Painting the Town The Victorians

It was the best of times...

..it was the worst of times.

The Victorian age was one of soaring ambition...

..technological wonder...

..and awesome grandeur.

As well as ugliness...

..squalor...

..and misery on an unprecedented scale.

The Victorians knew life was changing faster than ever before.

And they recorded that change in paintings that were the cinema of their day.

These paintings aren't fashionable, and they

don't generally change hands for millions of pounds in auction rooms, but to me, they're a goldmine.

They show us like nothing else what it was like to live in those incredible times.

And they tell amazing stories.

The most dramatic story of the age was the explosion of giant cities.

To our Victorian forefathers, they were a terrific shock.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne, people were at best uneasy at, and at worst

utterly terrified by, these vast gatherings of humanity. Nothing like them had existed before.

But by the time she died, the men and women of the age had pioneered

an entirely new way of living. They had invented the modern city.

At the dawn of the 19th century, Britain was on the move.

Rumours had reached even the remotest villages and hamlets of

incredible developments just over the horizon,

towns bigger than anyone could imagine,

astounding new machines

and money to be made for those ready to take the risk.

My own great-great-great-grandfather was in that tide of humanity that

left the land in search of a better life.

He, his wife and four of their children travelled to the industrial north by barge.

They didn't really know what they'd find here, but they did know what they were leaving behind,

and whatever they were to find here, it was better than begging for handouts or going hungry.

Their first stop was an upstart city called Manchester.

Early Victorian artists observed it from a safe distance,

fascinated, but wary.

And well they might be.

The safe distance, though, soon disappeared.

Like an invading army, the mills and factories marched across the plain.

The nation was in the grip of the world's first Industrial Revolution.

It sucked the rural poor into new cities right across the land.

But more than any other, it was Manchester that fired the Victorians' imagination.

It was where you came if you wanted to see the future.

In its dozens of steam-powered cotton mills, the rural immigrants

got their first taste of a new world.

The change must have been astonishing. The noise, the energy.

This was a real revolution in the pace of life, a rupture in history.

Places like this would change Britain beyond recognition.

Today, Queen Street Mill is the last of its kind to survive intact.

Conrad, hi.

SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY MACHINERY

I can't hear you!

So, how many people did it take to run one of these looms?

In this particular shed, they varied.

This one they ran eight looms - that's one, two,

three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

So one person has control over eight looms?

Yes, so you'd actually be kept going all the time.

It was a very, very hard job. A very hard job.

Rather dangerous, too. If you're

running eight machines and something goes wrong on one of them,

it could be right behind you, could be anything.

It could. The main danger being if the belt broke. You couldn't...

-It's leather?

-Yes. You couldn't stop the machinery, so it was repaired in situ.

Now, if there was a protrusion, shall we say there,

it could catch your sleeve.

It would take you round the shafting.

-Are you serious?

-I'm serious.

-They would be pulled...?

Pulled round, and there's quite a few, yes.

Quite a few was killed by going round the shafting.

So that's... And it isn't often you came down in one piece, to be honest.

But the paintings of the time told a quite different story.

Pictures of workers were rare, and, frankly, rose-tinted.

These factory girls are having a jolly time buying dresses.

You can hardly see the factory itself.

And here are some workers at a spinning mill on their lunch break.

Unlike some of their real-life counterparts,

they all seem to have a full set of fingers.

One has does have bare feet, but look how spotless they are.

There's not a speck of dirt on the women, their clothes

or, indeed, the entire yard.

Even the chimneys are puttering out genteel little wisps of smoke.

This was art designed to reassure anxious clients.

Wealthy Victorians, the kind who bought paintings,

found the new cities deeply unsettling.

Never before had they seen so many people massing together.

Manchester natives must have felt they being swallowed up by some alien beast.

If you'd been born, say, in the 1770s, you began life in a town of about 20,000 people.

By the time you were in your late 20s, the population had trebled.

