Canterbury to Margate Great British Railway Journeys


Canterbury to Margate

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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 a series of journeys across the length and breadth

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

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My journey now takes me towards the coast of Kent.

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I think of this county as being England's orchard or garden.

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But as Bradshaw reminds us it's "bound to the east and southeast

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"by the German ocean and the straits of Dover."

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And that means it's also been our frontier against our continental enemies.

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As the county closest to the continent, Kent has always played a crucial role in our defence.

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Its railways provided arterial routes not only for the flows of commuters

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but also for the needs of war, and today I'm following my guidebook along those tracks.

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On this journey, I'll be finding out how a railway

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helped to save Canterbury's historic heart in World War Two...

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The cathedral had railway lines laid into the nave to deliver sandbags to protect it.

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..hearing how the Whitstable whelk industry has changed since Bradshaw's day.

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In the old days, that's not what happened.

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No, in the old days, it all used to go away in the shell.

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But when the rail stopped taking perishable goods,

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we had to find another way of dealing with them.

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..and exploring the history of a seaside swim.

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Imagine you are staying in Margate, you would come out of your lodgings

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and you'd wait for a bathing machine to be ready.

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Which apparently always smelt like rotting carpet, that kind of horrible smell.

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So far, I've travelled over 60 miles from London through Kent to Tunbridge Wells.

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From there, I'll head east towards the coast before tracing

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the shoreline bordering the Channel on my way to Folkestone.

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Then I'll pass through Ashford en route to my final stop, Hastings.

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Today, I'll begin in Canterbury and travel on to Whitstable and skirt the sea to Margate.

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ANNOUNCER: We will shortly be arriving at Canterbury.

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Canterbury has been a destination for devout pilgrims for millennia,

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and especially since Thomas Becket was murdered in the cathedral in the 12th century.

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Once the railway was built, it became a magnet

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for Victorian tourists keen to understand their history.

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Canterbury Cathedral from the train is so impressive.

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Even when you're prepared for it, you're not prepared for it, because it just rises so high,

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the tower is so magnificent and dominating of the whole town.

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Some of the great views of cathedrals are from railways.

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Time to get off.

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Bradshaw's waxes lyrical about the cathedral's Norman architecture

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and the unusual double cross above its 574ft long nave.

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Lovely morning, isn't it?

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Discovering the city through my guide,

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I appreciate why Victorian tourists were inspired to take the train to Canterbury.

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Let me read you this, from Bradshaw's.

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"The appearance of Canterbury is exquisitely beautiful.

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"And as we enter, symbols of its antiquity stare us in the face everywhere.

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"Narrow passages, crazy tenements with overhanging windows,

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"peaked gables and wooden balustrades just out on every side.

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"Here and there some formless sculpture of a fractured cherub

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"or grotesque image peer out from a creaking doorway."

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Isn't that wonderful writing?

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Has any modern guidebook ever said it better?

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Fortunately, Bradshaw couldn't foresee that within a century

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this magnificent city would come under devastating attack during World War Two.

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Now here's something not in my Bradshaw's guide.

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I was tipped off to look for this.

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Had Germany attacked in 1940, '41,

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then invading troops might well have passed along this road.

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And little rectangles have been cut in the railway bridge so that British forces defending

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might have hoped to keep them at bay by pointing their machine guns through those apertures.

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Canterbury sits on a strategic railway link between London and the port of Dover.

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During the war, it constituted a major supply route for troops and materiel

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and the city became a target.

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'Paul!'

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Michael, welcome to Canterbury.

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Good to see you.

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Paul Bennett is an expert on Canterbury's history.

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This is my Bradshaw's guide, would it be a reliable guide to Canterbury today?

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Sadly not, no.

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Parts of Canterbury, Bradshaw would recognise,

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but a significant part of it was lost during the Baedeker raid of June 1st, 1942.

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A German air raid?

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A German air raid on Canterbury, on historic towns, and we lost the very heart of the city.

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The Luftwaffe consulted a German tourist guidebook called Baedeker's

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to select historically important English cities for bombing.

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How sad that a book written in celebration of human achievement was so cynically misused.

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The phrase, the Baedeker raids, comes from Gustav Braun von Sturm,

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a German propagandist, who said, "We will bomb every building in Britain

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"that has three stars in the Baedeker guide."

