Houses and Palaces Fred Dibnah's Magnificent Monuments

One of my early adventures into building is this chimney stack, which I built when I was about 17.

This was on my mum and dad's house.

We had a chimney stack with four pots on.

Only one was used for the water system - the back boiler and the hot water in the taps.

The others let water run down the bedroom walls next door and ours.

I decided that I would take it down and build a nice chimney stack.

It didn't have a design. I had no drawings.

I kept altering it in shape and size as it went up.

This is about 40 years ago. The people who live there now

wanted to dismantle it,

but the council put a preservation order on it.

It looks nearly as good as the day I built it. I'm quite proud of it.

Really, since I were a little lad,

I've been interested in buildings and building techniques

and all the skills that went into building a house,

even in the Middle Ages, all the tools, the different joints

and the ways they had of sticking things together, soldering lead.

Ightham Mote is one of the oldest and loveliest medieval manor houses

in all of England.

In 650 years, it's barely changed.

A moat surrounds all four wings

and all of the walls

drop straight down into its waters.

Within these four wings,

there's a lovely, open courtyard.

The house looks as though it was all built at the same time,

but it is actually the product of six centuries of development.

Peter Leach, architect and archaeologist, has been responsible for much of the conservation work.

The courtyard demonstrates how the house has developed over the years.

People have lovingly added bits to it from time to time.

What makes Ightham Mote interesting at the moment

is the restoration work being done.

It gives a good opportunity to find out how a medieval house was built

and to look at the materials that were used in its construction.

-This is the roof of the Great Hall, Fred.

-Yeah.

You can see the stone-rubble end wall here.

On top of it, there are the tops of the rafters and the lathing.

On top of that

are the tiles, pegged, not nailed.

They have holes in, for the wooden pegs.

There's straw in that.

I was wondering if that was put in for some kind of heat insulation,

put in for the new tiling.

If they can keep the original timbers, they do,

but the great beam was so rotten, they are putting a new one in.

This is the roof plate or beam that was under the valley gutter when we saw it on the roof.

-It must have leaked a bit!

-They didn't keep the gutters clear,

That's why it's rotted so badly. It dates from 1605 or 1610.

It's amazing.

You think of the centre of an oak tree as being hard and the sap wood as being soft...

-Yes.

-..yet the outer edges of it have survived pretty well.

An house like this has stood up to the elements for centuries.

How did they manage to build things that lasted for so long?

Their materials must have been pretty good.

Until they had the things modern builders have,

they had to use whatever was to hand - crude, maybe, but effective.

-You want me to go in the cow muck?

-Yes!

Now, it's what? Approximately half of that?

Half. That is the sifted cow dung.

It's nice stuff, is it?

That's it.

A nice measure.

That's rich, in't it!

I was collecting this

at seven o'clock this morning from our local dairy herd.

I tell you what, it takes a bit of mixing.

It isn't easy...

to shove about.

That's been milled beforehand with the hair put in.

What's the idea of the cow dung, like?

Well, it does give it more elasticity when you're spreading it

and it also hardens it.

I would say he's done that before, myself.

I've mixed a bit of mortar in my time, but never with cow muck in it.

I can't wait to smear that on the wall!

There. It's a nice bit of stuff.

It's a nice colour.

Yeah.

It's lime, goat hair...

Yeah?

..with sharp sand.

Well, you try it for yourself.

-See how you get on with that.

-I'll have a go.

Have a go.

-Do I continue in a downwards direction?

-Yeah, that'd be nice.

Oh, bloody hell!

-Let me put less on the hod.

-Yeah.

That's it.

-Push it well in. It has to go through the lath.

-Yes.

That's all right.

Now, that's going to be there

for 800 years.

So...

It's good to think we do something that'll stand the test of time.

-That's enough for me!

-That's great. Any time you want a job...!

It does have a tendency to stick to the floor, don't it?

Like the proverbial whatsit to the blanket.

We spray it to keep it damp,

so it doesn't dry too quickly and craze.

Crack. Yeah.

We key, as well.

