Brighton to Crystal Palace Great British Railway Journeys


Brighton to Crystal Palace

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In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.

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His name was George Bradshaw

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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,

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what to see and where to stay.

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Now, 170 years later, I'm making a series of journeys across the length and breadth of the country,

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to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

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In the 19th century, trains transformed Britain fundamentally.

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In the early years of the railway revolution,

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6,000 miles of track were laid.

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For the first time, people of modest means

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could explore their own country, and I'm following in their tracks.

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Over the coming weeks, I'll be travelling to the western outposts of Scotland,

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to the rugged mountains of North Wales, and to the beautiful coastline of Kent.

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Using my 19th-century Bradshaw's Railway Handbook as my guide,

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I'll be following in the footsteps of Victorian railway tourists.

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For those first travellers, planning a rail journey wasn't easy.

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Train times were displayed only locally, on the pub wall or the station door.

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But in the 1840s cartographer George Bradshaw

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began publishing rail timetables covering the country.

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It helped the masses to travel across the British Isles.

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Bradshaw published guide books too, like the one I'm using now, to make these journeys.

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The route that I begin today takes me on lines that were built not for coal or cotton, but for people.

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Victorian carriages running on these tracks would have been crowded with

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shoppers and commuters and sports enthusiasts.

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The railways put the middle classes on the move,

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the very people for whom George Bradshaw wrote his guidebooks.

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'Each day I'll cover another leg of the journey, stopping off

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'to see the towns and cities described in my Bradshaw's Guide.

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'Today is taking me to one of the very first seaside aquariums...'

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It was the sense of shock and awe that the Victorian public got coming in here,

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where they would see the denizens of the deep.

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'..showing me the conditions endured by Victorian miners...'

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Several times it occurred to me that if you weren't here I would probably get lost and die in here.

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-I'd never find my way out.

-I don't think you would, no.

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'..and revealing that greatest wonder of the Victorian age, the Crystal Palace.'

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It really makes me very sad that the building no longer stands.

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Yes, in November 1936 the building was totally destroyed by fire.

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On this route, I'll be heading from the south coast

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towards Crystal Palace and the capital itself.

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I'll follow the line out of London,

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sweeping through Suffolk into Cambridgeshire.

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From there I'll travel to Norfolk and King's Lynn,

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before arriving at my very final stop, Cromer.

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Starting in Brighton today,

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I'll travel the first 56 miles via Godstone,

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to the site of the Crystal Palace.

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When the first railways snaked towards the seafront in the 1840s,

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they changed the way that people lived.

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Prosperous men of affairs

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could live far from their offices in the smoky city.

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I'm headed for Brighton.

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In 1844, the journey time from London was already just 90 minutes.

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By 1865, it was down to 75.

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That made long-distance commuting possible.

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Bradshaw says, "Merchants who formerly made Dulwich or Dalston

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"the boundaries of their suburban residences

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"now have got their mansions on the south coast

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"and still get in less time, by a less expensive conveyance,

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"to the counting houses in the City."

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Well, the train I'm on takes 53 minutes, which is not such a big change in 150 years.

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The age of commuting had dawned.

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Before my guide was published, Brighton was an aristocratic playground

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where the blue-blooded enjoyed the sea air, or took the steamer to begin a European tour.

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The railway brought the coast within easy reach, and those enriched by industry and trade

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now occupied Brighton's elegant streets.

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As I came into Brighton I was struck by how far the town's extended.

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The houses sprawl across the neighbouring hills

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and this station is...is vast.

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This is why Bradshaw refers to Brighton as a marine metropolis,

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because it was a royal town, an international port, then it became a seaside resort,

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then it became a commuting town and it's a business centre in its own right.

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In the 1840s, the Victorian middle classes discovered Brighton and rushed to see it.

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The Brighton Pavilion, then a royal palace, was swamped with visitors,

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to the disgust of Queen Victoria,

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who swiftly packed up and left town for good in 1845.

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Her Majesty may not have been amused by the day-trippers and holidaymakers pouring in by train,

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but Bradshaw was.