And if you were lucky enough to make it into your 70s, the city was 15 times larger.

Newcomers from the countryside found themselves in the middle of a horror story.

In cities all over the nation, there were too many workers and not enough houses.

People were living like animals. Or worse.

A doctor in Manchester reported finding a single privy, little more than a hole in the ground at the end

of an alley, that was shared by no less than 380 people.

One inspector described a communal yard six inches deep in excrement,

into which bricks had been tossed for residents to walk across.

Not surprisingly, disease was rampant.

A child born into a poor family in Manchester

had a less than 50% chance of living to their fifth birthday.

One artist was prepared to confront the horror.

This is the work of Luke Fildes.

It's really a piece of campaigning visual journalism,

more eloquent than any newspaper expose.

Fildes was reporting what he'd seen one wintry night on the streets of London.

He recreated the moment using real down-and-outs as models.

The fat man in the middle was a drunkard whom Fildes paid in jugs of beer from a nearby pub.

Others represent different routes to the gutter.

The young widow.

And the tradesman, out of work, with a family to feed.

It's a painting that forces the viewer to look at the poor.

But the Victorians were more interested in shutting them away,

and the painting shows that too.

It's not a chance gathering of lost souls.

These people are waiting to enter that most feared of Victorian institutions.

The workhouse.

The first response of Victorian authority to this misery wasn't charity. It was blame.

If you were poor, it was your fault. So they built places like this

to try to scare people out of their poverty.

There was to be no more sitting at home, scrounging off the parish.

From now on, if you wanted help, you'd have to check yourself in here.

And you'd have to be truly desperate to do that.

A clergyman wrote to those framing the legislation,

"The workhouse should be a place of hardship, of coarse fare, of degradation, of humility.

"It should be administered strictly, with severity.

"It should be as repulsive as is consistent with humanity."

They took him up on his suggestion.

You might have arrived here with your family, but you weren't going to be with them for long.

All these doors were locked.

Men were in one wing, women were in another.

Children were separated from their parents.

In one workhouse, it was even said

that a five-month-old infant was kept away from its parents, being

only occasionally brought to its mother for the breast.

In the dormitories, as elsewhere, strict segregation applied.

This room was for elderly or infirm men.

They were known as the blameless.

But over here were the lowest of the low, the undeserving poor.

Able-bodied men who could possibly work were officially designated as idle and profligate.

Finally came the work itself, under constant supervision.

How long do I have to do this for?

Till you've done at least a quarter of a tonne a day.

-Quarter of a tonne a day?

-Mmm.

Minimum.

You'd know about it, wouldn't you?

At the end of a day's hard labour, a bowl of gruel.

What IS gruel?

Essentially it's skimmed milk boiled up with oatmeal,

and a very small amount of oatmeal, too.

Only about 16 drachms, which is - per pint - which is only 11...

it's less than an ounce.

An ounce?!

It's like porridge without the porridge in it, isn't it?

-Without the flavour.

-Without anything in it.

I keep digging down to the bottom hoping for something interesting, but there isn't, is there?

Well, you'd be grateful of it if you were in the workhouse.

It's about the only circumstances you would be grateful of it.

Occasionally, another artist might take up the inmates' cause.

But there were limits to their courage.

This newspaper engraving showed inmates' suffering realistically enough.

But when the artist turned it into a painting

for sale to a wealthy client,

the old women were cheered up, with a smile,

a vase of flowers

and a nice cup of tea.

If you wanted to sell your work, it didn't do to unsettle the rich.

They desperately wanted to believe

that the urban poor were this easily pleased.

And they had good reason to be frightened.

Just across the Channel,

revolution was sweeping through Europe.

The French king had been deposed.

There were violent uprisings from Naples to Prague.

When a huge political rally was announced for 10th April 1848,

the Victorian upper classes shuddered at the thought

that London would be the next city to fall to the mob.

As the fateful day dawned, the capital was already in lockdown.

The authorities were taking no chances.

Surprisingly, the British Museum was identified as a key target.

