Darsham to Felixstowe Great British Railway Journeys

In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.

His name was George Bradshaw,

and his Railway Guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.

Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,

what to see and where to stay.

Now, 170 years later, I'm making a series of journeys

across the length and breadth of the country

to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

I'm continuing my journey from Great Yarmouth to the City of London

on one of the great pioneering lines of the Victorian age.

My Bradshaw's guide has now brought me to Suffolk.

And it says,

"This is one of the best cultivated districts in England.

"Indeed, it may be called, almost exclusively, a farming county."

Before industrialisation,

this area was largely dependent on people travelling by boat.

And the railways opened up new routes for industry.

And they also allowed tourists in,

some of them with a very particular quest.

On today's leg of the journey, I'll be following Victorian

tourists to an English city that was lost like Atlantis.

It's not just the church ruins that go onto the beach,

it's also the bodies of the dead from the graveyard.

Meeting some gentle giants who were crucial

to the smooth running of the railways.

Face of an angel, middle like a beer barrel,

and a backside on it like a farmer's daughter.

That sums up the Suffolk horse.

And discovering how a 19th-century railway entrepreneur started

something that would grow beyond his wildest dreams.

Ian, I've never been as close to one of these container ships as this.

It's absolutely enormous.

I started this journey in Great Yarmouth, on the East coast.

And now, I'm heading south through Suffolk.

I'll be following a route through

what, in Bradshaw's day, was forbidding and difficult territory.

But the railways opened up the region to commerce

and allowed its riches to be tapped.

On this stretch, my first stop will be Darsham.

And then, I'll travel south, through the scenic East Anglian flatlands,

visiting the great ports of the East Coast.

Morning. Tickets, please.

-There we go. Weather not too bright this morning.

-Horrible, isn't it?

-Will it cheer up?

-We're supposed to have had a heatwave, aren't we?

Yeah, we're meant to. I'm going out on a boat this morning. What do you think?

How will I get on there, do you think?

Well, if the rain keeps up like this, it will be a bit wet.

With the coming of the railways in the mid-1800s,

this sparsely populated area was opened up,

not just for business, but for tourism too.

Journey times were dramatically reduced.

And, for the first time, the unexplored treasures of Suffolk's

beautiful countryside and coast became a sought-after destination.

This is Darsham, and Victorian tourists would come here

in their droves, headed for Dunwich.

Attracted not so much by the sunshine or the country air,

but by an interest somewhat more ghoulish.

They came to visit the crumbling, yet captivating ruins

of what was once the claimed capital of East Anglia.

One of the country's biggest medieval towns,

Dunwich's prosperity once rivalled London's.

I'm meeting Professor David Sear to find out more about

Britain's rival to the lost city of Atlantis.

-Good to see you.

-You too.

So, I've just arrived on the train, like a Victorian tourist.

And I believe they used to come in their hoards.

What've they come to see?

OK, they've come to see the medieval town of Dunwich.

Where we're standing is the last fragment of the lost town.

The rest is out beyond the cliffs. This town has gone into the sea.

And why so? What happened to the cliff?

Well, we're standing on, basically, sands and gravels.

And the town itself was absolutely decimated

by a series of storms in the 13th century and then subsequently.

And these big storms just ripped the cliff away

and the buildings collapsed down with it.

And you can see, here,

there's remains of a priory here that we're standing in.

And they would've come to see this and to see the, sort of,

not only just the romance of the ruins,

but also the ghoulishness associated with, sort of, the lost town itself.

How much more of this town could a Victorian tourist have seen

than I can see today?

Beyond here, now underwater, was a great big church,

All Saints' Church.

And you would've seen this tower teetering on the edge of the cliffs.

That's the great thing,

when the Victorians came here, it really was on the edge.

And with the tower, of course, came all the, sort of, romance

and the legend of the bells and the lost bells of Dunwich.

Which, they said, and still do say,

that, on a stormy night, you can hear.

Romance seems all well and good,

but the Victorians had a much more morbid reason for visiting.

Although we think of them as prudish and repressed,

they had a macabre fascination with death.

Dunwich allowed them

to indulge their dark side with a spot of human relic hunting.

Well, of course, if you've got a church on the cliffs,

you've got a graveyard.

And when the storms come and the cliff collapses,

it's not just the church ruins that go onto the beach,

it's also the bodies of the dead from the graveyard.

And, in fact, you still can come, to this day, after a storm,

cos there's a fragment of All Saints' churchyard left,

and you find bones and skulls on the beach.

And, of course, that attracted them.

I don't fancy searching for the bones of my forebears on the beach.

But David's taking me on a boat for a unique view

of the submerged city, beyond the Victorian's imagination.

He's conducting research beneath the murky depths,

using sonar technology to map what's on the seabed.

Very scientific.

