Manchester to Bury Great British Railway Journeys


Manchester to Bury

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In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.

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His name was George Bradshaw, and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.

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Stop by stop, he told them where to travel, what to see and where to stay.

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Now, 170 years later, I'm making four long journeys across the length

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and breadth of the country to see what remains of Bradshaw's Britain.

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From the early days of Britain's railways,

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you couldn't contemplate a journey without first consulting

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Bradshaw's - a comprehensive guide to train timetables.

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Over the coming weeks, using an ancient Bradshaw's guide, I will criss-cross Britain,

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on four fascinating routes to view the places and achievements that delighted the Victorians,

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to see how the railways changed the British people

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and to understand how much we've changed since.

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Along today's route, I'll be discovering how Manchester came to be known as Cottonopolis...

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By the end of the century, the Indians were getting Indian designs sent back from Manchester

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to India that maybe came from cotton that they had grown originally. It was crazy.

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..finding out how Bradshaw helped unify time across the UK...

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Each provincial city, like Birmingham, Manchester and so on, had their own time, and of course,

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this was liable to create great confusion with railway timetables.

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..and how the railways brought fish and chips to British plates.

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Thank you very much indeed. Lovely.

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It was the onset of the railways that allowed all this population,

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this inland population, for the first time to experience sea fish.

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On this journey, I'm travelling

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from Liverpool along the world's first

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passenger railway to Manchester.

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Then, I'll continue on across the country,

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from west to east through Yorkshire,

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along the Humber estuary to Hull,

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and eventually, up the coast

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to my final destination at Scarborough.

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My first train is from Eccles to the centre of Manchester.

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Then, I'll head to Denton

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and travel north to Bury.

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Manchester has a rich railway history, so I'm going to spend some time exploring it and its suburbs.

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The city helped to build the first modern train line from Liverpool in 1830.

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In turn, the railway transformed Manchester into a powerful global hub,

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and it was here that the first railway timetables were published and sold.

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So to start off, I'm heading right for the centre, where it all began.

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Manchester Victoria. Manchester - one of the hugely important cities

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in the development of our railways, and also the birthplace of one George Bradshaw.

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Thank you.

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Bradshaw, being from Manchester, must have written about this city

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with particular pride,

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and his guide book contains this page of illustrations of

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the buildings that the Victorians were so proud of -

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the Free Trade Hall, the Exchange building, fantastic achievements

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that I'm really looking forward to seeing again.

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Many of these grand buildings so familiar to Bradshaw were built

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with the wealth generated by the cotton trade in the early 19th century,

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and it was around that time that Manchester was nicknamed Cottonopolis.

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I'm hoping to get a tour of Cottonopolis from local guide

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Jonathan Schofield, starting at the Royal Exchange building.

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Hi, I'm Michael. Great to see you.

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Nice to meet you, Michael. Welcome to Manchester.

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It's lovely to be here. Why have you brought me to the Exchange building first?

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Well, I suppose the Royal Exchange is the spiritual heart of Manchester. What really gave Manchester

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its dynamism was trade, was business, and the Royal Exchange is the heart of that business.

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Well, I'm carrying this 150-year-old guide book, Bradshaw's, and Bradshaw describes this building...

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He was very impressed by this rounded Doric front,

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-and he describes the "cotton lords" meeting here on a Tuesday.

-Yes, well,

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they were cotton lords.

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Manchester was Cottonopolis and these were the cotton barons,

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or the Cottontots they were often called as well,

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and they would come here and they would do business.

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And by the way, it was so crowded in there that you had a grid reference.

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On the columns on the inside, you had letters and numbers,

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so I'll meet you at J2, because you would not find the trader otherwise.

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Describe the trade to me.

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Where is the cotton coming from before it reaches Manchester?

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Where is it going to after it has been in Manchester?

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It's coming from the hotter parts of the world, in some respects.

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It's coming from the southern states of the USA or Egypt - places where they can grow raw cotton.

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We cannot grow raw cotton around here, and so therefore, it would have come at least a thousand miles.

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The new railway gave Manchester a competitive edge over

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the rest of the world and sent the cotton industry into overdrive.

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Textiles, spinning, weaving and dyeing dominated

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Victorian Manchester and the small mill towns that surrounded it.

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By 1913, 65 per cent of the world's cotton was processed in the area.

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By the end of the century, we were selling printed fabric back to...

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tribes people in Africa.