The director of the Museum was sufficiently worried

he declared that if the building were to fall into the hands

of what he called "disaffected people",

it could turn into a fortress big enough to hold 10,000 men.

So up on the roof, they piled up bricks and rocks,

ready to hurl down on the rioters

they expected to be swarming down below.

Waterloo Station was cleared.

The Royal Family dispatched to the safety of the Isle of Wight.

And at the Bank of England, guns were mounted on the roof.

London waited.

In the event, 20,000 demonstrators gathered on Kennington Common.

But they were met by almost 90,000 police.

Their ranks had been swollen by ordinary Londoners,

who signed on as Special Constables to keep the peace.

Outnumbered, the demonstrators abandoned their plan

to march on Westminster.

Today, on the same spot,

the memory of that great gathering has vanished.

But at the time, its failure taught well-to-do Victorians

a crucial lesson about the people they so feared.

It turned out that what the Victorian working classes wanted wasn't socialism,

so much as the possibility of becoming middle class,

which I suppose explains why so many more of them volunteered

to become policemen than protestors.

Victorian society was competitive, restless, aspirational.

The revolution wasn't gonna happen here.

The cause that really lit the imagination of Victorian workers

was self-improvement.

If you wanted to get on, you did it on your own,

pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

With discipline and hard work, you could do anything.

One Lancashire blacksmith took this idea to heroic lengths.

In the process, he would shine new light on a hidden world.

James Sharples was one of 13 children,

the son and grandson of ironworkers.

He started work in a foundry at the age of ten.

But he nursed a passion for painting.

And while still a boy, he pursued it with typical Victorian earnestness.

He'd walk 18 miles into Manchester to buy paint and canvases,

he'd get up at four in the morning to study painting manuals,

and sometimes, he got his brother Peter out of bed

at three in the morning to act as his model.

Quite how Peter felt about that isn't recorded.

The result of his dedication was this hugely original painting.

It was one of the very first actually to show the Victorians

the labour that was firing the urban revolution.

While he worked on it,

Sharples carried on putting in 12 or 14-hour days at the foundry.

Snatching time to paint when he could,

it took him nearly three years to finish.

But he brought an insider's eye to his subject.

His picture shines with respect and admiration for his fellow workers.

Many Victorian ironworks survived well into the 20th century.

Ken Hall worked at one.

What do you think of this picture then, Ken?

Yes. Nice picture.

It's atmospheric if nothing else.

Don't you think they all look a bit clean?

Well, one of them's got a bloomin' hole in his apron, so...

-No, I mean their faces.

-Yes, they, they would...

Although there again,

I mean my face was always bloomin' clean

because of the wiping it, the sweating.

Oh, you sweat so much it just washes off.

Bloomin' hell, you'd wipe it off.

Your arms was usually dirtier than that, though,

but your face was usually the cleanest part on you.

What would be the temperature up there?

Hard to say. Well above 100 degrees where he's standing.

When I finished, it took about, oh,

near two years for the fire marks to get off your face and your arms.

What do you mean, fire marks?

They're like red patches of the skin, where you're burned...

It scorches you.

The Forge was the only major painting James Sharples completed.

But as an enterprising Victorian, he made the most of it.

This engraved version took him another five years.

But once the prints went on sale, he was made.

The Bank of England and the Foreign Office both bought copies.

After years of toil,

he'd become a living advertisement for self-improvement.

The machine age had brought chaos and squalor,

but now, at last, it was beginning to make British workers richer.

And with money, came a chance to get out of the city altogether.

Every year in early summer,

all Victorian London headed for Epsom Downs.

Then as now, Derby Day threw all classes together.

It was the nation at its most jumbled-up,

raucous and not necessarily sober.

Among the crowd at the 1856 race was the artist William Powell Frith.

It was his first visit to the Derby and he was quite blown away by it.

Admittedly, the day didn't start particularly well

when he nearly lost all his money to a group of tricksters.

