The Industrial Landscape Britain from Above

Looking down on our industrial landscape today,

we see the remains of a vanished age.

There are still some pockets of thriving industry,

but these are faint echoes of something much greater -

of the time when Britain was the greatest industrial power on the planet,

and it wasn't so long ago.

This is the story of how our industrial heartlands

have been transformed in the space of a single lifetime.

By comparing aerial images taken 60 years ago with those from today,

we can see the sheer scale and speed of change.

Where there were factories,

there are now fields.

Mining villages no longer have mines.

Docks have become offices and waterside apartments.

Seen from above, it's clear that no other aspect of our nation

has changed so quickly or so profoundly.

This is a story of evolution,

adaptation

and, in many places, extinction

1939.

War is still six months away, and yet in the skies above Britain,

the Germans are already at work

Secretly, the Luftwaffe photograph British industry,

the backbone of the economy.

Over the valleys of South Wales

they see the great coalfields that power the nation,

employing 200,000 miners.

Over Swindon, they look down on the heart of Britain's rail network,

where 14,000 people build steam engines for the world.

Over Manchester,

they see the great port at Salford,

and the world's largest industrial estate, Trafford Park,

where 50,000 people work in manufacturing.

And how do we know this?

Because we have the photographs

This remarkable collection of images

is helping archaeologists like Chris Going

to rediscover Britain's industrial past.

OK, well, what we've got here is a whole collection

of German target documents.

These were captured at the end of the war

and classified by British Intelligence.

This photograph, taken over Manchester,

shows the targets that the Germans were interested in.

The actual target is Salford Quays,

and these are the docks here, outlined in red.

You've got, to the south, the industrial heartland of Manchester,

but the interesting thing is,

all these target documents concern themselves

with just the industrial areas

If we look over here, you can see this really quite graphically.

This rather wacky thing is a night map.

The colouring is designed to be viewed under cockpit lights at night.

The yellow, outlined in red, are the designated targets,

of which there's Salford Quays

And you can see, it's this little industrial zone here,

in the west of Manchester, which interested them most.

So, basically, Britain's industrial strength, if you like,

is caught in these dossiers.

70 years on, the industrial landscape of Britain

is once again being photographed from the air.

Dr Toby Driver is an archaeologist who uses aerial photography

to investigate and document the impact of human activity on the land.

We get into the air to look down at patterns,

shapes that we can see,

and look for those that have been made by people.

Very often, these are invisible at ground level.

The aerial perspective is the only way

to get an overview of what's there.

Today, Toby's flying over the South Wales valleys,

the region where geography and geology has shaped the economy

and the lives of the people who live here.

We're approaching the South Wales valleys from the north here,

over a stunningly beautiful natural landscape -

the eastern part of the Brecon Beacons National Park -

but we'll see the contrast with these beautiful hills

and green fields

with the industrial landscapes we're about to come to,

which many people still find difficult to love, I think.

150 years ago, this pastoral landscape was transformed.

Abandoning its agricultural economy, the valleys of South Wales

were swept into Britain's Industrial Revolution -

a revolution fuelled by the black mineral

buried deep beneath its green hills.

Coal was THE great commodity, the great export,

from this part of Wales.

Parts of South Wales rose very quickly

from being farming landscapes

to this massive explosion of people moving in,

new buildings, fast new transport networks,

and it's the legacy of that explosion of activity

that we're really seeing in the landscape today.

Workers from all over the country

moved to South Wales in search of jobs.

These new miners not only dug coal,

but also created their own unique way of life.

The communities were tight knit

cut off in their own valleys, surrounded by steep hills.

These were the valleys of chapels, socialism,

rugby and male voice choirs.

More than anywhere else in Britain,

we see, from above, communities defined by the landscape.

This is the Rhondda -

two valleys snaking south towards the sea.

In between the hills of coal, people, roads, railways and houses

are crammed into the narrow, deep-winding valleys.

This place has evolved for one purpose.

Every coal pit had its supporting town,

and all the transport infrastructure to get that coal from the valleys,

down to the great ports at Cardiff and Newport and elsewhere,

shipping that coal out around the world.

Based on a single natural resource,

the Rhondda's prosperity was vulnerable.

