Pleasure Palaces Fred Dibnah's Magnificent Monuments

I don't think there are many better pastimes

than spending time in the back garden doing this.

RIVETING

Yeah, you can't beat a bit of riveting.

Of course, if you get 'em wrong, they're a hell of a job to get one out!

I don't suppose riveting

would be everybody's idea of a good time.

A day at the seaside or an amusement park would be a bit more like it for most people.

What people enjoy doing in their spare time varies a lot. In this programme,

we're looking at different places

that have been built for leisure and pleasure.

As well as Blackpool, I'll be going to places like theatres and museums.

Starting with one of our earliest and best-preserved places of pleasure.

The city of Bath is very important.

It has the only hot springs in the country.

And this is what made it very important to the Romans.

The Romans developed Bath

into a city of leisure and pleasure.

They built around the hot springs

a wonderful system of baths... and what we can see here, in fact.

The thing is, along with Hadrians's Wall,

it's one of the grandest monuments

that the Roman Empire left behind.

The main feature is the great bath,

which is still fed from the hot springs

by the original Roman plumbing.

A masterpiece of early civil engineering.

The hydraulics that control the water flow

show a detailed knowledge of the art of taming springs.

The channels that carry the hot water through the baths still function today

as the Roman engineers intended them to do.

The baths were a meeting place.

Roman Britons would come here in the afternoon to chat.

They knew how to enjoy themselves,

all that time ago.

Another amenity that Romans introduced to Britain were theatres.

When they left, the theatres disappeared.

They never really made a comeback until the Tudor age.

In Tudor times, this area south of the Thames

was London's Theatreland.

It was known as Bankside.

It was the home of Shakespeare's Globe.

The theatre was destroyed by fire and no trace of it was left.

What we see today is an authentic reconstruction that's only 200 yards away from the original.

It was the vision of an American actor, Sam Wanamaker, who was involved in the project

from the cutting of the first trees.

To get the wood, they had to travel all over the country

to find trees of the right size and shape.

Peter McCardy is the carpenter

who was responsible for the whole timber-frame construction.

If we look at the timber structure here,

these posts actually reflect the bays inside.

The basis of timber construction

is breaking the structure up into a series of bays.

If we look at these joints,

we can see we've got these curved braces.

We look for a tree with that natural curve.

This is good, this lovely angle.

In buildings that are polygonal, like this,

or indeed, in buildings that weren't square in plan,

and quite a lot of medieval buildings weren't square in plan,

they would shape the posts to the angle of the building.

This is shaped approximately to 162 degrees.

Peter, when you started,

there couldn't have been much left of the original.

The Globe theatre suffered from fire.

-Being timber...

-The thatched roof.

The thatched roof led to the demise of the first Globe theatre.

They fired a live cannon during a performance of Henry VIII.

Some of the wadding went onto the thatch.

It caught light and the whole thing was razed to the ground.

That created a problem for anybody who wanted to do a reconstruction.

There was nothing to work from in the way of any tangible physical evidence.

There's a number of drawings of the theatres that were done at that time.

I've got one here on the end of a peg.

That shows you how big the illustrations are that we've had to work with.

The building as we see it,

and the timbers and joinery details,

have had to be based on careful research of other buildings

which have got similar features and characteristics.

Like the joints for the mortice and tenons

and all the usual joints pegged together.

Quite interesting, how you've...

how it really looks as though it's been sawn with a pit saw.

In 1987 they discovered the archaeology of the Rose theatre foundations.

And then in 1989 they excavated the Globe theatre site.

And it's from those two pieces of information,

and these drawings, that we've got the overall size of this building.

100ft diameter and a 20-sided polygon.

Each of these bays represents

a facet on the building.

There are 20 around the whole circle.

The building is really dealt with

in two-dimensional planes.

So you don't fabricate

a 3-D structure, you simply fabricate flat walls.

Once they'd done this, they'd have to take it all apart

to transport it to the site.

And then piece it all together again.

It must be one of the biggest timber prefabricated buildings ever made.

There are various, really interesting refinements that these carpenters evolved

to ensure that when the timbers were put together,

they came together with the right angles.