That helps to stop the shrinkage.

-It definitely has the smell of the countryside about it!

-That's right.

Lath and plaster was fine for the house of a country squire,

but I'm on my way to see a palace that was built to entertain a king.

Hampton Court had to be built of something more substantial but, again,

it came down to the availability of local materials,

so Hampton Court was built of brick.

Ightham Mote is quite a modest place,

but at the other end of the scale,

Hampton Court is the biggest, most splendid Tudor palace in England.

The palace was begun in 1515

by Henry VIII's chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey.

This central gateway is part of his original palace.

It's a bit strange how history goes.

Henry gave his best minister, Cardinal Wolsey,

permission to do some lodgings for him.

When he couldn't fix it up with the Pope about his divorce,

Henry kicked him out and carried on building himself.

That is most of what you see today.

Jonathan Foyle is the Assistant Curator for historic buildings and he knows all about how it was built.

Jonathan, tell me

which bit did Cardinal Wolsey do?

He took it over in 1514 when he wasn't yet a cardinal.

I've never been good on history!

He was on the cusp of that career.

He took over a medieval manor house. Some parts are buried in there.

This is the best example of Wolsey's domestic architecture.

He transformed this into a bishop's palace.

It was suitable then for a cardinal, as he developed it,

and for the royal family.

The whole of this breadth between the two gables is his.

-The other bit's Henry's?

-Henry's additions.

-When they fell out?

-Even before then, Henry took the house over.

These rooms are Wolsey's, probably built in the late 1520s,

when he needed to retire from the King.

He was in deep water by that stage!

The hall is in that direction,

the gardens in that direction.

He may have used this fire. It's an original.

-The ceiling's quite interesting.

-It is. Yeah.

The background's plaster, but the ornamental bit's a bit different.

What's that made of?

They are moulded timber ribs.

Each one's got a groove, in which is put a length of leather mache.

That's wet, pounded, stamped leather,

which is gilded in the fashionable style of the day with arabesques,

then gilded lead leaves

and bosses at the junction.

-Lots of lovely, old panelling.

-Yes. These are quite plain.

What you'd expect in the 16th century is the linen-fold pattern.

-That goes like that.

-We've got a lot in the next room.

We've got two rooms here, Fred, that are covered in linen-fold.

I like this one with the cross. It may have been made for Wolsey.

It's quite ornate for linen-fold panelling.

It is called linen-fold panelling because it's like folded-up linen

or a cloth, you know, like your grandma did.

You work with your hands. How would you make something like that?

The timber in-between the folds would be done with concave and convex moulding planes.

-You groove the whole length and that's done instantly?

-Yeah.

That looks like it could have been done the same as masonry, with an hammer and chisel.

It's a bit up and downish.

That's the effect,

to get it to look like folded-up material.

I failed woodwork badly at school.

-I was top of t'class in woodwork.

-I bet you were!

This is Henry VIII's bit?

This hall was rebuilt by Henry VIII on the site of Wolsey's.

I'm researching that and it seems almost certain

that Wolsey's hall was longer and bigger.

Henry rebuilt this from 1532 to 1535, a few years after he arrived.

This is a wonderful hammer-beam roof above our heads.

I always thought they came about because they couldn't get big trees,

but there's a little more to it, in't there?

There is, but you're limited by the length of trunk that a tree could provide for a beam.

To span 40 feet like this, you'd need to find an immense beam.

I've seen them in industrial premises in Lancashire.

To get across here, it would be two feet deep by nine inches thick,

with a queen post - two vertical posts heavily braced with iron rods, to accomplish the same thing.

You want a feeling of lightness and space.

If you have beams coming across, it spoils it.

In Westminster Hall in the 1390s,

they pioneered this technique

of building a hammer beam straight out from the wall like a cantilever.

That can support a central vault,

so it's a very light construction.

It looks like the underside of a ship.

This was a late one. Westminster was in the 1390s. This is the 1530s.

I think it's Henry's best bit here.

In the Middle Ages,

in roof construction, like hammer-beam roofs,

the main joint in all of it were the mortise-and-tenon joint.