But I'll still keep open a superstitious ear

for the watery bells of All Saints' Church.

Where did the medieval city of Dunwich stand, then?

What we can see, here, is that the last fragments of the medieval city,

quite literally, are on the cliff line.

And then it stretched for about a mile to the north.

-And it came out about a mile this way.

-Big city.

-Yeah, really big.

I mean, the same size as the City of London.

The port's riches were based on exports of East Anglian wool

and grain and imports of fish, cloth from the Netherlands

and wine from France.

The harbour and port activity was to the north.

And then, you sort of came up this low hill

and you entered the hub of the town.

The marketplace, the main churches clustered round the marketplace

and, of course, those are now underneath us.

-Literally underneath us.

-Literally underneath us.

But tell me what it really looks like.

Are you telling me there are walls under there, or is this, kind of,

the vague outline of where a church was?

What is there, actually, underneath?

We've been able to map the whole of the seafloor, here.

And, incredibly exciting,

we've found the ruins of four churches from the former medieval city.

But, of course, these buildings have fallen down a 20-metre-high cliff.

So, they've broken up as they go down.

So, it's the ruins of ruins, if you like.

Modern technology is bringing

the submerged antiquity of Dunwich to life.

I like to imagine how fascinated the Victorians would have been

had they had this view of a medieval metropolis.

I suppose what is really exciting about that is that...although this

place has disappeared, in a sense, it's never been tampered with.

It never got modernised. It didn't have any skyscrapers.

-So, I mean, this really is a whole medieval city.

-Absolutely, yes.

Certainly, we're beginning to get the geography

of an untouched medieval town.

Loving history as I do,

I'd be delighted to walk the streets of Dunwich, unsullied by modernity.

A pure medieval city.

Back on the train at Darsham, I'm heading south

to the town of Woodbridge.

My Bradshaw's guide talks about agriculture in Suffolk

being conducted "on the most improved principles."

A wonderful Victorian phrase.

And now, I'm on my way to see an innovation in agriculture

that was unique to East Anglia.

The new railways allowed tourists to flock

to Suffolk in unprecedented numbers.

Many of those visitors might have glimpsed,

toiling in the fields, a Suffolk icon,

without realising that that noble beast was also vital to

the smooth-running of the railways on which they were speeding by.

This is Woodbridge

and I'm looking forward, here, to meeting an animal that I really

admire for its strength, its quiet dignity and its strong work ethic.

The Suffolk Punch is one of the oldest breeds

of working horse in the world.

And Roger Clark is going to introduce me

to these unassuming creatures.

Roger.

-Good afternoon.

-What an amazing horse. Absolutely huge, aren't they?

-Yeah, they are. Two tremendous geldings.

-What makes them so strong?

And what makes them so useful?

Well, with the Suffolk horse, his main characteristic,

why he can pull so well, is his angle of draught.

-And...

-His what?

-His angle of draught.

If you see, sorry, where the collar sits on his neck.

When he leans into the collar,

he can exert all his power on the long forearm, short cannons.

So, that's where the strength is.

So, when he, he's like Suffolk people.

When he leans into the collar, something has to give.

-And it's a fine head as well.

-Well, face of an angel.

Middle like a beer barrel,

and a backside on it like a farmer's daughter.

That sums up the Suffolk horse.

Before the railways,

East Anglia was isolated from the rest of the country,

and consequently, developed its own horses and agricultural methods.

The Suffolk Punch was bred for its immense stamina,

specifically to plough the heavy clay.

It's reputed to be able to pull up to two times

its own one-tonne body weight.

In Bradshaw's day, this power was invaluable, as they were deployed

to railway goods yards across the eastern counties.

Now, they have a history with the railways, don't they?

Yes, the bigger ones would be either for heavy draught

or for shunting in the goods yards.

They used the horses for shunting?

Yeah, shunting trucks and so forth,

which possibly was the most economical way.

When you think that they'd save them

actually having to use a steam engine for that job.

A cart horse has a tremendous surge of power,

and that's what was needed to get a truck started.

Once it started, then it rolled along.

The railways used all types of heavy draught horses to shunt wagons,

including Suffolk Punches and Shires.

Trained not to catch their hooves in the tracks

and to step deftly out of the way once a wagon was rolling,

they'd save large costs for the railway companies.

As little as 100 years ago, Suffolk Punch horses were a common sight.

But mechanisation has left the species' survival in doubt.

How rare is this breed?

Well, it's on the Rare Breeds Category One

and Rare Breeds Survival Trust list.

That is to say that it is, in fact, an endangered species.

In fact, people talk about the panda and the tiger and so forth.

These are far more in danger of extinction than they are.

Although, thankfully, we have enthusiasts like the Trust, here,

that are maintaining the breed and, hopefully, carrying it forward.

The Trust works these surviving animals regularly,

pulling carts of tourists through the countryside.