-If you didn't have the right angle in this building, they wouldn't meet.

-Too long or too short!

You might miss, like this.

I spent from being 15 years old till I were 22 as a joiner.

It's wonderful, how it's been done.

I don't think it could have looked a heck of a lot different when it were first built.

The principles in Sam's conception for this project were to do as accurate

a reconstruction as possible.

Peter Street was the original builder

and I like to feel that if he was standing here instead of me,

that he would feel comfortable,

as though it was one of his buildings.

What would have made him feel at home is not just

a structure that would have been familiar,

but the whole design and decoration of the building.

The curtains, the painting of the stage

and the marbled columns have been recreated

by craftsmen and women to make it look as it would have done in Shakespeare's day.

By the 18th century, the design and decoration of buildings

had become so important that a whole city was built in one style.

It was at this time that the old Roman city of Bath

was transformed into the most popular leisure resort in England.

It became the summer capital of polite society.

The place to go to take the waters and socialise.

Towns have usually grown up

in a fairly higgeldy-piggeldy sort of way.

But Bath is an example of a town whose whole look

was designed for gracious living.

It was a Yorkshireman, John Wood,

whose vision helped to change the face of Bath.

Queen's Square is a perfect example of a design layout,

with all the houses in it built to the same proportions

and of the same stone.

His grandest project,

the Circus,

has 30 houses built on a curve, and a paved square.

When he died, his work was carried on

by his son, whose greatest work, the Royal Crescent,

has been called the finest crescent in Europe.

Like his father, the young John Wood was influenced

by the classical style of Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome.

Another imperial age left us with some of

our grandest monuments.

The age of Victoria

and the British Empire was at its peak.

The Great Exhibition was held in 1851

to demonstrate the industrial supremacy

and the prosperity of Britain.

It was a great success.

The profits were used to establish

an area of museums

in South Kensington.

The grand facade

of the Victoria and Albert Museum

was built between 1899 and 1909,

to bring uniformity to a group of buildings

devoted to the decorative arts.

Aston Webb, the architect,

wanted to bring the outside into the museum in quite a clever way.

What he wanted to do was to create a buffer zone, if you like,

using Portland stone,

which he used on the outside face.

He decided to bring what is normally used outside into this first area.

It works quite well.

In the other part of the entrance,

you have the walls rendered.

The soft plaster brings you into the envelope of the museum.

All this lovely marble, as well.

In the entrance here, he wanted to use several marbles.

The floor is Carrara marble,

also with black Italian marble

and also Romanian red marble.

I've got a table in my back kitchen with that pink marble on.

-Believe it or not!

-When we take it up,

we'll let you have that slab!

As you get into the museum,

you can see the way the decoration and the materials used

were designed to complement the exhibits.

So this staircase was the one that led up

to the original ceramics galleries.

As we walk up the staircase, the whole structure

is clad in ceramic tile.

If you look on the staircase, the decoration here

endlessly repeats the marrying together of science and art.

S and A, not V and A for Victoria and Albert.

That's what S and A is there for.

If we carry on up the staircase,

you can see above the handrails

are the painted panels.

It's almost like a jigsaw,

how it all fits together.

Little hexagonal pieces.

They're cut up into smaller pieces that look like

mosaic tesserae.

The vitrified tiling was also carried up into the ceiling, too.

You can spend a day just admiring the decoration

without looking at any exhibits.

For me, the most exciting bit

was being able to get up into the roof

to see what some of the original buildings

would have looked like.

We've now got inside the roof void of the south court.

As you can see, it's had inserted into the south court, in 1952,

a modern suspended ceiling.

Getting into the void, you can see

the original roof structure.

Yeah. And the beautifying.

And the beautifying.

It was a bolted iron structure with a glass roof.

Very similar to the construction of the Crystal Palace.

The walls are still decorated

with the original paint scheme.

-Gold leaf.

-Highly decorated.

-Yeah, beautiful.

See the plaster there,

how it's stuck to the laths,

which are all the gentle curve of the arch.

Even down to the decoration running along the eye sections

of the girders.