That is an hole in one bit of wood

and a bit on another to fit in the hole.

The tools needed to form such a joint are fairly simple.

They must have been similar in the Middle Ages.

A big drill for drilling a series of holes in a straight line

and a chisel and hammer

for joining all the holes up into a rectangular one.

We'll fix it together and see if it fits.

This is an haunch mortise-and-tenon joint on a grand scale.

That goes in there like that.

Then,

in this beam,

the hole is slightly out of line,

so when I knock this wooden peg in here,

it'll pull the tenon down into the mortise hole.

Once we have got it in, we won't be able to get it out. Here goes.

That feels very good and very tight.

The next stage is to bash in the wooden wedges, when I can find them.

Here they are.

One in there.

One in there, like that.

That is a mortise-and-tenon joint on a grand scale.

That's how all the roof trusses in Hampton Court would have been made.

They'd chop all that off after and make it level.

That's what they did.

Buildings never stayed the same,

as different owners extended them,

added to them or converted them.

Hampton Court stayed much as it was in Henry's day

until William III came to the throne in 1689.

William commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild it

and it was Wren who added this baroque palace.

Hampton Court was a place to live,

but some great houses

didn't begin as houses.

I went to Lacock to see one that's best known today as the home

of a famous 19th-century inventor.

William Henry Fox Talbot was a great innovator,

who was responsible for finding out, more or less,

all we know today about photography.

His family home, like a lot of big country houses, started life

as a religious institution.

Before the Reformation, this was a nunnery. After the dissolution of the monasteries,

Henry VIII sold it to a courtier, William Sharrington.

A lot of courtiers bought monastic buildings

that Henry had taken over.

The King made quite a lot of money out of it.

When he bought this place, it consisted of a church

and many large rooms that were cold and draughty that the nuns lived in.

At the time of the Reformation, when Henry was selling all these places to his noblemen,

the problem was making them so you could live in them.

There were no central heating then.

In the whole nunnery, there was only one fireplace

in the "warming" room, which is next door.

The answer for most people was to flatten the lot and use the materials to build a new house.

It was easier than digging it out of a quarry.

But Sharrington didn't.

He left most of it and sort of built on top of it.

That were a wonderful thing to do, because it preserved all these lovely arches,

windows and niches.

This is what's known as

the South Gallery.

The whole house is full of long, narrow passages,

which follow the line of the cloisters underneath.

The whole lot is stuck on top of these passageways.

In the days of the nuns, the Abbess was billeted

down that end in her private quarters.

The nuns were up this end in their dormitory.

It was just a passageway then.

It was the same when Sharrington was here, but he had a tiled floor.

When Fox Talbot came,

he put floorboards down and made these beautiful bay windows.

That bay window is the very one where the first photo were taken.

This was in 1835,

when the Industrial Revolution

and British inventiveness was at its height.

From Lacock, I went to Northumberland to see a house

built by one of Britain's mightiest industrialists.

The Industrial Revolution brought a great surge in house building

and the rich industrialists built mansions like this.

This is Cragside in Northumberland,

the home of the first Lord Armstrong,

innovator, inventor, engineer and gun maker.

In the 19th century,

he played a major role in the industrialisation of Tyneside.

His Elswick works at Newcastle was the heart

of an engineering industrial empire making cranes,

hydraulic machinery and armaments.

Built on a hill, it was one of the most remarkable houses of its day.

It had hot and cold running water, telephones, a fire alarm and a hydraulic lift.

All the electricity were generated by a hydroelectric power station.

No wonder they called it,

"the palace of the modern magician".

Armstrong also created a series of lakes in the grounds

to store the water for the power to generate electricity

and drive all the hydraulic machinery he installed in the house.

Lord Armstrong helped his domestic staff

with his hydraulic machinery.

He had a lift for taking up coal to the bedrooms, a hydraulic lift.

Of course, this spit is driven by a water turbine

that's quite a way off down in the cellar.

It works by a complicated system of rods

and bevel gears and universal joints.