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By April '42, they had bombed Exeter,

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then Bath, then Norwich, and then on June 1st, 1942,

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at 12.45am, 16 blood-red flares shone out

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over the skies of Canterbury

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and down rained 8,000 incendiaries

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and about 150 high explosives that devastated parts of the town.

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Now, given both the strategic significance of Canterbury

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and the wonderful heritage, presumably the people of Canterbury were prepared for all this?

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They were very prepared. The population had been provided by then with lots of shelters.

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Many of the principal buildings had been covered in sandbags.

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The cathedral actually had railway lines laid into the nave

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to deliver sandbags to protect it.

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During the raid itself, there were people chucking incendiaries

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off the cathedral roof, it was such a close-run thing.

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We could have lost Canterbury Cathedral in that raid

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if it hadn't been for the organisation of the city at that time.

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People used all kinds of wiles to defend the city.

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They created fake Canterburys by lighting up areas of the countryside

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while obscuring the real city in smoke.

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Despite this, they endured 35 raids which took their toll.

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We lost 880 buildings. 6,500 buildings were damaged.

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But fortunately, only 115 people were killed.

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That's a tribute, I suppose, to how far civil defence had advanced by then,

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the shelters were in place, and so on.

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10,000 shelter places were created in 1941,

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and thank goodness for it.

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The shelters might be steel boxes built in people's homes or half-buried in the garden.

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Many residents also sought refuge in the railway tunnel, and overall, thousands of lives were saved.

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For some who experienced the bombings, like volunteer rescue operator, Anthony Swayne,

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the memories remain powerful.

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What do you remember of the air raids themselves?

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The screaming of the planes as they dived down.

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Then the explosions of bombs, then shouting in the street.

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Do you remember looking at the devastation of the city after it had occurred?

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Oh, rather. It smouldered for about three weeks.

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It must have been very shocking.

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It was. We couldn't even breathe, the air was so hot.

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You imagine a whole city burning,

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the heat was...incredible.

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How would you describe the noises?

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Absolute hell on earth.

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It was.

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It was not only our guns shooting at the planes, it was the bombs that dropped.

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Screaming of people in the streets.

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It was just hell let loose.

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But through it, came people of strength, I must say that.

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I find it moving to hear at first hand what the people of Canterbury lived through

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and how their ingenuity helped to save the cathedral.

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And now as I reach the station, by chance another bit of history thunders past.

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It's brilliant just to see a steam engine race by you.

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I've been on several steam journeys recently, but I'm not normally in the position

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of watching an old locomotive race by with all the wind and the smoke and steam.

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Fabulous sight.

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It would have been a common experience for Victorian tourists following their Bradshaw's guides.

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But I'll have to settle for modern electric efficiency to get me to Whitstable, changing at Faversham.

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Faversham, and my connection goes in three minutes.

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< Where are you going?

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Whitstable!

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Whitstable, platform four.

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What?!

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Looks like I'm not the only person going to Whitstable.

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Perched atop the Kent coast, Whitstable has since Roman times been famed for shellfish.

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In 1830, it gained one of the very first railways to convey coal between the coast and Canterbury.

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It also carried seafood, and inevitably, the Canterbury and Whitstable railway

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was nicknamed the Crab and Winkle Line.

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Two years later, it was joined to a new harbour serving the expanding shellfish trade.

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"Whitstable," says Bradshaw's,

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"is the harbour of Canterbury and is celebrated for its oyster fishery,

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"the produce of which, under the name of Natives, is highly esteemed in the London and other markets."

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I am here to find out more not about the oyster, beloved of metropolitan toffs, but the Whitstable whelk,

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traditionally the food of the British working classes.

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I'm meeting Derek West, a whelk fisherman, whose family has been fishing here for three generations.

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Derek. Michael. Lovely to see you.

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In your memory, what was it like in its heyday, this harbour?

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Very, very busy in the war and just after the war.

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There was shipping here and we used to have all the old rail lines round the harbour here.

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Very good, them days.

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The things that were caught here, the oysters, the whelks and so on,

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what happened to them? How were they sent on?

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We used to bag them up and take them up to the station and they used to go to London market.

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Did they go fresh on the trains?

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No, they was all cooked, they was all put in bags,

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and took up to the station up at Whitstable on the trains.