Every single surface has been gilded or painted or stencilled.

You see the flanges there, riveted,

-joining the pieces together.

-Yeah.

-They were certainly good with the rivets!

-Absolutely.

One of the original aims of the museum

was to inspire British designers and manufacturers.

So there's a collection of

plastercast reproductions

from some of the world's greatest

buildings and monuments - put together

for the benefit of art students

who couldn't afford to go abroad

to see them for themselves.

They include the door of a cathedral

and Trajan's column from Rome,

which they had to chop in half to get in here.

At building monuments, the Victorians were best.

From London I went to see

one of the most famous.

This magnificent monument on Princes Street in Edinburgh

was erected in remembrance

of Sir Walter Scott, the famous Scottish writer.

I don't know why - there's 287 steps to t'top of this monument -

through all my career of being a steeplejack,

I've always found it easier

to go up a straight, vertical ladder

to t'top of anything, really.

Shortly after Sir Walter Scott's death,

it was decided that they should build a monument in his remembrance.

So it were put out for a competition.

There were quite a few eminent architects who wanted the job.

But George Meikle Kemp, a joiner from Midlothian,

submitted his first drawing.

Of course, because of his humble beginnings

and the fact that he were only a joiner,

they turned him down.

But there were nobody really happy on the committee

with what they'd received on the first attempt.

So a second batch of drawings were put forward by all the architects.

But Mr Kemp applied again under an assumed name.

They picked his drawing and he got the job.

He supervised the whole thing from the beginning but not to the end,

because when it were halfway up he went to see the main contractor.

It was a terrible, foggy night.

Whether he'd had a wee dram, nobody knows.

But he fell in the canal and drowned.

His brother-in-law actually finished off the construction.

The capstone were placed on the top by Kemp's son.

Mr Kemp would have been proud to see the end product.

But it weren't finished after four years.

The 30-ton block of marble

that had to come from Italy for the statue of Sir Walter,

they dropped it in the harbour in Italy.

They managed to get it on a boat and when it got to Leith,

in Scotland, they had no gear to get it off!

It took another two years before the statue were completed.

Recently, there's been quite a lot of restoration work done on it.

They used exactly the same stone,

but of course it will never get as black as what the rest of it is.

There won't be the same amount of smoke in Edinburgh as there was.

I'd have daubed a bit of mud on it

to make it blend in with the other.

It's something I tried when I was redoing

some of the stonework on my house.

When I bought this house about 40 years ago,

it basically were a two-up and two-down.

As my family got bigger, I'd got to do something about it.

So I built as much on it again.

In all the wonderful buildings we've been looking at,

even castles and all that,

they've all been messed about with and extended one way and another.

Even kings were great DIY men.

Extensions were done to the house in the days of the Earl of Bradford.

But they didn't do a good job.

They omitted all the beading and the fancy work.

When I did it, I thought I'd try and reproduce

what they did in 1854.

When I first did the moulding and the fancy bits,

the little square pieces

were a very white material.

They stood out like a sore thumb.

So I made a mixture of mud and water out of the garden,

and painted them. God and the rain has done the rest.

They're now quite a good match with the moulding.

Not far from me is a Victorian monument of a different kind.

And one that's become one of

the country's most famous landmarks.

Blackpool Tower were built in 1894.

It's really an imitation of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

It helped transform Blackpool

into one of the biggest and busiest tourist resorts in all of England.

The tower is 518ft high.

And what you've got to remember is when it were built in 1894,

there were no aeroplanes and no skyscrapers.

Most Victorian people

had never been far off the ground.

To actually have the experience of being 500ft up in t'sky

and being able to see 30 miles

must have been an unbelievable attraction.

The tower were completed by the famous railway bridge builders

Enan and Froud, from Manchester.

On this maintenance level, it gives you some idea of what it's all about.

It's four latticework towers,

all leaning inwards.

And braced together with these big

three-inch diameter diagonal tie rods.

They stabilise the whole structure.

They tell me, in a 70mph gale,

it only moves an inch at the top.

The North pier is even older than the tower.

It were designed by a gentleman called Eugenius Birch.