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"Scores of laughing, chubby, thoughtless children,

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"skilled manifestly in the art of ingeniously tormenting maids, tutors, governesses and mamas.

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"Whilst intent upon their customary constitutional walk,

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"the morning habitues of the promenade swing lustily past.

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"Let us mingle with the throng and obtain a closer intimacy of the principal features of this place."

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Well, the social hierarchy has changed, but people are

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still enjoying themselves here and I'm going to go a-mingling.

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The seafront bustles still.

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I'm meeting historian Geoff Mead to help me imagine the attractions of Victorian Brighton.

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-Hello.

-Hi.

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-Michael Portillo.

-Geoffrey Mead.

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My Bradshaw says that at one time the chain pier was the item of first consideration for the visitor,

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in other words the highlight of Brighton. What did it look like?

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It was basically a long suspension bridge that ran from here.

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Chains went through the wall here and the chains ran out to a tower down on the beach here.

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Stretching over 1,000 feet out to sea, this was Brighton's first pier.

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Constructed in 1823, it enabled the royal and rich

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to glide across the waves to their yachts and steamers.

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Then there were four towers on timber supports

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with chains suspended from them,

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rods suspended from the chains, and the deck hung on the rods.

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It was secured to the timber underneath.

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Then there was a square, stone-clad pier head where people could promenade to.

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By Bradshaw's time, piers such as the chain pier were no longer for the rich to board ships.

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They'd become a playground for the middle classes.

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Once the railway arrives, it changes the social demographic of Brighton.

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Whereas before you needed your own transport to get here, you needed to be rich,

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once the railway comes in, it allows the world and his wife to come to Brighton.

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So Brighton changes from being the resort literally of kings to being the working man's resort.

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50 miles from London, easily accessible, and it changes the nature of the resort.

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Bradshaw says something very interesting and very clever.

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He talks about the levelling of the railways literally and metaphorically.

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So you had to create flat ground for the railways but you produced a levelling in society, too.

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Certainly it revolutionised the seaside, which had been exclusively for the very rich,

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down to the man in the street.

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That pier, alas, is no longer here.

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But one of the other Victorian attractions survives intact -

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the aquarium, designed by Eugenius Birch.

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Before the railways, few people travelled to the coast.

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Many might never have seen a live fish.

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So the Brighton aquarium opened up a submarine world that was entirely new.

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This was designed in 1869. It was such a colossal building project

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that it took three years to complete.

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It opened in 1872, as the wonder of the age.

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It was the largest aquarium anywhere in the world.

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And it felt like this, did it?

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It felt like this, but...

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it was the sense of awe, shock and awe, that the Victorian public got coming in here,

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where they would see the denizens of the deep at close hand.

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We have to think that today we're all very familiar with underwater photography,

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many people have been down, skin divers.

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In the 1870s, no-one had seen an octopus close to.

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No-one had seen tropical fish.

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Even common British species that lived in deeper water would only have been seen in a fishmonger's shop.

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Visitors could buy a train ticket from London that included entrance to the aquarium.

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At that time, prawns, lobsters and even salmon were star attractions,

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alongside more exotic displays of sea lions.

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Building the aquarium, then, the Victorian seaside town reinvents itself?

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All seaside towns have to constantly reinvent themselves.

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The introduction of piers, the introduction of things like aquaria,

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the cinema is basically a south coast of England technology.

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A whole raft of ideas coming in to, as you say, reinvent the seaside.

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Brighton goes on and on.

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Brighton developed pioneering seaside attractions.

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The aquarium was one of the first and now I'm going to go on one of the world's first electric railways.

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Ian Gledhill is chairman of the Volk's Railway Association.

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-Hello, Ian.

-Hello, Michael. Nice to meet you.

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Michael Portillo. Now, Volk's Electric Railway, 1883.

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-Who was Volk?

-Magnus Volk was a local pioneer and inventor.

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He was born in Brighton, born in 1851.

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As a teenager he got absolutely passionate

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about electricity, at a time when most people didn't understand it.

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They didn't know what it was. He put electric light in the Royal Pavilion.