But after that, he was seduced by the exuberant variety of the crowd,

"Modern life with a vengeance" was what he called it,

and he set out to paint the definitive depiction

of this great festival.

What I love about it is that Frith wasn't really interested

in horses or horseracing at all.

What he was interested in was people,

and what you get at the end is not a group portrait,

it's a celebration.

This isn't a threatening, anonymous mob.

It's a collection of endlessly engaging individuals,

each with their own story.

He even included the con-artists whom he almost fell foul of

with their three-thimble betting scam.

Beside them, a recent victim.

And opposite him, a fresh-faced new one.

His wife knows what's up.

And so does his dog.

But he looks suckered in already.

It might not all be beautiful, Frith seems to be saying,

but this is the stuff of life.

Aghhhhhhhh!

COMMENTATOR: And they're off!

Bashkirov ridden as Maidstone Mixture gives way as they begin the descent.

Kandahar Run, Doctor Fremantle up from Washington Irving.

How many times do they go round?

-The once, luvvie, the once.

-Just once. Well, I don't know!

New Approach is still quite well back at this stage.

-Curtain Call travelling much better now.

-Go!

Go on!

Go on, Tartan!

Go on, Tartan.

Go on, Tartan!

Doctor Fremantle poised.

The white cab of Washington Irving...

Go on! Go on, Tartan!

CHEERING

Well...

-Did you back the winner?

-We did! Thank you very much for your luck.

Well done! Well done! There you are, I told you.

Just stand by me, the luck'll be with you!

LAUGHTER

William Frith had fallen in love with the Victorian public.

And they returned the favour.

When Derby Day went on show, they crowded in so closely

that it had to be protected by a stout iron rail

and an even stouter policeman.

Frith was also there

when city workers first discovered the British seaside.

A potential buyer dismissed this painting as "a tissue of vulgarity".

One fellow artist thought it "a piece of cockney business,

"unworthy even of an illustrated newspaper".

But the public knew better.

It was voted Picture of the Year at the Royal Academy,

and in the end it did find a buyer -

Queen Victoria herself.

Meanwhile, back in the capital, all was not well.

The same summer that Derby Day was exhibited,

Londoners were confronting a rather urgent and rather unsavoury problem.

A heatwave hit the city.

The Thames began to give off a mysterious and appalling smell.

The problem came to a head at the brand new Houses of Parliament.

And there's a clue to its cause

in one of the great building's most private rooms.

Ever since medieval times, sewage had gone from people's homes into holes in the ground.

It was then collected from there by the night soil man. Nice job(!)

He then sold the sewage to farmers for use as fertiliser on the land.

But in Victorian times, the growing popularity of water closets like this created a real problem.

Because now in addition to the human waste, you also had vast quantities of water,

because every time you used the loo, you flushed it.

As a result, the holes in the ground, the cesspits, overflowed,

so they connected the cesspits to the drains, but the drains emptied directly into London's river...

and the result of that was that the Thames became an open sewer.

'The newspapers dubbed the crisis "The Great Stink".

'As temperatures soared, and the lumpy river simmered gently,

'MPs realised that they'd ignored the city's problems for a little too long.

'Now at last, work began to tackle them.

'Parliament looked afresh at plans by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette for a massive new network of sewers.

'He'd been pushing them for years.

'But he'd been blocked with petty bureaucratic excuses.

'Now, with the Stink at its height, all objections suddenly vanished.

'The system he built is still in use today.'

Man coming down.

Okey-dokey... OK, ta.

If you'd like to just follow me.

Good, let's go.

Watch your footing there. That's it.

'The scale of the project was astonishing.

'Bazalgette built 1,100 miles of new sewers -

'an enormous, hidden masterpiece.

'It conquered both stink and disease.'

What do you think when you look at all this engineering work?

I'm amazed.

Seriously... even after all this time?

-I'm amazed.

-You could almost find it beautiful, couldn't you, in a way?

It is...it is.