That's some name, innit?

He decided that he would build it out of cast iron stanchions,

instead of the much stronger wrought iron.

His argument against the wrought iron

were if a ship crashed into it, it would bend and twist it.

If a ship crashed into his cast iron stanchions,

it would bust a few and they'd be able to replace them.

I think that were a good idea. I do indeed.

The pier was opened in 1863.

In 12 months, it attracted a quarter of a million punters

who paid a penny a piece to get on it.

The pier company tried to attract

a higher class of holidaymaker.

They only had two kiosks.

One sold tobacco and the other sold boots. There were no beer.

Not long afterwards came the Central pier,

which catered for the working classes who came here on trains.

A great venue for open air dancing

and loud music that went on into the night.

A stark contrast to the middle classes on the North pier.

By the beginning of the 20th century,

Blackpool had become firmly established

as Britain's favourite seaside resort.

It attracted millions every year.

After fresh air, the piers and the promenade during the day,

the evening was the time for the fun of the theatre.

Blackpool became a centre for popular entertainment.

Theatres were springing up all over the place.

This is the grandest of all the grand theatres, the Grand.

Designed by Frank Matcham, it took only nine months to build.

How did he do it with all this beautiful plaster?

Very quick. They'd be hard-pressed in this day and age to accomplish the same thing.

It's amazing how Matcham managed to get 1,200 people in such a small space.

His great thing were his lavish interiors.

All this beautiful ornamental plasterwork,

and lots of different sorts of styles.

Matcham used the cantilever design

to support the circles.

Basically, what that means is the girders came out of the wall

and radiated into the centre of that great curve,

which gives the whole thing great strength.

It must have bent a bit

when a pop band were on and kids were jumping up and down.

They've been pulling in the crowds in Blackpool

for over 100 years. The latest attraction

is as impressive for its engineering

as it is for the excitement of riding on it.

This is the latest engineering feat here on the front at Blackpool.

The Pepsi Max Big One is the biggest rollercoaster in the world.

It's 235ft high.

And the carriages go at 85mph.

That's fast. I think I'm going to have a go.

Goodbye. I'll see you later.

In about two minutes.

I don't know whether I'm going to like it.

You might see my breakfast!

I nearly gulped!

It would be better if it had strings on.

You don't need a hair brush!

I want to meet the man who first commissioned it.

He must have been very brave.

Aye.

One of the mechanics told me...

I said, "It's a bit bumpy. It could do with some springs."

He said, "As the morning wears on, it gets smoother. The wheels get soft."

Polystyrene or polypropylene. Poly summat or other.

Having just got off the Pepsi Big One,

it must be a nerve-racking business, being in charge of a place like this and a machine like that.

This is Jim, who's in charge.

Them lot up there don't really know what's going to happen to them.

They're going to love every minute.

And as for nerve-racking,

it tests you at times, I tell you!

It's quite scary, really.

That's the idea. To scare the pants off people.

But do it safely. That's what it's all about.

How many tons of iron is there?

There are 2,700 tons of steel in that.

Most of it was manufactured

and supplied not far from here, in Bolton.

Robert Watson's. The structural steel fellow.

All the steelwork came from a company in Southampton.

The biggest and best in England.

I can't see anything in Europe

going bigger than that at the moment.

Frightening to think of anything bigger.

We'll hold the record for a while.

The track's two pieces of tubing.

A little bit more than that!

A steel tube track, that's right.

Our engineers walk that track every day.

You were on the first run.

The wheels take a while to warm up.

But it will be better now.

Let's go back.

-Then it gets to stage where it just keeps going.

-Let's go back!

This is the third time round on here this morning.

That's it. I'm ready.

My hat's gone!

I should have riveted it on.

It's funny, wherever I go, whether it's a place of entertainment,

or somewhere much older

and quieter and more peaceful, I always look at things

and wonder about the men who built them.

And about the great vision of the architects and engineers

who helped to create that wonderful, rich heritage of buildings

that we have in this country today.

What a credit they are to the men who built them.

Subtitles by Sally Gray, ITFC, for BBC Subtitling - 2000

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