Falling demand, politics and global competition

have brought the coal industry to its knees.

In 2008, the last pit in South Wales closed.

What we see today are the mortal remains of a mighty industry.

Train graveyards with tracks leading nowhere.

Black spoil tips slowly turning green.

Rusted mining machinery at the mercy of the weather.

Toby Driver has been comparing modern aerial photographs

with RAF images taken just after the Second World War

These pictures tell a devastating story.

The key thing with the industrial landscapes

is that what we see today

is not necessarily what was there 60 years ago.

Step back in time

and we see collieries rise from the green hillsides.

This is a snapshot of the coal industry in its final flourish

a world that has now gone.

It's hard for people to understand

how transient some parts of the modern world can be.

Sometimes landscapes are the way they are for centuries.

But as we've seen in the South Wales valleys,

factories, towns, landscapes

can vanish in a matter of months or years

Since the loss of its main industry,

unemployment in the Rhondda has soared.

Almost a third of working-age people are without jobs,

and almost two-thirds of families survive on an annual income of less than ?10,000.

Wherever communities relied on the pits for work, the story's the same.

The only colliery still operating is Big Pit, at Blaenavon.

But it no longer produces coal

Instead, it's a museum.

For 30 years, John took coal out of the mine

Now he takes school children down to see it.

Some of the children you take underground, especially the girls,

you tell them about Victorian times and pushing drams a tonne in weight.

You ask them if they want to do it and they say no.

Then you say to them, if you want to eat, would you do it?

It makes them think.

John has seen a whole way of life disappear.

Most of the workforce have gone into different jobs, light industry.

Some of the people have moved away, as well.

Back in the '60s, there were about 8,000 people living in Blaenavon.

We're now down to about 3,500 to 4,000.

So we've practically halved.

The irony is that there's still plenty of coal left in South Wales,

but the only way to make a profit from it is with a far smaller workforce

At this vast opencast mine, massive machinery has removed

over 20 million cubic yards of rock and coal

to leave a crater 100 yards deep.

Like this hillside, once the whole region

would have been black with the spoils of mining.

Today, the landscape is re-greening.

Sculpted from the slag heap is Sultan the pit pony,

a symbol of this transformation and the end of a great industry

The very geography which once made this landscape work

now restricts its ability to escape the past.

Not every centre of Victorian industry has suffered the same fate.

This is Swindon,

a town that, like the Rhondda, rose from green fields 150 years ago

a product of the first industrial age.

But unlike the valleys of South Wales,

Swindon has no natural resources.

Instead, it exists entirely because of its location.

Swindon sits at a good sort of crossroads for trade in Britain

and that's enabled it to develop.

When Brunel and the directors of the Great Western Railway came here

at the end of the 1830s,

they looked at the site and they thought, "OK, 1840 onwards

"Swindon will become the epicentre of the Great Western Railway."

They built their great works here,

brought in labourers, and the trains arrived,

whizzing at a tremendous high speed from Paddington to Bristol and back.

At Swindon, Brunel not only created one of the largest engineering complexes in the world,

but pioneered a new age of mass transportation.

The railway changed Britain fundamentally.

It not only created this extraordinary engineering enterprise

and these craft skills, and changed the face, physically, of Britain -

the whole landscape changed with this network of railway lines

but it also created a totally new economy.

From now on, Britain was able to trade internally, as well as externally,

very successfully indeed.

Purely as a result of its location,

the small market town of Swindon became a thriving centre for this new world-beating economy

People poured into the town from all over the country

to make up the 14,000 staff of the Great Western Railway.

Brunel designed planned housing estates to accommodate the newcomers.

From above, we see an ordered, Victorian world,

reflecting a time when a whole community could work for one company,

generation after generation.

But this Victorian way of life couldn't last for ever.

Imagine if you were born in Swindon just after the Second World War

You'd have been brought up in the last, dying days of the steam age.

In fact, the last steam locomotive built for British Railways

was built here at Swindon Works and called Evening Star,

suggesting the end, very much the end, of an era.

That same person then lived on through the consumer boom of the late ' 0s

and then right on through into the world of information superhighway,

internet, mobile phones, fridges, cheap mortgages,

shopping, shopping, shopping, and no-frills flights all around the world.