So, we're all harnessed up. Perhaps you'd like to take one,

Michael, if you take the one that Bruce has got.

-Bit of a responsibility.

-It certainly is. Just watch your toes.

-Watch my toes! Oh, my goodness.

-You've got a tonne of horse, there.

All right, a tonne of horse. Right.

You are a big fellow, aren't you?

Not quite sure who's in control, here.

Travelling on a wagon drawn by a Suffolk Punch gives me

a warm appreciation for the strength of these good-natured animals.

So, Roger, I suppose most people would think that with the coming

of the railways and with the coming of motor vehicles on the roads,

that that would be the last time that you'd be using big horses.

Is that really what happened?

Well, I don't think it did, really.

When you think that although the railways came

and, obviously, took the road coaches off the road,

the produce and goods that they took to the stations

obviously needed horse power to deliver them.

And I think the Great Western Railway in London

boasted something like 800 horses,

of various sizes and that.

You know, parcel vans, heavy goods, and so forth,

that they could boast that they could,

they only had one parcel in 10,000 mislaid.

I wonder if they could claim that today?

I had no idea that horses were used on the railways until the 1960s,

when, as part of the Beeching reforms,

tractors replaced these gentle giants.

The Suffolk Punch's story has won my regard and affection

and I salute these working horses,

who were so familiar in Victorian Britain.

From the Suffolk Punches, it's back to the iron horse for me.

Slow train to Ipswich and the intercity to Manningtree.

I'm following in the footsteps of Bradshaw's tourists, who,

keen to escape the grimy reality of the Industrial Revolution,

took the train in order to rediscover

the gentler myth of a rustic age.

Rural life in 19th-century Britain was pretty tough.

But painters of the period liked to depict

the countryside in idealistic terms.

One of the Victorians' favourite landscape painters was born

in Suffolk and worked here much of his life.

And we still love his work today.

I'm alighting at Manningtree, on the Essex-Suffolk border,

one of England's smallest market towns.

This is the gateway to Dedham Vale,

an area immortalised by a famous 19th-century painter,

whose warm-hearted scenes attracted Victorians with magnetic force.

-Hello.

-Good afternoon, sir.

-Fantastic view from your station.

-Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

-Is that actually Dedham Vale?

That way, between the pylons,

straight across that way to Dedham Vale, that's right.

Through the pylons, that's a pity, really.

-But even from here, the countryside is fabulous.

-Lovely.

Hasn't changed, I shouldn't think, for the last 100 and whatever years.

-And your station actually says "for Dedham Vale."

-Yes, that's right.

-You get people coming here...

-We get lots of walkers, a lot of walkers.

-And Constable fans.

-Yes, oh, dear, a lot of Japanese turn up as well.

-Oh, really?

-Yeah.

Constable is still doing his bit for Suffolk tourism?

-He did, all these years after his death.

-Very nice to see you.

-Thank you.

-Bye.

-Bye.

The charming hamlet of Flatford,

in the heart of beautiful Dedham Vale,

is the setting for some of

John Constable's most celebrated paintings.

Including The Hay Wain, which he finished in 1821.

So, here is a site that I know so well

from having seen the painting The Hay Wain so often.

And yet it's so unbelievably unchanged. It's so perfect.

The wagon is stuck in the middle of the river, there.

The buildings look much the same.

It takes your breath away.

My guide here is Mark Cable, from the National Trust.

Michael, nice to meet you.

I thought I was prepared for all this, having seen

the paintings before, but this is unbelievably beautiful.

-It's very nice, isn't it?

-Wonderfully unspoiled, isn't it?

Unchanged for nearly 200 years, yeah.

So, this is where The Hay Wain was inspired.

This is the scene of The Hay Wain painting, indeed.

So, it wasn't actually painted on site.

It was actually painted in London, in Keppel Street.

-It must have been sketched here?

-It was sketched, yeah.

Constable made many sketches of Willy Lott's house

and the surrounding area.

And then put together

in his studio in London.

So, this building is largely captured by the artist as it is,

as it was.

The only slight change he's done is, if you notice on the roof,

he's slightly shrunk it, just to get this side of the house in.

It moves me to know that I'm seeing Willy Lott's house

much as Bradshaw's tourists did.

Constable died in 1837, three months before Victoria came to the throne.

But his popularity reached new heights in Victorian Britain,

as people craved pastoral relief from urban squalor.

Here we are, today, the place is still full of tourists.

-There are amateur artists here. I gather many Japanese people come.

-Yes.

So, we're still captivated with it.

-We are, indeed.

-Why?

It's interesting, because the reason that it's a tourist attraction now

is that trade has actually shifted from the river.

So, this river would have been very, very busy in Constable's time,

with barges, or lighters, as they were known in those days,

were going backwards and forwards with trade and goods.

That has now moved to the railways.