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In Bradshaw's time, fresh and cooked whelks

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were sent by rail to the city and sold as a snack on London's streets.

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They cost around a penny for five, and cockneys loved them.

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Demand was high, so Derek's great-grandfather employed a different kind of whelk pot

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which improved the catch.

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Derek's brought a half-size one for me to see.

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That was the old, original whelk pot.

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And this is a kind of iron or steel cage?

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That's right. We roped... We used to rope them up.

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Your whelks are attracted into the pot.

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Bait goes in the pot there and the smell draws the whelks into the pots.

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And then what prevents them getting out?

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There's a net in there, a small net, what we call a crinnie that stops them from coming out.

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Like a valve, they can get in but they can't get out.

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Have you any idea, in the old days,

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your grandfather's day, maybe your youth, how many people were fishing whelk?

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There used to be about ten whelk boats on the harbour here.

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What is it now?

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There's only about two.

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In the late 20th century, as whelks' popularity declined, the industry waned.

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Derek's family is one of the few in Whitstable that still catch and prepare them for sale.

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These days, they're removed from the shell, cleaned and sorted by size.

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Hello, Jean.

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Hello there. How do you do? I won't shake your hand.

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'Jean West is an expert picker.

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'She and her team can prepare 200 kilos of whelks per day.'

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You're Derek's bride, I believe.

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That's right, 57 years.

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And you've done a few of those in your time, I dare say.

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Yes, I've been doing this since 1963.

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Good heavens! These are now put into packets and frozen, is that right?

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Yes, they are put into 2.5 kilo packets and they are frozen.

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Then people come with the refrigerated lorries to collect them.

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We have them from Birmingham, Essex, London, all over.

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In the old days, that's not what happened.

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No, in the old days they all used to go in the shell by train up to Birmingham,

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and down to Hastings and places like that.

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When the rail stopped taking perishable goods, we had to find another way of dealing with it.

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'Since the late 1960s, lorries have replaced trains

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'as the main carrier of perishable goods like shellfish.'

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They are something that you either love or hate.

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The people that like them, really go for them.

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I don't like them very much.

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I've got friends that do.

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You don't like them very much and you spend your entire day with them!

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I see enough of them!

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How do you actually pick a whelk?

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Turn the shell...take it out.

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Do you think I might have a go at that?

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Turn the shell...there we go.

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Well done.

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Then you have to take the hat off...

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Oh, you have to take the hat off? And pop that in there.

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'With it out of its shell, I'd better try one of these once so popular whelks.'

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It's got a kind of a tough bit and a soft bit.

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-That's nice.

-Is that good?

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They have a reputation of being very chewy, but that's quite nice.

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The smaller ones are nice.

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The coast here at Whitstable is given a beauty by the severity of the tide,

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the sea is far away, grey under a grey sky.

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It's really kind of beautiful, little fishing boat silhouetted.

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In Bradshaw's day, this coast was heaving with boats catching not only whelks but oysters too.

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The Whitstable Oyster Company sent 60 million to London in one year alone.

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So appropriately, tonight I'm staying in a place strongly linked to fishing.

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This beautiful house, rebuilt in 1778, was apparently the home of Captain Jasper Rowden,

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who was a famous Whitstable oyster dredger.

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Bernard Wright owns and runs The Captain's House as a B&B.

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-Hello, lovely to see you.

-Very nice to meet you.

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Jasper Rowden, who was he?

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Jasper Rowden was the pre-eminent oyster dredger man of his generation.

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This house stood here on the beach before anything else was built around it.

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There were maybe one or two other houses scattered about the place.

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He would have lived here and would have been looking

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straight out to sea rather than onto this busy road that you see here.

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In Captain Rowden's day, oyster dredging was back-breaking work.

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The oysters were hauled up by hand into special boats called yawls,

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where they were separated from the rubble from the sea bed.

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So, staying in the Captain's House, I feel respect for him and his crews.

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He would have been a very well known character in the local area.

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We sort of feel him about, as if he's still here sometimes.

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Which is a nice feeling, just to understand the history

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of the place, to do with the town being so famous for oysters.

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Well, I'm here to spend the night.

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Yes, come on in.

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A bright and breezy new day.

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And reluctantly I leave behind the pretty harbour and delicious seafood of Whitstable.