My wife would object, but it is beautiful... I mean...

it's not a parallel with the Pyramids or something like that,

but as a complete structure, it's...

yeah... it is, er...

And a functioning structure, that's the thing, isn't it?

Yeah... I mean the Pyramids just looked good and hid a body, didn't they... Or two, maybe...

but I mean this has actually served London as a working,

you know, wonder of the world if you like because it is up there...

must be up there in that sort of field...

for 150 years.

And could well serve the same purpose for another 150 years or more.

Such epic feats of engineering were inspirational.

One artist captured the Victorians' excitement.

This extraordinary painting by Ford Madox Brown is a hymn to the building of a new world.

In the artist's eyes, the simple laying of pipes becomes heroic labour.

The workmen are bathed in a pool of light.

One clamps a rose between his teeth.

And their proud bearing proclaims the moral dignity of work.

Other figures ram home the message.

The "ragged wretch" as Brown called him, who has never been taught to work.

The delicate ladies who represent the idle rich.

The Victorians had embarked upon a great task,

and these were the men who would carry it out.

The word on everyone's lips was 'improvement'.

By the middle of Queen Victoria's reign,

this fearsome beast, the city, was beginning to be tamed.

People even started to see it as something they could take pride in.

Engineering achievements like Bazalgette's sewers showed how the city might be transformed...

above ground as well as below.

Abel Heywood was one of a new generation of civic leaders

intent upon making the Victorian city the envy of the world.

He was a founder of one of Manchester's great political clubs.

Within these walls, he and his fellow councillors drank, debated and plotted their city's rise.

Today it's home to some rather less high-minded occupants.

I know this looks a bit dodgy, but inside here, in one of the best-preserved bits of the building,

you can get a real clue as to the ambition of Heywood and his allies.

Which way to the changing rooms, please?

It's just through there, sir.

Thank you!

Just to be clear, it's not the knickers that provide the clue to these men...

it's the fittings, in this what was the cloakroom of the old Reform Club.

Just look at the details -

solid marble washbasin.

A vaulted gallery above.

And columns... beautifully, intricately carved.

I think we can take it that people who would go to that amount of trouble fora cloakroom

wouldn't settle for second best for their city.

What they needed was a grand gesture, a permanent statement of the city's greatness.

Their dreams were realised in a spectacular Town Hall.

It was modelled on the mighty town halls of medieval Europe,

as if to tell the world that Manchester too was a centre of civilisation.

'At its heart, a magnificent shrine to the city's new sense of itself.'

'To decorate the walls, the council turned to the man who had painted that great hymn to "Work",

'Ford Madox Brown.'

These murals are trying to do something rather bold, and rather cheeky.

They're trying to give a 19th-century city an ancient and noble pedigree.

But they're history as you might expect to find it

when it's been commissioned by a bunch of politicians.

So an intriguing mix of things which definitely did happen in Manchester,

and things which definitely didn't.

Here's the opening of the Bridgewater Canal,

an important moment in the city's industrial growth.

And here's the philanthropist, Humphrey Chetham,

dreaming of his school of music, still going strong in Manchester today.

Both of these are achievements of which Mancunians can be justifiably proud.

But hang on, what's this? The baptism of Edwin.

It was a key event in the adoption of Christianity in England.

but it happened in York.

And here's John Kay, the inventor who revolutionised weaving.

He actually came from Bury.

Well, at least it's nearby.

But even if they're not entirely convincing,

the murals are a reminder of a heroic effort of will.

Manchester had once horrified Victorian Britain.

Now it had been turned into one of its showpieces.

Its streets were soon adorned with a great flowering of grand buildings.

As the rest of the country followed suit,

it seemed that the Victorians had at last taken their cities to their hearts.

Around the same time, the Victorian city found its true artistic champion.

John Atkinson Grimshaw was born in Leeds.

He would come to evoke the cities of the age in loving twilight shades.

But he had a long apprenticeship first.

His was a classic Victorian life.

