Places of Work Fred Dibnah's Magnificent Monuments

This is my place of work here in my back garden.

Everything's powered by steam.

So I've always been in need of a decent chimney.

I managed to build one recently,

so I'm having a little topping out ceremony with my wife.

-There, my dear.

-Thanks very much.

MARCHING TUNE ON GRAMOPHONE

You always had a grand party

on top with a brass band.

This is t'best we can do with a gramophone and champagne.

It's a bit sad, really, because

I've knocked lots of these things down

and this is the last to be built in Bolton.

Hopefully, you know.

-Good health.

-Cheers.

May it have many years of happy smoking!

My back garden must be the only place

left in Bolton that needs a chimney like this.

When I was a lad the whole place was full of factories,

providing work for hundreds of people.

In the past we didn't make things in factories

and we didn't have industrial towns.

We used to be an agricultural society.

And what was made was made at home.

Most of our earliest surviving places of work were agricultural buildings

like this 1,000-year-old tithe barn at Falmer, near Brighton,

which is being restored as a Millennium project.

The techniques thatchers use

were developed over 2,000 years ago

so I was able to have a look at one of

our most traditional building crafts.

Some of these barns are amongst the largest surviving buildings from the Middle Ages.

There can't be many bigger thatching jobs than this.

John Harman is the master thatcher in charge of the project.

He showed me how to go about it.

-Now then, John.

-How are you?

There's no roofs like this where I come from. They're made of slate.

What stops the rain coming in, you know?

Cos there's no underfelt, is there?

It's the angle of the way the straw lays on the roof.

We have a thickness of two foot.

-So we've got an undercoat and we've got a topcoat.

-Yeah.

If it goes through the topcoat, it's OK.

What stops it all slurring off?

It's sparred on to the basecoat with hazel spars, like a wooden staple.

They did this in Roman times.

That's right. Before that.

-Almost the same, eh?

-Back to the Iron Age, really.

Are you going to show me how to do a bit?

Yeah, sure.

Wait a minute. I'll do it... I'll do it proper.

How's that?

I'm only an apprentice, so...

I don't want too much.

Take a little bond of straw.

-Pull a bond. Put that across this way.

-Yeah.

I'll have a do at fixing one of them on.

It turned round a bit.

Keep 'em going uphill when you put 'em on.

Yeah. Yeah.

How many thatchers

are left now in England?

Too many. FRED LAUGHS

When people ask about steeplejacking, they say that.

"He must be t'only one."

-And there's bloody hundreds of 'em!

-There's about 1,500 altogether.

Oh, aye. A fair bit of stiff competition.

There can't be many thatched roofs this big. It's like a cathedral.

There's not many tithe barns about.

I've never seen

a thatched roof this big.

50 tons of straw we've put on.

Tithe barns like this were used to store the produce

that was paid as a tithe or tax

towards the upkeep of the local priest.

The Church was important in medieval society.

A lot of early work places had religious connections

like this ancient hospital.

In the Middle Ages, the monks did charitable work.

This included looking after the poor

and the sick, and the places they set up to do it

were really our very earliest hospitals.

St Cross Hospital is in Winchester.

It's not a hospital with an accident and emergency department

or a maternity unit, so you won't see any doctors or nurses here.

What we have here today is Britain's oldest existing charitable institution.

It was founded in 1132 for the benefit of 13 poor men.

It was more like an almshouse than hospitals we have now.

And today it still acts as sheltered accommodation

for 25 elderly men.

This is the church of the hospital of St Cross

and building started in 1135.

It's so old, when it were first built, it had a thatched roof.

Sometime in the 14th century it acquired a lead one.

Round the side, they're taking part of it off, so we can see

how the Normans put a roof on a church like this one.

'Stuart Moore is the conservation builder who is doing the work.'

When the building was constructed, it would have had a thatched roof.

The line on the wall here is the original weathering,

sort of flashing to the thatch.

Obviously that's been cut off at a later date.

Really, the whole weight of the roof

is taken on these two great balks of oak, in't it,

with the, you know, the...purlin or the spar resting here

and then this prop on the back?

Yes. I mean, it's a fairly common situation on a bigger building.

Just back from you you can see there's a tie,

a piece of timber passing between the two.

It stops them rolling apart.