That would be the very same person living in the steam age as is living today.

That's an extraordinary compression of time.

The closure of Swindon's sole industry

could have spelt disaster for the town.

But instead, what we see from above is a new Swindon

expanding beyond its railway past.

Today, it's one of the fastest-growing towns in Europe

with the lowest unemployment in Britain.

Unlike the Rhondda,

Swindon has not been constricted by its geography.

In fact, its location has enabled it to evolve.

After the canals came the railways, and after the railways came the motorways.

The M4 motorway whizzes through here, and the M4 Corridor

is well known today for the hi-tech industry,

so Swindon's always been a great transport route hub and centre

and, I guess, it always will be

When one of the world's largest car-makers looked for a site

for their European factory, they came to Swindon.

Here, 4,000 people work for the town's largest employer - Honda

On average, a completed car leaves the factory floor every 80 seconds.

After getting the all-clear on the test track,

the car is ready for distribution.

Just as Swindon used to make trains but now makes cars,

so what used to be distributed by rail

is now distributed on the motorway network.

And where the steam engine

transformed Britain's landscape in the 19th century...

..in the 20th century, it was the combustion engine.

Stewart Ainsworth has been studying the evolving industrial landscape.

When you look down over the landscape today,

I think the most dramatic change you see

is motorways.

The sheer scale, the sheer...

almost beauty of those curving interchanges,

wide lanes, traffic moving along them...

It's like the red and white cells in the blood

being delivered from the heart

out to all the organs and the extremities of the body

And the more important the organ, the more circulation is needed

At the epicentre of six motorways is the city of Manchester.

Nowhere illustrates better this change from old industry..

..to new.

What we see from above

is a city shaped by three centuries of industrial endeavour.

It's a three-dimensional landscape

that you see down below you,

and each level of that landscape

is another tier in that industrialisation process.

In many ways the birthplace of the industrial age,

Manchester owes its existence to its damp climate.

In the 18th century, it was the perfect place to spin cotton

without it snapping.

As a result, Manchester became the global centre of the textile industry

and has consistently pioneered ground-breaking ways to trade with the outside world.

The first entirely artificial waterway, the Bridgewater Canal

was opened in 1761.

In 1830, the world's first passenger train arrived in Manchester.

But perhaps its greatest single feat

was the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal.

This is one of the most important waterways in Britain in its day

It was opened in 1894,

after an awful lot of dispute and debate,

basically to bring the sea into Manchester.

The Ship Canal was large enough to allow ocean-going vessels

to come right into the heart of the city.

Despite being 36 miles inland,

Manchester became the fourth-largest port in Britain.

At the same time, the Ship Canal brought about a complete transformation

of what was a deer park into the world's first planned industrial estate.

Where we're flying at the moment is over Trafford Park,

a real industrial Mecca.

It became the home of engineering,

it became the home of car manufacturing.

Henry Ford moved from America to put manufacturing plants in here

for his Model T Ford.

It became such an important global centre

that America came to Manchester

NEWSREEL: Trafford Park,

where deer once roamed, is now a planned dockside estate

where 200 firms employ nearly 50,000 people.

The goods from Trafford Park were distributed through the Ship Canal

to the four corners of the globe.

The ships carry manufactured goods, textiles,

pottery, cars, chemicals,

machinery, iron and steel - all those products

on which the prosperity of Great Britain depends.

Aerial photographs taken by the German Luftwaffe

show the port in its heyday.

Well, if we look at the photography of 1939-40,

taken courtesy of the German Air Force,

it's a busy scene.

You can see shipping on all of these wharfs and docks.

We've got about 18 or 19 ships

and the warehousing and busy marshalling yards.

If we go forwards in time,

you can see...suddenly...

the shipping has all gone.

Where Trafford Park once relied on its Ship Canal for trade,

today it's the M62 motorway.

And where factories once manufactured,

now giant sheds store the goods that the roads bring to us.

100 years ago, Trafford Park was considered the future.

In this short space of time, this vision has vanished.

And what we see today is the rise of a different kind of economy

Alongside the M62 motorway, what little remained of the old deer park

has been transformed into one of Europe's largest shopping centres.