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It was the first public building in Sussex to be lit with electricity.

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And he wanted to show that people could travel by electricity, so he built the railway.

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Volk copied the idea from Germany,

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where the first electric railway had opened in Berlin in 1879.

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He wanted to give the people of Brighton a taste of the future.

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We now think of this as a tourist attraction, but actually then

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-he built it as a kind of industrial demonstration project, to show what electricity could do.

-Absolutely.

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That's what he wanted to show.

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He knew that electricity was the coming thing, so he wanted to show that it would work.

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Once people got used to it - they were frightened of it at first -

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but once they got used to it, they flocked to it.

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Before long, the line carried 19th-century tourists

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along the seafront, travelling at about six miles an hour.

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There were stops at the aquarium and the chain pier.

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Some landmarks have changed, but the rolling stock hasn't.

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All our cars except one are over 100 years old.

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That is amazing. Is it a big task to keep them going?

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It is, because the electric motors are the originals,

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-so they are 100 years old as well.

-That's amazing.

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Our national passion for historic railways is so great that it affects even celebrities.

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-So, driver.

-Yes?

-You're Nicholas Owen, aren't you?

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-I am, yes.

-What are you doing here, then?

-Well, I love railways.

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I'm one of those very unusual railway enthusiasts, I like electric railways.

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So when I was asked a couple of years ago

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to declare this the 125th anniversary - I think it's on my chest there -

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I said, "I'll come as long as I can look at the railway properly, understand it."

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They said, "Well, would you like to be a volunteer? Would you like to perhaps drive?"

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I've driven a few trains in my life and this was just irresistible.

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-How fantastic. A schoolboy's dream come true.

-Absolutely.

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Your secret is safe with me.

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Yes, I fear not.

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Replenished by all that sea air,

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I'm heading towards my next destination, 35 miles away.

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Like so many visitors to Brighton in Victorian times and modern times as well, I have been a day-tripper

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and I'm on the mainline headed north towards London. But I won't go all the way to the capital.

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I'm going to seek Bradshaw's guide in finding a place to rest my head.

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My next stop is the village of Godstone in Surrey.

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Along the way, my guide book tells me to look out for an impressive Victorian landmark.

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Now we're passing over the Ouse Viaduct,

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one of the finest works in the kingdom, according to Bradshaw's.

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"It commands extensive views over the surrounding countryside.

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"As we're whirled along it, the prospect presents us with an unbounded scene of beauty."

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And you do feel, heading towards Gatwick, heading towards London,

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that you want to breathe in the openness before you lose it altogether.

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This listed viaduct was built in 1841

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by railway engineer John Rastrick, and now carries 493 trains a day.

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Having changed trains, I'm on the last stretch of tracks before Godstone.

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After sampling the glamorous life in Brighton, I've checked Bradshaw's

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for somewhere suitable to stay the night.

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Under the entry for Godstone, Bradshaw's notes that the parks of this neighbourhood are much admired.

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Then he has a whole list of what we would call stately homes

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that are within striking distance of the station.

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I've picked one which I'm managing to stay at tonight, Starborough Castle, eight miles.

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We are now approaching Godstone.

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Bradshaw notes the distance by coach to Starborough Castle.

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It's now a smart B&B and I'll have to settle for a taxi to get there.

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-Hello.

-How are you doing?

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-Can you take me to Starborough Castle?

-Certainly.

-Thank you.

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-Hello.

-Welcome to Starborough Manor.

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Now, Starborough Manor, you say? I'm looking for Starborough Castle.

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Is that it?

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Well, the whole area was Starborough Castle but in the '70s it was split up and became Starborough Manor.

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The castle itself was demolished in 1648 on the orders of Parliament

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because it could have been a place of resistance during the Civil War.

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'The stone from the castle

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'was re-used to construct the present manor house.'

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My Bradshaw's Guide, which was written in the 1860s, refers to

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Starborough Castle, so actually he's referring to the house.

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Yes, exactly.

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Well, very beautiful it is too.

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I'm off to see if I can find my key.

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-Let me show you to your room.