Yeah. I see there's a few extra mortise holes

that didn't seem to get used.

Yeah, I mean, we have a theory

the original carpenter would probably have marked it out at ground level.

He knew where the rafters were and where the posts went.

But he hadn't realised

the vaulting is in the way.

With a lot of the lead stripped off the roof, you can see how

they constructed the lovely vaulting in the church.

The vaulting here is rough, but inside it's lovely.

Oh, yes. I mean, this line here that you can see - these stones -

shows us how thick the vaulting is. You'll see that this

is right at the top of the piece you can see.

So this is all...

About 14 or 15 inches thick.

Yes. The vaulting is basically an arch.

And an arch only works if it's got a weight on it.

So all this has just been put on top to add strength.

When you think they had no cement mixers,

there must have been armies of blokes mixing mortar to keep the wall from going.

We're 60ft up so it's all been carried up here.

The Normans were great builders.

They constructed churches and castles

on a vast scale.

For many, the building site was their work place.

But how did they build such huge places

all that time ago?

And how did they manage to lift massive lumps of stone

to such a great height?

These little holes that I'm chiselling in here

are going to enable me to put the dogs in,

which is an interesting clamping device.

We'll see it in a bit so that I can lift up the stone

and lower it down with, you know, with ease on... wherever I want it.

Right.

Really, you can see my bricks are nine inches long and four and a half inches wide,

The thing is

you can pick it up with one hand.

But the old timers didn't have bricks back in the Middle Ages.

They did, but they'd just started making 'em.

Most of the building material was stone.

The bigger the lump, the less you could play with it.

And so two men even lifting that and placing it carefully

on top of another two stones, it would be difficult.

There'd be blue fingernails.

So they invented these things

which is... a weird-looking piece of equipment,

but...very handy...when it comes to lifting up big stones.

Them holes are so...

so small and yet you've got like...

perfect control over the...the piece of stone.

Yeah.

When it was at the top, of course,

they wouldn't have any chain blocks.

It would be all pulleys and made of wood, I suppose,

with a small amount of iron involved like the axle.

They had no tower cranes.

It'd be the gallows bracket which would bring it up

and there'd be maybe a few blokes

on rope, holding it off the wall.

At the full thickness of t'wall, they'd let it swing in over the top.

If you really study

architecture and buildings,...

you can see evidence... of these holes.

I don't know, I mean...

Imagine that now with the mortar underneath.

Then all you've got to do is give it a little tap in t'right place

and...the job's a good one.

In the Middle Ages cloth were one of our most important trades

and Lacock was an important manufacturing and trading centre,

found on the old main road between London and Bristol.

By the 14th century most villagers of Lacock earned their living by weaving

and the products became quite famous and were sold far and wide

and even exported from Bristol.

In the 15th century wide looms were introduced

and, of course, many houses had a wider first floor

to accommodate the extra size.

The first storey of this house

once contained a hand loom.

In the Middle Ages they could only use the local materials.

Of course, everything was made of wood, thatch, plaster and sticks.

Slates and tiles

and bricks came much later.

Stone can be used more or less straight out of the ground or the quarry.

And this is an example of like random-rubble-type building.

Plenty of mortar and bits of stone

and stone dressings round the windows and doors.

But next door they've spent a bob or two

engaging the services of a reasonable stonemason

who's squared the stone and cut it to shape.

And a great saving on mortar for a start.

But quite nice. The joints are only about one-sixteenth of an inch thick.

And at the top there's a beautiful freeze

that looks like it may have come from somewhere else.

But they're still lovely to look at.

Trade in the textiles that were made here

turned Lacock into a wealthy place.

But as an island, much of our trade has had to be carried out by sea.

So shipyards

became some of our busiest work places.

From the southwest I went to Chatham in Kent to see one of our oldest.

Shipbuilding's always been one of our greatest industries.

At this historic dockyard at Chatham

is the world's most complete naval shipyard,

dating from Georgian and early Victorian times.

The dockyard is now a naval museum.

But you can still see nearly all of the 18th and 19th century docks and buildings.

Hundreds of people from over 26 trades were employed here,

all working

to produce one single object - the warship.

Together with the dry docks,

the covered slips formed the industrial heart of the dockyard.

This end slipway - the wooden one -

which, of course, is the oldest of all of 'em,

is a magnificent piece of carpentry on a grand scale.