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The Indians were getting Indian designs sent back from Manchester

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to India, that maybe came from cotton that they had grown originally.

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It was crazy, but it just builds up that classic competitive advantage.

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So, what's going to be the next stop on Jonathan's tour of Cottonopolis?

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Now, we're here at the cotton cathedral, I suppose, with the Royal Exchange.

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-Let's go to the civic cathedral, which is Manchester town hall.

-OK.

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All around the city, you get these little gems that tell a story about Manchester and its cotton heyday.

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Sometimes, they're on the buildings. Sometimes, they're literally on city streets,

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and just here, you can see iron kerbs, which are very distinctive.

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I've come across them in other cities, but not with

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the regularity you see them in Manchester, and that's because these

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vast cotton trucks, covered in cotton bales, over-laden with cotton bales, would crack and smash stone kerbs.

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So what they thought to do - we'll put iron kerbs. It didn't actually work.

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They just got pushed into the ground, but they didn't crack at least. And you can see these

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certainly in the warehouse districts, but also in other areas of the city, and it's just a little reminder.

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We still rattle around in the bones of the cotton industry in Manchester.

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A vein of history written into the streets.

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Exactly.

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This is a wonderful way to approach the town hall, isn't it?

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It is. It's the best way - face on to Manchester's civic cathedral that

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tried to embody all those virtues of independence of spirit and mind.

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This grand Neo-Gothic pile cost a million pounds to complete in 1887.

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That's about £48 million in today's money,

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which shows just how wealthy Manchester had become.

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What it is really, I suppose, is a complete encapsulation of that

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high Victorian utter confidence, and I think the golden ball with spikes on the top there is a classic one.

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Most town halls might have had a crown, or a cross, or something like that. We've got...

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a symbol of the cotton industry, the cotton bud about to burst and give us the raw material itself.

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But also - and I love this particular one - is the sun,

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and it's saying, "Wherever the sun shines, Manchester has business."

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We are international. We don't look local, we don't even look national.

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We look across the world to our trade, and we feel we have influence on the world as well.

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George Bradshaw was extremely proud of his home city and its monopoly of the cotton industry.

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He wrote, "Watt's steam engine,

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"Arkwright's power loom and the factory system and

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"inexhaustible supplies of coal have given superiority to Manchester."

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But when India gained independence, it began to process its own cotton much more cheaply.

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Manchester's cotton scene slowed and, by the 1950s,

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the mills began to close. Today,

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the mill buildings are surrounded by a different Manchester -

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a city of glass and steel. And that's partly due to

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one recent event that profoundly changed the skyline.

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In the 1990s, a massive bomb destroyed the Arndale Centre,

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during that dark period for Ireland and the United Kingdom of which I have many poignant memories myself.

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But in Manchester today, you sense that it wasn't just the

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unhappy chance of a bomb that's led to the city's transformation.

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There is today an appetite for architecture as provocative and

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outstanding as that that Bradshaw admired a century and a half ago.

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Mancunians, it seems, have always been looking ahead, ready to embrace the future.

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-Good morning.

-Good morning.

-How are you?

-Fine, how are you?

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So, Manchester now is full of modern buildings, skyscrapers and so on.

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-What do you think of those?

-I like it, cos it's like...

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a diverse mix of old buildings and new buildings, and some of them, like,

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you can see how Manchester's changing over the years. Like, you've got cobbled streets

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in Market Street and then next to it, you've got the Hilton Hotel and everything, so it's really different.

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You can see the timeline of how everything's changed.

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What do you think of Manchester now?

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Oh, I always liked Manchester.

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-It's a changing city, isn't it?

-Yeah, but I still like it.

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So what's better - the old Manchester or the new Manchester?

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Well, you've got to go with the times, haven't you?

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Manchester's busiest station, Piccadilly, certainly did move with the times.

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Manchester Piccadilly has none of the Victorian old-world charm of Manchester Victoria.

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This has been made to look like an airline terminal.

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This says, "I'm classy, I'm glassy and brand new."

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I'm heading south, to find out about another textile success story for Manchester driven by the railways.

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Bradshaw's guide tells me that Denton, towards which I'm headed now, has several "hat manufacturies"

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as he puts it. Denton then was a village of about 3,500 people.

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I think now, I'm going to discover it's pretty much been absorbed into Greater Manchester.

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Thank you.