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I'm now heading around 15 miles along the Kent coast.

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The Victorians could be rather pompous.

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The line to Margate.

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"This has been called the pleasure line, and certainly the beauty of the country traversed by its trains

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"justly entitle it to that distinguishing appellation.

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"Its iron roads and branches intersect Kent in all directions affording the inhabitants

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"of the great metropolis facilities of visiting the numerous watering places on its coast."

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In modern parlance, that means this is the line

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to sun, sand, sea and fun.

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-So this used to be called the pleasure line?

-It did, yes.

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Do you still get a lot of weekenders, sunseekers, holidaymakers?

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Oh, yeah, thousands, especially in the summertime.

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Whitstable, Margate, Broadstairs.

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So not so different from Victorian times?

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No, I don't think so. We get the whole spectrum from elderly people to young kids.

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Young kids seem to love Margate.

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You've got the sea, the beach and the escapism, I should imagine, from living up in town.

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That's what I'm there for. I'll do a bit of escapism while I'm there.

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My guide comments on Margate's meteoric rise in popularity once the railways arrived.

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It says, "Steam has done wonders and Margate visitors have to be numbered by hundreds of thousands."

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With new journey times from London of just two hours,

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train-loads of daytrippers sped their way towards the seaside town.

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What a great, big, impressive station Margate is.

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I suppose that is telling us that, as Bradshaw says,

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hundreds of thousands of people would come to Margate for a day trip or a holiday.

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-Bye-bye, now.

-You enjoy Margate.

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-I'll enjoy it, thank you.

-Hope you find your escapism!

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-Safe trip, bye!

-Ta-ra!

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Bradshaw goes on to say, "When London folks grew wiser and found

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"that short trips had a wonderful power in preventing doctor's bills, the place grew rapidly."

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In fact, salt water had long been considered a cure for diseases like rickets and TB.

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The world's first sea bathing hospital was built here.

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I'm meeting historian Allan Brodie at its grand entrance.

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This is really rather a lovely building.

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This is the Sea Bathing Hospital.

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The committee to establish it was founded in 1791.

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And the small building here opened in 1796.

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The magnificent thing we are looking at is a reconstruction of the mid 19th century.

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Who are these patients?

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They are children from poor backgrounds who this charitable committee have brought down,

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firstly on sailing boats, then steamers, to be treated here.

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They are suffering from the whole range of tuberculosis

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as well as diseases that are essentially poverty related.

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The upper classes also came to Margate to bathe

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and even to drink the curative sea water.

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But rather than visiting the hospital, they took a dip in the sea in a private contraption

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that it's claimed was developed here, the bathing machine.

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The bathing machine, when and where does that originate?

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The first bathing machines probably date from the very early 18th century and Margate has a special part

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in the story because it takes the simple bathing machine, essentially just a cart

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drawn into the sea by a horse, and puts a strange, concertina-shaped canvas cover at the back of it,

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so if you are a lady or gentleman who wanted to have a bit of privacy, you could come down the steps

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and have a little swim inside this, effectively a little private bath

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in the sea, under this strange canopy.

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Our ancestors didn't care to swim as we do today.

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They savoured a ritual which grew up around the bathing machine.

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You would come out of your lodgings, go to little bathing rooms on the High Street,

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sign your names on a blackboard, and wait for a bathing machine.

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You'd come down to the bathing machine, where you would be provided perhaps with some kind of costume,

0:23:210:23:26

or you may have some costume of your own, and perhaps some towels to dry yourself with.

0:23:260:23:31

You would change inside this bathing machine, which apparently always smelt

0:23:310:23:35

like rotting carpet, that kind of horrible smell.

0:23:350:23:38

Poor horse dragged the machine into the sea and you went down the steps

0:23:380:23:42

and bathed in under this canvas canopy in privacy.

0:23:420:23:47

If you were more a bit more adventurous or felt you could swim, you could come out of the canopy.

0:23:470:23:51

From the mid 19th century the railways transported a new wave of working class visitors

0:23:520:23:58

to Margate, who entered the sea not to improve their health but for pleasure.

0:23:580:24:04

The Victorian period is a transitional period

0:24:040:24:06

between the Georgian period in the 18th century, where people

0:24:060:24:10

drank sea water, and bathed, dipped in the water.