-All right, thank you.

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'Having learned that the splendid castle was destroyed on the orders

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'of parliamentarians, I hope that my conscience won't stop me sleeping.'

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After splendid hospitality at Starborough Castle, I'm now pacing an old Roman road

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in search of a clue in my Bradshaw's Guide to the underground history of Godstone.

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Bradshaw talks about the famous quarries at Godstone.

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I'm here to meet Peter Burgess, who's unearthing their past.

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-Hello, Peter.

-Hello, Michael, welcome.

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I've come here because of my Bradshaw's Guide.

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He says that Godstone was named after "good stone".

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Yes, quite a few people have made this very same statement.

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If you look into it a bit deeper, you'll find that

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"stone" is a reference, as in many other place names, to the Roman road that runs through the village.

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And "Cod", we believe, is a Saxon family. So this is Cod's place on the Roman road.

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But nonetheless it is famous for stone here.

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Oh, yes. There are very extensive quarries for the stone that can be found at Godstone, indeed.

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The stone was originally used as

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a building material in London, being the nearest source to the capital.

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It was called firestone

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because of its special heat-resistant properties,

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and was later used in factories as a bed to roll out molten glass

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and for domestic hearth stones.

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After the late 1850s, the railway came to Caterham, which is about two miles up the road from here.

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One of the reasons for constructing that line,

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one of the things that persuaded people to put money into the line,

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was the fact that it would serve as a link for quarries to get the stone up into the national rail network.

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At the time, this quarry produced the best stone in the area, and the industry grew.

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But as the railways spread it became easy to bring in

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higher-quality building materials like Bath and Portland stone.

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Godstone quarry declined and closed in the 1940s.

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The old tunnels are still here. They haven't changed much since Bradshaw's epoch.

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-Pretty cool in here, isn't it?

-Absolutely.

-You and I are having to squat down a bit in here.

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What were conditions like for the quarrymen, say, in the 19th century?

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We have it good because we've got good lights.

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They'd be working by candlelight but they would have had the same issues with the height and so on.

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They wouldn't have been wearing helmets, of course.

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-Health and safety not a big thing?

-Oh, no, no.

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'Miners dug over six miles of tunnels in the quarry.

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'As I follow in their footsteps, I gain some sense of what those Victorian workers endured.'

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We've come through such a labyrinth.

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Several times it occurred to me that if you weren't here I would

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probably get lost and die in here, I'd never find my way out again.

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I don't think you would, no.

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What are these jottings here?

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These appear to be numbers.

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My guess is these are tally marks.

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The quarrymen would have been paid, my guess is, for the amount of stone taken out and they kept a record.

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In order to get this out, of course, they had to do it all by hand.

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Picks and hammers and wedges were the tools they had.

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'Inside the mine, Peter and his colleagues are excavating

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'the tunnel floors, to reveal more about how the miners operated.'

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It just looks like rock, but persevere...

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and you will see it gets a bit rusty.

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'They've uncovered some very early rails which carried horse-drawn wagons of stone to the surface.'

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This rail here, this broken section, is in fact the same as you are uncovering here.

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-It's very different from what I recognise as a rail.

-Indeed it is.

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First of all it's made of cast iron, so it's not particularly strong.

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That limited how much you could carry on a railway like this, because the rails would break, as this one has.

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What does this say?

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This was the name of the railway that they were made for. It says CM&G.

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Croydon, Merstham and Godstone.

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Where you were scraping here,

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there's of course a chance that that lettering might still be in place.

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-Must be worth another go.

-Yes, indeed.

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Peter's discovered that these rails were recycled from

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one of the earliest horse-drawn railways built in Surrey in 1803.

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They helped the mine to prosper,

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as larger amounts of stone could be hauled out more quickly.

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Now it's time for me to leave Godstone for my next destination.

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I've emerged more or less intact from my dark, subterranean dungeon.

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Now I'm back on the mainline,

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headed for a part of London.

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I'm travelling towards a place whose name, more than any other,

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recalls the triumphs of Victorian industry - Crystal Palace.