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In the 1800s, there were 90 hat factories around here,

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employing almost 40 per cent of the population.

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It's claimed the trilby hat was born here,

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but the hat industry was all but killed off with the arrival of

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the motor car. It provided shelter from the elements,

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so hats were no longer needed.

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Failsworth Hats is one of the few hat factories left,

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and manager Karen Turner is going to make me my very own Denton trilby.

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Are you Karen?

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Oh, I am, yes. Hi! Nice to meet you, Michael.

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Lovely to see you. I keep hearing about the history of hats.

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So we'll just measure round your head, just above the ears at the

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widest point, which is 58cm, which is a seven and one eighth in imperial.

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-Oh, seven and one eighth. Useful to know. I'm often being asked that, yeah.

-That's it.

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This is what we start off with.

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This is what we call a hood, and it's made from rabbit hair,

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felted rabbit hair. Nothing else, just felt and...

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-It's nice and soft.

-Yeah.

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Ancient-looking machinery.

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I suppose this hasn't changed very much in many decades.

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No, not at all. This machinery's probably, what...?

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How old do you think? 80 years old perhaps.

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Some of it's even older, yeah.

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Now, you seem to have put that into a steam chamber. Is that right?

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Yeah, steam is really important.

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The steam is softening it now.

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Abracadabra... I've been following a guide book

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150 years old that talks about the hatters around Manchester.

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Would the process be very different 150 years ago?

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Probably not, no. The only difference might have been that, whereas

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we start off now with a hood, they will have

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actually bought in rabbit hair and made the hoods themselves,

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which was even more labour-intensive.

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In Bradshaw's time, mercury was used to separate the rabbit hair from the hide to make the felted hoods.

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Many hat workers suffered from mercury poisoning, with symptoms like erratic behaviour and dementia.

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It's said that the expression "mad as a hatter" came from that.

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Back to my hat. After much more steaming, stretching

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and setting of its shape and size, it's almost complete.

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So, now we're going to line the hat in,

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and perhaps you'd like to have a go at this to finish the hat off?

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I'd be worried to have a go, because when I make construction kits,

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I always manage to get the glue everywhere.

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-Er, not bad, Michael!

-But this is very nearly a completed hat.

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It is very nearly, yeah, yeah.

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Pull the brim down your nose.

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And at a jaunty angle.

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That's it, yeah, yeah. Very good.

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-Is that it?

-Yeah, very nice.

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Thank you very much.

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Over many decades, thousands of workers making headwear for the world

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helped put Manchester on the map and I lift my hat to them.

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-Do you ever wear a hat?

-No, not any more. I used to.

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-Did you?

-Yes.

-And what made you give up wearing a hat?

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Er, well, none of them fit me now!

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They're all too big!

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But do you think it's a pity that people don't wear hats any more?

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Oh, the young ones do, don't they?

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-They seem to wear these trilby things that are in fashion.

-Oh, do you think so?

-Yeah.

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So, maybe there's still hope for the hat industry.

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Now, it's back into Manchester for my bed for the night.

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And my trusty edition of Bradshaw

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has brought me to one of the most impressive buildings in Manchester.

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In Victorian times,

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even the most utilitarian of buildings were magnificent.

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As Bradshaw's guide says, "For style of architecture and beauty,

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"perhaps Watts's new warehouses in Portland Street excel all others and ought by all means to be seen."

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When it opened in 1858, it was the world's first cash and carry.

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Now, it's a listed building and, luckily for me, my hotel for the night.

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This building was designed to look like

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a highly decorated Venetian palazzo from the 15th century.

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It was a way of saying, "The cotton barons of Manchester are as powerful and wealthy

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"as the merchants of Venice were when they dominated trade in Europe."

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Bright new morning in Manchester, and the interior of the warehouse

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that is now my hotel is just as magnificent as the exterior.

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It's incredible that the Victorians built warehouses to this quality, but even so, I can't believe that

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the original warehouse had that chandelier.

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These days, there's not much sign of the cotton industry left, but I'm told that the sweeping,

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cantilevered iron staircase and balconied stairwell

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are part of the original warehouse.

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Bradshaw's home city has changed dramatically since he set up

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his company here in the 1830s, publishing railway timetables.

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In this short street, George Bradshaw had his office once,

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but it's perfectly clear there's no trace of it left now.

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But I'm interested to find out more about this son of Manchester and how it was that he came to bring

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order to that chaotic world in which the many railway companies

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had uncoordinated and largely unknowable timetables.