The timber in it is unbelievable.

It's as big as two football pitches.

This must be the biggest shed in all of England.

The reason for its great size is, you know,

they needed it to build ships under cover, you know,

in the 18th and early 19th century.

It sort of...

It's a magnificent piece of woodwork. The trusses

are a work of art.

I don't think I've ever, ever, ever been in anywhere made of wood

as grand and big as this, you know.

The most beautiful...

Eh...

It makes you wonder how they got those great roof trusses up like that.

When you think, they must have made 'em

down on t'floor, flat.

Then they pulled them up the verticals with guy ropes on

to keep 'em in t'vertical position.

And then when they got two or three up,

put the timber across under the windows,

which would give it stability as well as the guy ropes.

Then crash the bolts through.

Definitely.

Yeah. Some piece of woodwork.

The round end is magnificent. It's like a big fan.

In the 18th century, the Royal Dockyards was the biggest manufacturing site in the world.

But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution

factories began to appear all over Britain.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries we led the world

in using the power of coal, water and steam to drive

the machinery that made mass production possible.

And with this came the need

for a new type of building, so our first mills and factories were built.

To see one of the earliest I went back up north.

Armley Mills in Leeds was built at the beginning of the 19th century.

-This wonderful canal wends its way all the way from Liverpool.

-It does.

How many miles further up does it go into Leeds?

About two miles into the centre of Leeds.

It would bring raw materials for the industries of West Riding,

from the Liverpool docks.

It touched, really, every industrial town all the way.

I suppose that's why it's like a snake, in't it?

-It goes everywhere all over t'show.

-It is, yes.

When it came, it catered for this place.

There's been mills here from at least the 16th century,

possibly before, long before the canal came.

Riven by, of course, the river.

The river and the shape of the river

was the reason why Armley Mills is here.

-Driven by water and the water came from the river.

-Yeah.

This is where the water disappears under the mill to the water wheels.

Mill buildings were designed to house a big workforce

and lots of machinery.

They also had to be fireproof

because the materials that were being made

were highly inflammable.

The most interesting thing that you can see here is the construction.

Originally they were timber floors which was where the trouble was with fire.

So they made floors out of stone flags.

They supported them on brick arches

which you can see there.

They were carried on the iron beams and the beams were supported by the iron columns.

So it's all material that wouldn't burn.

By the middle of the 19th century

we were building some pretty impressive spinning mills.

This, behind me, is India Mill in Darwen near Blackburn.

It were built somewhere about 1875.

This must be one of the finest chimney stacks in all of Great Britain.

The Victorians, when they did things,

not only have they got to be functional,

they've got to look good. I once had the pleasure

of laddering this chimney, you know, for an inspection.

It looks impressive from down here, but up there, the size of some of them rocks

they must weigh five or six tons each, some of 'em.

They're so big.

It would be built from the inside off a platform in the middle.

As the walls went up, the platform would be moved at 6ft centres

up the middle.

They're great stones. They no doubt have a steam engine or winch to pull 'em up.

The biggest overhang is 5ft from the face of the brickwork.

You've got to go out backwards 5ft

to get round the corner of the biggest overhang.

Here we are. My word!

You can ride a bike round here.

It's so sad that places like this were still working

in our lifetimes, but, alas, they've all gone now.

Factories brought lots of people into the new industrial towns

where fresh food wasn't as available as it had been in the country,

so shops began to appear

to cater for the needs of the workers.

The first co-operative store was a grocers,

opened in Rochdale in 1844.

But by the early 20th century

the Co-op was selling everything from food to furniture.

To see one from this time

I went to the North of England Open Air Museum at Beamish.

I remember as a kid going in the Co-op with my mum.

It were a room similar to this.

And the architecture and everything was so superior, you know.

They had their own architects and their own builders.

And they're all, if you look around, on t'same pattern.

Like in Lancashire, in a poor mill neighbourhood,

there were always this beautiful building - the Co-op.

It had beautiful stone dressings or terracotta,

always a beautiful plaque - Farnworth and Kearsley

Co-operative Society,

Bolton Co-operative, Rochdale,

Ramsbottom Co-operative Society.

You can't help but notice as well in here

that all the packaging will all rot away.