He was the son of a policeman.

He worked as a clerk on the Great Northern Railway.

He taught himself to become an artist,

despite his mother chucking his oil paints on the fire in disgust.

But he saw something she didn't.

Grimshaw belonged to a generation which couldn't remember life before cities.

Instead of pining for some rural past,

he found poetry in the smoke and fog and gaslight.

These pictures celebrated Victorian cities.

Among them, the city that would undergo the most radical transformation of the age.

Glasgow had suffered the Victorian curse of population boom and grotesque overcrowding.

But its council launched a spectacular fight-back.

The slums were torn down.

39 new streets rose out of the rubble.

And a lavish town hall rivalled Manchester's.

But the transformation reached its climax in this park,

just outside the city centre.

For seven months, it was turned into an outlandish oriental fantasy...

the 1888 International Exhibition.

Six million people poured in to marvel at the energy and sophistication of the new Glasgow.

These may only have been temporary buildings, but they looked like palaces.

And they held a bewildering cornucopia of exhibits.

There was a working dairy, there was an oriental smoking lounge,

a Dutch cocoa house with waitresses in national costume,

the world's largest terracotta fountain.

Live diamond cutting. A stuffed polar bear, a giant Canadian cheese.

Thomson's Patent Gravity Switchback railway,

a balloon manned by Signor Balleni - he actually came from Warwickshire.

Busts of Queen Victoria in soap, a loom making hygienic woollen underwear, a bachelors' cafe,

an Indian fakir lying on a bed of nails,

the Power Drop biscuit machine, and two Venetian gondoliers

whom the Glaswegian public came to know Signor Hokey and Signor Pokey.

Now all of this had been assembled

with the express idea of raising money

for what was to be the city's crowning glory,

the real evidence of its transformation -

a permanent palace of the arts.

Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery embodied a very Victorian idea:

that art could raise up and ennoble the population,

that it could elevate the soul of the common people.

In the bad old days, the rich had hoarded art in their homes,

but here the Council's ambition was that paintings should be freely available to everybody...

in the words of one writer, "for the instruction and gratification of the people at large".

In its first year, over a million of them came.

Once Victorian artists had feared the crowd.

Now this magnificent gallery welcomed them in.

-You must be Harry, are you?

-Aye, pleased to meet you, yes, I am.

-Very good to see you.

-How long have you been here?

-I've been here 16 years, Jeremy.

-16 years!

-16 years yes.

-And what do you like about it?

-I just love the ambience of it,

I love the... I love walking around.

I've been here 16 years and I still find things that are new to me.

It's always been a principle of this place hasn't it, that it's free...

-anyone can come.

-Yes, it's free.

It's the people's museum, and it's still free to this day.

-Do you have a favourite painting in the gallery?

-I do, Jeremy, yes.

-Can we go and see it?

-Sure.

This is Guthrie's Highland Funeral here.

This is your favourite painting in the entire gallery?

It's one of them.

Pretty miserable, isn't it?

Well, it's the realism of it.

You look at the two chairs,

it's an infant's coffin is on it.

I just think he's got great depth of feeling.

I know it's very sombre, and it's probably quite a depressing subject

but, I mean, it was something that happened

and it probably happened more frequently then than it ever does now.

I think it's very powerful. Would you not agree?

I agree with you, it's quite powerful.

I think it's making a statement.

Oh, yeah... I give you it's... I grant you it's pretty strong.

With the rebirth of cities like Glasgow and Manchester,

a triumphal spirit was in the air.

Many Victorians believed they'd conquered a great challenge...

that modern civilisation had reached a peak.

Well, not quite.

There was still one city holding out against the tide of improvement.

Squatting at the centre of a vast empire,

London was on scale of its own -

it had become the largest city on Earth.

But as it had swollen, it had broken.

Victorian London was a tale of two cities.

In the West End lived the wealthy.

The East End was another story.

A web of narrow alleys and teeming docks...

lawless immigrants and destitute families.