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I know that he was born in Salford, just outside Manchester, in 1801.

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As a Quaker, he was involved in charity work and would have been a well-known figure amongst

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the Manchester radicals. A political animal perhaps,

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which makes him even more interesting to me.

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Historian Trevor Thomas is an expert on Bradshaw and his railway guides,

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many of which have ended up here, at the John Rylands Library.

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-Nice to meet you.

-I feel as if I've come to Bradshaw's shrine here.

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Yes, I think you're right. This is the city he was born in and lived in all his life.

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'Bradshaw's big idea was to gather all the railway timetables for the whole country into one handy guide.'

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And here is the Bradshaw collection.

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Wow. It's all Bradshaw. Bradshaw, Bradshaw, Bradshaw...

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Bradshaw, Bradshaw, Bradshaw... And Bradshaw is up here. It's huge.

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-Yes, it's one of the...probably the best collection of Bradshaw material that there is in the country.

-Yes.

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Trevor's picked out one of the earliest editions

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so that we can take a closer look.

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So, this is very small, clearly intended to go in a pocket.

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I think it's a waistcoat guide,

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which you could stick easily in your coat pocket,

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and this is actually the first edition of 1839.

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And this was the first time these timetables had been brought together in one place, is that right?

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Er, it's... A number of people were trying to produce timetables in 1839

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and Bradshaw was the one that won the race

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to produce the first unified national timetable.

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And the interesting thing about this particular copy is that it's

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an association copy which a previous owner had bought from Mrs Bradshaw.

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And the note says that the coloured lines of the railways were done by

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George Bradshaw's son and granddaughter,

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so it's a historical connection with George Bradshaw, this particular map.

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This tells us about Bradshaw's origin, doesn't it? Because he started as a map-maker.

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He was an engraver, and he set up an engraving shop in Manchester that

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first produced canal maps. And he was very quick to spot the commercial potential of the new railways

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and the need for a unified timetable to make sense of them for the user.

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So, by the time that he's producing timetables,

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has time been standardised across Britain?

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Not at this stage, no. Each provincial city,

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like Birmingham, Manchester and so on, had their own time,

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and of course, this was liable to create great confusion with railway timetables.

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So each city is setting its own time, according to when the sun sets in that particular place.

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That's right. There's no GMT, there's no pips, nothing of that kind.

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And the early trains - the guard used to carry a fob watch - which was London time - with him on the train,

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so that there was at least one established sort of rule of time.

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And the railway manufacturers, or the railway companies,

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did start political pressure to standardise time,

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so they were responsible for pressure to actually produce what we now know as GMT, I suppose.

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The first time I ever heard of Bradshaw I think was in Sherlock Holmes.

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Whenever there's a new case and they have to travel somewhere, Holmes says to Watson, "Get the Bradshaw!"

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There are many, many literary references, including Jules Verne - Around The World In Eighty Days,

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where the first thing they do is to consult Bradshaw, so it was universally known.

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Bradshaw got as far as India and China.

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One of the most interesting ones is an overland guide, in which

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he describes the railway journey from London to India in some detail,

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so they did extend very, very widely.

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You're giving me a very good idea for the next series.

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I did wonder about that.

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Despite the enormous changes in Manchester since Bradshaw's time,

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with its iron kerbs and grand public buildings,

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the city's history is still evident for all to admire.

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Hello. Castleton, single, please.

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-Single to Castleton... £2.90, please.

-Thank you very much.

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There you go.

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-Thanks a lot.

-Thank you.

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Easy enough to buy a ticket, and just as well, because nothing drives me mad like bureaucracy.

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When Bradshaw first travelled by rail, you had to buy your ticket a day ahead, you had to give

0:23:310:23:36

your purpose for travel, your place of birth, your age, your name, your address -

0:23:360:23:43

a bit like buying an airline ticket today, really.

0:23:430:23:46

For the last leg of my journey, I'm heading north, to the hills and valleys around Bury.

0:23:500:23:56

I don't know what I did with my ticket...

0:24:060:24:08

In Bradshaw's day, this area was alive with industry.

0:24:130:24:16

Thank you.

0:24:160:24:18

He writes, "Stone, coal, slate are quarried in great plenty in the neighbouring moorlands,

0:24:180:24:24

"and cotton, woollen and flannel are the staple articles of manufacture."