0:24:100:24:14

By the Victorian period, you are beginning to get that system of bathing machines being transformed

0:24:140:24:21

into the beginning of the swimming and the beach holiday culture

0:24:210:24:26

that we would much more recognise today.

0:24:260:24:29

By the end of the 19th century, so many people were catching

0:24:310:24:34

the train to the beach that the cumbersome bathing machines

0:24:340:24:37

made way for the more practical swimming costume.

0:24:370:24:40

The railways made the British seaside holiday

0:24:400:24:43

a part of national culture and it clings to its position to this day.

0:24:430:24:48

Before I leave town, I'll visit a place that Victorian tourists wouldn't have missed,

0:24:520:24:57

the mysterious Shell Grotto, which was discovered shortly before my guide was written.

0:24:570:25:04

Extraordinary, like entering a subterranean cathedral,

0:25:050:25:10

everything's covered in mosaics, but mosaics made of seashells.

0:25:100:25:15

The whole thing very elaborate, very intricate, incredible amount of work.

0:25:150:25:20

And big!

0:25:210:25:23

Over 4.5 million shells were used to create this underground masterpiece.

0:25:240:25:29

This is the greatest room of all, and you must be Sarah?

0:25:320:25:36

Hello! I am!

0:25:360:25:38

'Sarah Vickery owns the grotto.'

0:25:380:25:40

I saw a sign saying don't touch the shells because they are delicate.

0:25:400:25:44

Here and there obviously some have fallen away, but it's in pretty good condition.

0:25:440:25:48

Considering it's been open to the public since 1837, so literally millions of people

0:25:480:25:54

would have walked through here, so it's a miracle, the condition it's in.

0:25:540:25:59

Believed to have been discovered by a group of school children playing hide and seek,

0:25:590:26:04

the grotto quickly drew the crowds.

0:26:040:26:06

-When it opened, it would have been

-THE

-thing to do.

0:26:060:26:10

Margate was an incredibly busy town, of course.

0:26:100:26:13

So, I think...at one stage, they had a one-way system going in here, it was so busy.

0:26:130:26:20

They would have had hundreds and hundreds of people through every day.

0:26:200:26:24

'Grottos became fashionable in Britain in the 18th century.

0:26:260:26:30

'Wealthy travellers returning from grand tours of Italy

0:26:300:26:33

'recreated the idea in their landscaped gardens.

0:26:330:26:36

'Some have suggested this grotto was built as a temple, others a secret meeting house.

0:26:360:26:43

'In truth, nobody knows.'

0:26:430:26:46

In a way, it's a fantastic story.

0:26:470:26:50

This huge work of art exists... and we don't know who the artist is.

0:26:500:26:56

No, exactly, it's anonymous.

0:26:560:26:58

Following my Bradshaw's Guide around Britain, as so many 19th century tourists did,

0:27:010:27:06

I'm continually surprised that so much that the Victorians saw, we can still see today.

0:27:060:27:13

My guide may be over 150 years old,

0:27:140:27:18

but much of it remains relevant for the 21st century traveller.

0:27:180:27:23

For the railway tourist, Kent offers medieval heritage,

0:27:230:27:28

fine seafood, and excellent sea bathing.

0:27:280:27:31

Whitstable has adjusted to the 21st century.

0:27:310:27:34

Canterbury has been rebuilt after World War Two, and Margate maintains

0:27:340:27:39

its position as a sea bathing centre on Kent's pleasure line.

0:27:390:27:45

On my next journey, I'll be hearing how the railways helped Britain to win the First World War...

0:27:470:27:53

It made it possible to supply the troops with the equipment

0:27:530:27:56

they needed in a much greater quantity than they might otherwise have had.

0:27:560:28:00

It was as simple as that.

0:28:000:28:01

..imagining how to fill some famous boots...

0:28:010:28:05

Ones actually worn by Wellington?

0:28:050:28:07

Yes, the icon of our collection.

0:28:070:28:10

..and venturing into the very first railway tunnel under the sea.

0:28:100:28:14

It is absolutely unique.

0:28:140:28:16

It's massive, yet it's invisible.

0:28:160:28:18

And it is, honestly, one of the wonders of our modern day.

0:28:180:28:23

-A renaissance in rail.

-We hope so.

0:28:230:28:26

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0:28:510:28:54

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0:28:540:28:57

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