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Here I have to use my imagination a bit,

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because Bradshaw describes the Crystal Palace, sitting on the summit of Penge Park,

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as being one of the outstanding sights in Europe.

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But of course now the Crystal Palace is gone.

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My guide is full of praise for the Crystal Palace.

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"With its marvellous transepts and wings and galleries,

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"situated in the most exquisite and park-like grounds,

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"ornamented with a noble terrace,

0:22:010:22:04

"commanding one of the finest views in England."

0:22:040:22:07

The extraordinary glass palace

0:22:070:22:09

was built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park.

0:22:090:22:13

By 1854, it had been moved to this suburban hill

0:22:130:22:17

with a dedicated station of suitable grandeur.

0:22:170:22:21

Well, it's certainly a magnificent station.

0:22:230:22:26

You can tell that this in its day was quite something.

0:22:260:22:30

Maybe this is the kind of traditional London exhibition architecture.

0:22:300:22:36

It reminds me a bit of South Kensington and the museums there.

0:22:360:22:40

Just a few passengers today, but you have to imagine that these stairs, built on a colossal scale,

0:22:480:22:55

once saw thousands of passengers a day

0:22:550:22:58

surging through on their way to see the wonders of the Crystal Palace.

0:22:580:23:03

On just one day in 1859,

0:23:050:23:07

over 100,000 Victorians poured through the station.

0:23:070:23:11

I'm meeting historian Ken Kiss to discover what they came to see.

0:23:110:23:15

-Hello, Ken.

-Hello, Michael.

0:23:150:23:17

-Pleased to meet you.

-Very good to see you.

0:23:170:23:19

This was one of the great wonders of the world in its day, wasn't it?

0:23:190:23:22

This was an enormous building, a fantastic edifice of iron and glass.

0:23:220:23:26

Absolutely. It was that period of optimism

0:23:260:23:28

and interest in everything that was going on.

0:23:280:23:31

Inside the building you would have models of bridges,

0:23:310:23:34

models of all sorts of structure.

0:23:340:23:36

There was a whole series of courts that were given over to architecture.

0:23:360:23:40

So you could go in there and the very first court you walked into was the Egyptian court.

0:23:400:23:45

You had this remarkable court, nearly 100ft long, 60ft high,

0:23:450:23:49

with a perfect reproduction of everything from Egypt.

0:23:490:23:52

You just moved through an archway into the Greek court, then on to the Roman court.

0:23:520:23:56

So you could really spend days in the building.

0:23:560:23:59

Bradshaw's continues to enthuse.

0:24:000:24:02

"The sight of the Crystal Palace on the summit of Penge Park

0:24:020:24:05

"is one of the most beautiful in the world."

0:24:050:24:09

When the palace was rebuilt in south London,

0:24:090:24:11

it was even larger than the one in Hyde Park.

0:24:110:24:15

I'm guessing that that balustrade marks the footprint of the building.

0:24:150:24:19

-It's absolutely huge, isn't it?

-Yes, tremendous size.

0:24:190:24:22

That's this thing running along here at the bottom

0:24:220:24:24

in my Bradshaw's Guide.

0:24:240:24:26

So, from one end to the other, how big would that have been?

0:24:260:24:29

That's 1608ft from end to end of the building.

0:24:290:24:32

Huge. And how tall?

0:24:320:24:34

About 208ft to the top of the centre transept.

0:24:340:24:38

So give me an idea against this transmitter mast.

0:24:380:24:41

About one, two, three-and-a-half lifts on there

0:24:410:24:44

would give you the main part of the building.

0:24:440:24:47

The Crystal Palace was built

0:24:490:24:51

to celebrate Britain's technological achievements.

0:24:510:24:54

Railways epitomised that success,

0:24:540:24:56

and appropriately they conveyed the visitors who came to admire.

0:24:560:25:01

Over six months, 6,200,000 people attended

0:25:010:25:05

on special excursion trains from all over the country.

0:25:050:25:09

It makes me very sad, being here, that the building no longer stands. It was destroyed by fire, wasn't it?