It became the focus of all the Victorians' deepest fears.

Writers now began anxious expeditions into this hidden, menacing world.

"I propose to record", wrote one, "the results of a journey into a region

"which lies at our own doors... a dark continent

"within easy walking distance of the General Post Office."

Among the explorers who set out to penetrate its perilous interior

was the celebrated French artist Gustave Dore.

Fired by tales of the extraordinary scenes to be found in the capital,

he embarked on what he called a "pilgrimage" to see for himself.

His images of the East End crackle with dark and fantastic detail.

He made sure he had a police guard on these forays into Aldgate, Stepney, Wapping and Whitechapel.

"You adopt rough clothes,"

said his companion, "you commit yourself to the guidance

"of one of the most fearless members of the detective force.

"He mounts the box of the cab and the horse's head is turned...

"East".

In these engravings, you can feel the gloom and the gaslight,

you can hear the mass of hungry children,

see the sullen glares of the adults, almost smell the filth.

Dore acted like a spy, lurking in corners, hardly ever drawing in public.

But he possessed an invaluable asset - he had a nearly photographic memory.

Here was a London few Londoners had even dared to imagine.

The desperate in the night shelter,

unmoved by the pacing missionary who reads from the Bible.

The addicts in the opium dens.

And the pickpockets and muggers, gambling their day's takings.

One of his most famous scenes shows rows of huddled terraces

where washing is fouled with soot from passing trains.

Gustave Dore makes East London look like a land of endless night.

Growing numbers of people were looking for a way to escape the inner city.

Fortunately for them, Victorian enterprise offered a solution,

one that would change the face of the modern city.

Before the invention of things like this,

people really had to live within walking distance of their work,

but once you had omnibuses shuttling in and out of town, people could live one place and work another.

They could even go shopping or go to school somewhere entirely different.

To us it's just commuting, but to them, it was liberation.

The omnibus threw all classes together,

an irresistible prospect for Victorian artists.

Here a wealthy young woman looks indulgently at her less well-off neighbours.

Beside them sit a city gent and a nurse.

William Maw Egley even built a pretend omnibus carriage

in his back garden, sitting his models on boxes and planks of wood

to capture the crush of a rush-hour journey.

By the end of the century,

the Victorians were making 300 million bus journeys every year.

The consequences were dramatic.

Along with the train and the tube, omnibuses opened up great swathes of land for development.

They created the modern suburbs.

Six million houses were built during Victoria's reign.

In the last decade of the century, this ridge in Crouch End, North London was finally taken.

Snooty Victorian critics reacted with distaste.

One of them talked about, "The life blood of London pouring out into

"long arms of bricks and mortar and cheap stucco", but actually the suburb was a brilliant invention.

It gave people gardens and light and space and clean air, and it was where very large numbers of people

chose to live, and indeed still choose to live.

Suburbs bloomed across the country.

They were in a way the Victorians' greatest innovation.

They might be less grand and showy than great public buildings,

but they still shape the lives of millions.

The ultimate answer to the challenge of city life.

Victorian artists had charted an extraordinary journey.

It had begun with horror,

fear and shock.

But over time, the Victorians had confronted

the great change that was upon them.

Today the results of their ambition and energy are all around us.

We walk their streets...

..visit their museums...

..and share their passions.

We're still ruled from their lavish town halls.

And, of course,

we still rely on some of their less glamorous innovations.

The very shape of our cities,

and so of our lives,

was moulded by their labour.

It's often said that the British aren't really an urban people,

that we think the real Britain is out there in the countryside.

Certainly lots of eminent Victorians believed that, but the plain fact is,

then as now, most of us lead urban or suburban lives.

The debt that every one of us owes the Victorians

is that they didn't just create the modern city -

they taught us how to survive it too.

Next time: The Victorian family home

was a refuge from the pressures of the Victorian city.

But in the wings lurked danger...

dark forces that threatened to destroy

the dream of Home Sweet Home.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.

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