You can move it away from the fire and move it into the fire.

It goes round, as you can see.

Some barbecue that, believe me,

and the biggest back boiler I've seen

for the domestic hot water.

This is the dining room, where he entertained

such guests as the King of Siam and the Shah of Persia,

who, of course, came here to buy guns off him.

As well as using his machinery to help with the domestic chores,

he also used it to impress prospective customers.

The whole place really were a shop window for the inventions he did.

This, without a doubt, must be one of the finest

Victorian domestic English interiors.

In the ceiling alone are a few good English oak trees.

The fireplace is wonderful.

It's got to be the biggest inglenook fireplace in England.

The outer Gothic arch and the great stones going up

have survived very well, but Sir William did a bit of overstoking,

because there's a few nasty cracks in his mantelpiece proper.

You can imagine him sat there,

thinking of what he were going to do next with his hydraulics.

This is the library, the other great Victorian room in the house.

Sir William used it every day as his sitting room.

You can see

where he wrote letters.

The other interesting things are the lamps.

Originally, they were oil lamps.

Sir William had them converted to electricity,

which came from a generator outside in the grounds.

Sir William's first attempt at electric lighting were interesting.

He had a vessel full of mercury.

He lowered the bit with the bulb on into the mercury by hand.

There were no light switches. The thing's alive.

I don't know whether he had rubber gloves on, but it must have been a dodgy operation,

but, with his inventive mind, he got it to this stage.

It's interesting that a great industrialist,

who was responsible for many major technological advances,

chose this very traditional, old English style of building

for a house that he filled with modern inventions.

Was the housing for factory workers built, like Cragside, to last?

The coming of the railways

meant a standard range of building materials became available

for low-cost workers' housing all around the country.

It's hard to know what it was like to live in them.

Those that haven't been pulled down have all been modernised.

To get a sense of what it was like, you need to come to Beamish.

If you want to see some houses where more ordinary people live, this is the place to come.

This is Beamish up in the Northeast, near Newcastle.

This lovely, old town behind me

has been dismantled in other parts of the northeast

and brought back here and re-erected in every minute detail.

It's new, but the bricks are old and the window frames are old.

When you come here, you get a lovely feeling of long ago.

It's interesting.

This fine Georgian terrace is called Ravensworth Terrace.

It was taken down in Gateshead

and brought back here and re-erected.

A lot of rows of houses in Bolton are like this. It's so sad,

that during the last great conflict,

they pinched all the railings off these lovely Georgian garden walls

and melted them all down.

These are not repros. They've survived.

These are lovely Georgian windows, with little panes of glass.

As it's raining, I'll see how Miss Smith's piano lessons are going.

I'm off. I'll see you later.

-Good morning.

-Good morning.

-A splendid parlour.

-It's nice.

It's a cut above the others with the semi-circular arches. I've got a fireplace like that

at home in one of my bedrooms.

About 1850, that were made.

The lovely sash windows,

with the panelling and shutters and everything.

Not very long later,

they made rooms similar in proportion, but they lacked

the Cornish moulding and even skirting boards

at t'turn of century in worker houses.

This is posh.

Next door to the music teacher is the dentist's house.

He must have been well-to-do, because he could afford a servant.

Good morning. A bit like home from home for me, this.

The Victorian cast-iron fire grates were the centre of the household.

Everything happened here.

Bread were baked. The boiling water dried all the clothes on this rail.

From about 1900 onwards, if you didn't have a lot of money,

you'd buy a terraced house, like the type in Coronation Street.

The bedrooms were barren, just a square box.

The only form of lighting were one single gas bracket,

nearly always screwed to the chimney breast

or often, I never worked out why,

to the side of a window frame.

Where the light come in, the gas bracket were there!

Just like the town, they've created a complete pit village,

complete with an engine, an engine house, the headgear, the screens,

the village school and a beautiful row of pitmen's cottages.

Behind me is the Methodist chapel - that means no drinking!

Subtitles by Catherine Fowell, ITFC, for BBC Subtitling - 2000