftsmanship of the master blacksmith.

Francis Skidmore was a remarkable, versatile man,

born in 1816 and died in 1896 so he was a real man of the 19th century.

His father was a silversmith and jeweller,

and the two of them worked together in the 1840s on precious metal,

but Skidmore became much more interested in base metal,

in copper and, above all, iron. He was obsessed about iron,

and by the 1860s had a very large workshop, and a workforce of over 200 people.

This work was a collaboration,

a vision in many metals including irons cast and wrought,

but it was also the creation of two men, designer and smith.

Scott and Skidmore clearly got on, though we know from Scott's biography

that he found Skidmore a little bit annoying sometimes.

"Mr Skidmore has kicked over the traces" is one phrase that I seem to remember.

In other words, Skidmore obviously received Scott's designs and then added a bit.

We don't know how much Skidmore designed

but the Hereford screen couldn't have been made without the fine artistry of the blacksmith.

When it was shown at the International exhibition in 1862,

it was heralded the grandest, most triumphal achievement of architectural art.

Further endorsement came just a year later

when Scott won the commission for the Albert Memorial

and the duo produced another collaborative triumph.

But in this era of Victorian ingenuity,

far larger forces were at work.

One man's invention was about to change the course of history for iron and its craftsmen.

In 1855, engineer Henry Bessemer patented his converter for turning iron into steel,

which was wrought iron with a tiny amount of carbon added to strengthen it.

With steel now cheaper to produce than it had been, and far stronger than wrought,

it took over from iron in large-scale industry overnight.

Today, working smiths have to use either recycled iron or mild steel

as Britain's last commercial wrought ironworks closed its doors in 1974.

Working wrought iron is really totally different to working steel

and I actually know some old blacksmiths who gave up forge working in the 1970s

because the steel that they were now forced to use was too hard to hammer.

Steel is superseded wrought iron and steel is much harder to work

but the techniques and the processes are basically the same as working wrought iron.

Speaking of today, the early 21st century,

end of the last century, I suppose there are three influences at work.

There is the continuance of the conservative tradition.

Naturally the need to repair 18th-century gates, particularly,

but also the wish of many people to have 18th-century-style ironwork.

There's the work being done by people who are using modern tools

and creating modern designs,

but very much in the blacksmithing tradition.

Finally, there's the use of iron in a non-blacksmithing context.

The use of iron by designers like Wendy Ramshaw

who was trained as a jeweller, is a wonderful jeweller,

startling new gates and grills.

Now, niche markets for traditional work

and new architectural commissions are keeping the craft and design alive.

The story of the blacksmith is twofold.

In iron, art and science have come together.

Iron has used technology's advances to propel us forward.

It has given us protection and strength,

and transformed Britain into an industrial force on a national and global stage.

But right from the start,

the ironworker's urge to individualise and decorate his work has also given us beauty.

In our churches, on our houses, and on our streets.

The blacksmith has shaped our world.