0:24:240:24:30

There's little evidence of any of this today.

0:24:300:24:33

But one thing that the railways brought here is still going strong...

0:24:370:24:43

..fish and chips.

0:24:450:24:46

Hello, I've come to see Tony.

0:24:460:24:50

-Tony Rogers?

-That's the one.

0:24:500:24:52

Tony Rogers and his family have been supplying fish

0:24:520:24:55

to fish and chip shops in the area for over 100 years.

0:24:550:25:00

I'm following a 19th-century guide book to Britain's railways, and I assume

0:25:040:25:08

the railways made a big difference to the availability of fish.

0:25:080:25:11

They made a tremendous difference.

0:25:110:25:13

Prior to the rail, people living in inland towns and cities could only

0:25:130:25:18

eat fresh-water fish caught in the local ponds and rivers and streams.

0:25:180:25:23

It was the onset of the railways that allowed all this population,

0:25:230:25:26

this inland population, for the first time to experience sea fish.

0:25:260:25:32

The railway was a revolution. For the first time,

0:25:320:25:36

it meant that fish could be caught, transported

0:25:360:25:38

and sold in a city like Manchester, all in the space of a few hours.

0:25:380:25:44

Soon, the popular dish - fish and chips - was born, although it's not clear where.

0:25:440:25:50

It's a source of great rivalry between where the origins were -

0:25:500:25:55

in the East End of London, or Ashton-under-Lyne - Mossley.

0:25:550:26:00

Mr Lees, in Mossley, claims to be the originator of bringing over French fries and the chip potatoes.

0:26:000:26:07

Now, as a Northerner, I stake my claim!

0:26:070:26:12

Well, all this talk of food is making me hungry.

0:26:130:26:17

Rock salmon was a favourite in the 19th century,

0:26:170:26:20

but at Caroline Thomson's chip shop, the menu is always changing.

0:26:200:26:24

-Hello!

-Hiya. How are you?

-Hello.

0:26:240:26:27

Hi, Caroline. Fine, thanks.

0:26:270:26:29

-Oh, thank you very much indeed. Lovely.

-Smashing. Thanks, Caroline.

0:26:290:26:32

-You're Caroline, aren't you?

-I am.

0:26:320:26:34

-Tony's been telling me all about you. Come and join us.

-I will.

0:26:340:26:38

I'm eating traditional cod.

0:26:380:26:40

Are tastes changing very much?

0:26:400:26:42

-I think cod is our best seller, although we do such a variety of fish.

-Any new developments?

0:26:420:26:48

Yes, there are, actually. We've got these.

0:26:480:26:51

They're called ocean pearls, which is a mussel deep-fried.

0:26:510:26:55

-In batter?

-In batter, yes, yes. And then this is scampi,

0:26:550:27:00

but you know what scampi is.

0:27:000:27:02

Very hot.

0:27:020:27:04

Everything has to be hot. If it's dipped in the chilli, it's nice.

0:27:040:27:07

It's nice, very nice. And should I be worried about calories?

0:27:070:27:11

You just have to say no to the cream cake afterwards!

0:27:110:27:13

In Bradshaw's time, the railways reached into every corner

0:27:160:27:21

of people's lives, in ways that no-one could have predicted.

0:27:210:27:26

You can scarcely overstate

0:27:260:27:28

how much change the railways brought to Britain.

0:27:280:27:31

They made Manchester not only big,

0:27:310:27:33

they put it at the heart of a global trading empire, and they altered

0:27:330:27:38

ordinary people's lives too, including the food that they could eat.

0:27:380:27:41

Few people understood, and certainly no-one recorded, the transformation better than George Bradshaw.

0:27:410:27:48

Tomorrow, I'll be travelling back in time in a Victorian railway carriage.

0:27:540:27:59

In the age before health and safety, it doesn't say, "Do not lean out of the window". So, may I have a lean

0:27:590:28:04

-out of the window, please?

-Yes, of course.

-Thank you.

0:28:040:28:07

I'll be finding out about the latest Roman discoveries in York.

0:28:110:28:16

This is a part of the city wall that was only exposed about 30 years ago.

0:28:160:28:22

And I'll be taking to the air in the Network Rail helicopter.

0:28:220:28:27

The Victorians built it right along the cliff edge.

0:28:270:28:30

It is one of the most spectacular bits of track I have ever seen.

0:28:300:28:33

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