0:25:090:25:14

Yes, in November 1936 the building was totally destroyed by fire.

0:25:140:25:19

We have really no idea as to how it happened. We have some clues

0:25:190:25:23

but we think it was probably a pipe underneath the floor.

0:25:230:25:26

A lot of people stood there and said, "How can glass and iron burn?"

0:25:260:25:29

But of course it was the timber floor that was burning.

0:25:290:25:33

It had nearly eight acres of timber flooring and that was more than enough to destroy the whole building.

0:25:330:25:38

The fire burned all night and was visible in six counties.

0:25:380:25:42

Later Churchill described it as the end of an age.

0:25:420:25:46

Today, rare survivors of the Victorian exhibits are the Crystal Palace dinosaurs,

0:25:480:25:55

described by Bradshaw's as

0:25:550:25:57

"the models of the diluvian and antediluvian extinct animals".

0:25:570:26:02

Fantastic that the Victorians constructed these things, isn't it?

0:26:020:26:07

Quite remarkable, yes.

0:26:070:26:09

-I mean, all this is done years before Darwin's Origin Of Species.

-Oh, yes.

0:26:090:26:13

These ones are absolutely massive.

0:26:130:26:15

Apart from anything else, they're amazing works of sculpture and even engineering, aren't they?

0:26:150:26:21

Yes, indeed. There's a tremendous amount of ironwork.

0:26:210:26:23

The armature inside that creature amounts to several hundred bricks

0:26:230:26:27

and five-inch pipes and all sorts of things

0:26:270:26:30

to make sure that the final structure looks as it does.

0:26:300:26:33

It's amazing to recall that, at the time,

0:26:340:26:37

no complete dinosaur skeletons had yet been found.

0:26:370:26:40

Although the models aren't 100% accurate, they're not far off.

0:26:400:26:45

-The Victorians must have been stunned by it.

-Absolutely.

0:26:460:26:50

No-one had seen anything like this before.

0:26:500:26:53

These creatures were millions of years old and here they were in three dimensions.

0:26:530:26:57

And it's also very Victorian, isn't it?

0:26:570:27:00

You come for a day out, you come for entertainment, a picnic, but at the same time you've got to be learning.

0:27:000:27:05

-Absolutely.

-They're very earnest about that.

0:27:050:27:08

Father would ask the children, "Now, what is the name of that one?" Yes, that's the sort of thing.

0:27:080:27:13

They would certainly have been very keen and they must have felt better

0:27:130:27:16

to have been educated as well as just enjoying the surroundings.

0:27:160:27:19

Following my Bradshaw's, I'm stunned by the progress

0:27:210:27:24

and the self-confidence of the Victorian age.

0:27:240:27:28

From seaside attractions, to mines, monuments and even dinosaurs,

0:27:280:27:33

it was an era of limitless creativity.

0:27:330:27:36

Like a good Victorian tourist I've taken the train to the aquarium in Brighton

0:27:360:27:41

and to the site of the Crystal Palace.

0:27:410:27:43

And that's made me admire even more the engineering of the time.

0:27:430:27:47

But when I was crammed inside that subterranean quarry

0:27:470:27:51

I thought about the sweat and toil of thousands of men

0:27:510:27:56

that was required to make a reality of each of those ideas of genius.

0:27:560:28:02

On the next leg of the route, I'll be finding out how even the dead benefited from the railways...

0:28:030:28:09

It was also the terminus of...

0:28:090:28:12

what was rather irreverently known as the Stiffs' Express.

0:28:120:28:16

..understanding how London became a great shopping destination...

0:28:160:28:19

Part of what's changing is coming about through the railways.

0:28:190:28:23

Suddenly you're getting suburbanites coming into the centre of London to walk the streets, to shop.

0:28:230:28:29

..and trying my hand at one of the oldest trades on the river.

0:28:290:28:34

-Would you like to have a little drive, Michael?

-Left hand out a bit?

0:28:340:28:37

It's not like tyres on the road. It's more like tyres on treacle.

0:28:370:28:42

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0:29:060:29:08

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0:29:080:29:10

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