Linked to the country via the motorway network,

a quarter of the entire British population

is within a 90-minute drive of Manchester's Trafford Centre

32 million shoppers visit the centre each year,

with receipts adding up to almost ?1.5 billion.

We've got this huge, great Trafford Centre down there,

which is a cathedral of consumerism.

It's sucking people in. It's become a leisure activity it's become recreation.

It's become fun to go shopping

While Trafford Park has transformed itself beyond recognition in the last 70 years,

one piece of grass, measuring 105 x 68 metres,

has survived the enormous changes.

The local ground and the teams drew their support from the people who worked in the local industries.

If we change to what it looks like now, it's a world away.

The football ground has expanded,

although the pitch hasn't grown bigger,

but the area around's been bought up, because this is Old Trafford.

In the photo of 1939, we see the home of Manchester United

surrounded by factories and warehouses.

Now they've gone, replaced by car parks

for visitors who travel from further afield to watch the games.

In this stadium now, there are 76,312 seats.

This is the largest club stadium in the United Kingdom...

David Howard gives guided tours of Old Trafford

to fans who travel from around the world to see the club's famous ground

These are the most expensive behind you here.

For these boxes, you close your eyes, you sign your cheque for ?66,90 .

It's a far cry from the days when Manchester United was the local club

for the workers in Trafford Park.

Please don't touch the grass! Thank you. This way, please, folks.

David has lived the change.

In the 1960s, he worked for a local engineering firm.

If you were in Trafford Park, you came to Manchester United.

All the factories here were within walking distance. I'd come here

with my father and my brother. In those days, of course,

we'd all stand to watch the football match.

Manchester United, over the years,

has changed dramatically in terms of its fan base.

We've not got the historic fan base that we had. We've got a massive new fan base, all over the world.

Manchester United is now the richest football club on the planet.

They estimate that they have over 100 million supporters worldwide...

..and today, Old Trafford is exporting a global brand.

Wherever you go in the world, it'd be a big surprise

if you didn't see a Manchester United shirt in a shop somewhere.

People know who Bobby Charlton was, people know who Ronaldo is.

They know he plays in Manchester.

Do they know he plays at a football ground

on the edge of an industrial estate in Manchester, I wonder?

Manchester is now better known around the world

for its football than its manufacturing.

Self-consciously, the city has reinvented itself

leaving its industrial past behind.

Factories have been replaced by leisure and culture.

The working-class way of life in Victorian terraced housing

has been turned into a primetime soap opera.

But perhaps the biggest - certainly the tallest - statement

of Manchester's new aspirations is the Beetham Tower,

rising 48 storeys into the sky over the city centre.

With its 220 bijou flats and 274 luxury hotel rooms,

the tower is Europe's highest residential skyscraper

Its architect, Ian Simpson, has reserved the top floors for himself.

He's in the middle of constructing a two-storey luxury penthouse.

Most architects design these brutalist and modern things

and live in a Georgian terrace

I've never believed in that.

I believe in trying to experience the buildings we design.

This is the formal reception space -

this is the main living area for the apartment.

Through here, we have the olive grove,

which, obviously, at level 48 is quite unique, certainly in this country.

They will actually grow olives

This city now... I mean, a few years ago, it was black and dirty.

There was nobody living here.

Clearly, it had to change, otherwise it would die.

People were leaving the city if they had any money.

The only people left were those who couldn't get out

And we're trying to reverse that now, make it an attractive place.

And a building like this is all about signalling that ambition

and changing the perception of the city internationally.

70 years ago, the Luftwaffe photographed Manchester from the air.

But the city's rebirth came about not as a result of German bombs

but its own evolution.

In one human lifetime,

our industrial landscape has changed beyond recognition

And although the effects are felt most strongly on the ground,

it's only from above that you can really appreciate Britain's amazing transformation.

The industrial landscapes of Great Britain, in their prime,

were just caught in the 1940s and '50s.

And they've completely disappeared since then.

The photography chronicles its disappearance quite clearly

It's an amazing change. It's half a century,

and yet it's as remote in some areas as...

as the Roman period, as the Stone Age. It's gone.

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