You know,... not like the modern days, you know,

where everything lasts for ever when you throw it away.

What are you doing, dear? Is this a Nescafe machine?

That's right. Just grinding some coffee.

Two and seven, eh?

Blooming 'eck.

I've got some beautiful scales at home just like these.

They must be the same maker in every detail.

When my uncle died with his temperance bar, my auntie give 'em me.

We've got 'em on top of the telly now at home.

Now then, Malcolm. I know what you're doing, but these lot at t'other end of here don't.

I'm going to send the money by using a system which will take the ball

-and lift it up onto the track.

-Yeah.

It will then be forced down by gravity.

It runs into the cash office. Now that system will then quicken up

the method of...recording everyone's purchase

and make it easier working out the dividend at the end of the quarter.

There were a similar contraption in the Co-op in Bolton when I were a little lad,

but it worked off either a vacuum or compressed air.

It did exactly t'same thing.

It made life easier for the guy behind the counter.

Shopping must have been a pleasure

especially if you went to a place as beautiful and ornate as this.

Leadenhall Market in London.

It's a wonderful example of the great lengths

the Victorians went to to make

even the most ordinary places good to look at.

Whatever was built, they used ornamentation

with no other purpose than to please the eye.

The whole place is an iron founder's dream, you know.

All the beautiful columns and ornamental corbels

and the flowery bits will be hollow.

Inside, where nobody can see, there'll be big rectangular-shaped holes.

Joining the ends are lots of nut and bolt holes.

It will be held together by nuts and bolts.

Quite a wonderful thing, really,

when you think about it.

All these lovely wrought iron bars

would once have had sides of beef hanging down and that.

It must have been an interesting place, I think.

Right next door, we have the modern face of the work place.

This is the Lloyds Insurance Building.

It shows how much construction techniques

have changed. There's not many people

who work in such a futuristic building as this just yet.

But is this the shape of the work place of the future?

Lloyds have a long association with the sea.

They started off insuring ships.

As they moved with the times, so did their office.

This here thing behind me is Lloyds HQ

here in London.

The only criticism I have about this wonderful thing here

is the fact that all its innards are on the outside, all the services

and they look rather fragile and a bit vulnerable to the atmosphere and the weather.

But I've noticed on every corner there's a tower crane permanently fixed there

so, in a way, it could be a lot easier for the maintenance of the pipes

than being under floors and up cavities inside.

There all fairly easily accessible.

We demolished the 1928 building to make room for this one.

But we kept this in store and this didn't go...

'Richard Keene of Lloyds showed me round.'

I must say

I'm impressed with the magnitude of it all.

This, Fred, is the underwriting room.

It's known colloquially as The Room.

If you ask anyone in the City where The Room is, they'll send you here.

You know, from what you see, Lloyds is very much a marketplace.

We made the decision that we needed a new home.

One of the prime requirements was that we needed as much working space

as possible, and Richard Rogers the architect has provided us

-with just that.

-He has indeed.

A great amount of space you've got.

There's only the concrete pillars and then it's the outer skin.

-That's right.

-With the other pillars on the outside,

which gives you a ginormous working area or the floor, as you might say.

This magnificent staircase that goes up,

it's like James Bond, in't it?

JAMES BOND STYLE FLOURISH

On this level, we have all the directors

of the Corporation of Lloyds, who have offices here.

And I thought I might show you something a little bit different.

So if you'd like to come in here.

Wow!

This is something of a contrast.

This is a genuine Robert Adam

dining room.

It's here because we found that part of Bowood House in Wiltshire,

owned by the Marquis of Lansdowne,

was being demolished with this room.

So Lloyds collectively purchased the room.

And the whole room was cut into sections,

bought to the City, but here it's back to...

-The original Robert Adam design.

-That's right.

That cornice moulding there.

At the end of my kitchen I've got some almost exactly t'same.

The only difference is the lamb's tongue bit at the top is plain on mine.

But that's a bit bigger than what mine is at home. Yeah.

I didn't know Adam designed kitchens.

He had nowt to do with it.

It's just the plaster. You can buy anything nowadays in shops.

Well, Richard, after seeing that lot in there,

I think I'll nip over and see the chairman

about giving me a reduction on my steeplejacking premiums!

Subtitles by Sean Sutton, ITFC, for BBC Subtitling - 2000