So, that's actually freed up this area to become what it is today,

which is a picturesque tourist attraction.

I mean, actually, the countryside was a very grindingly poor place.

-So, this is romanticised.

-Absolutely.

Did the early 19th-century people and the Victorians,

did they like it because it was romanticised?

They were starting to crave the sort of pictures of England as it was.

So, absolutely. As we do now.

And it looks inviting, it's an English summer's day.

And then, in the Victorian period, I mean,

England is covered in dark, satanic mills.

-So, there's a real, kind of, escapism.

-Exactly, exactly.

People would start to go back to Constable and realise,

think of these times in fonder,

of fonder memories, you know, of the countryside, and we idealise it.

The new industrial conurbations set Victorians yearning

to escape to the country.

As in so many things, we feel the same today

and imitate their excursions.

But whilst I've got Mark here,

there's one more thing I've always wanted to know about The Hay Wain.

By the way, what is actually going on in this painting?

Why is the wagon in the middle of the river?

Well, there's a number of theories.

Some people think it's cooling down the wheels here,

the rims of the cart.

Other people have suggested that it's stuck in the mill pond.

I don't think it's either.

I think what's happening is we've got some distant hay carts,

over here, so it's travelling across here to relieve

this hay cart and come back with a load of hay.

But interestingly, even that theory has its issues.

Because this is actually a log cart.

The cart was actually sketched by a chap in the village

called Johnny Dunthorne,

who Constable requested that he sketch the cart

and send it back to him in London.

He didn't have enough detail

in his memory to recreate the cart.

So, again, it's possible that

Johnny Dunthorne sent him

a picture of the wrong cart that Constable had in mind.

It's been a wonderful afternoon in Constable country.

As the sun sets over this curiously familiar landscape,

I make for the village of Dedham, where Constable went to school,

and where I'll stay the night.

The next day, my journey continues,

and I'm travelling on the Mayflower Line.

So-called because the master of the ship the Mayflower,

which in 1620 took the Pilgrims to America,

lived in the town which is my next destination.

I'm on my way to Harwich, which my Bradshaw's guide tells me,

"is built on a peninsular point of land,

"close to where the River Stour joins the German Ocean,

"and has a number of maritime advantages.

"It derives considerable profit from its shipping trade,

"fisheries and annual visitors."

Which is interesting, because

today, I don't think of Harwich as a major port.

TANNOY: We have now arrived at Harwich Town.

In Bradshaw's day, the coming of the railways had, indeed,

made Harwich a booming port, just an hour's journey from London by train.

But today, it handles mainly passenger ferries,

having been eclipsed by Felixstowe, just across the River Stour.

Felixstowe's better railway connections

and the invention of the container in the 1960s

made it the economical choice for shipping lines.

Felixstowe Docks have grown rapidly, doubling in size every ten years.

It's now the largest container port in the UK,

and one of the biggest in Europe.

I'm setting out from Harwich on a pilot boat with

Captain Ian Mace, Deputy Harbour Master,

to gain an idea of Felixstowe's vast scale.

Ian, I've never been as close to one of these container ships as this.

I'm looking down the length of it, it's absolutely enormous.

Any idea what lengths these things get to?

The biggest ones that we have coming into the Haven are 397 metres long.

So, it's a fairly substantial size.

And over 10,000 20-foot containers onboard.

-10,000 containers on board?

-Yes.

So, the thing that I see on the back of a lorry,

10,000 of those on a single ship?

Yes, exactly.

The advent of the freight container, the box that changed Britain,

means that everything you can buy on the high street,

from food and clothes to electronics and furniture,

arrives on container ships for sale throughout the United Kingdom.

Astoundingly, it's estimated that our shops would start

to run out of food in three days if Felixstowe Docks were closed.

So, give me an idea of how many of these vessels come to Felixstowe.

In a year, there's about 10,000 movements within the Haven.

At busy times, we can have half a dozen to ten vessels

of this similar size at anchor, waiting to come into the port.

A bit like aeroplanes stacking to go into an airport.

These staggering consignments of containers,

over three million in a year, come in by sea

and are then directed around the UK.

Port Manager Paul Davey can give me an idea of how the importance

of railways today compares with Bradshaw's time.

What I see here is that you're putting containers

onto vehicles, but please tell me that you still use railways.

We do. We use rail extensively.

We have more freight trains going from this port

to more destinations in the UK than any other port.

We have two rail terminals at the moment.

We're building a third one

to increase further the capacity for rail.

Is this as big as Felixstowe will get?

This is the first phase of a development which will,

eventually, see the quay lengthen still further.

We've also got the potential to expand in Harwich,

just on the other side of the river.

Oh, you're going to expand in Harwich?

There's quite a nice symmetry here because Harwich,

over the years, lost out to Felixstowe.

Now, Felixstowe's getting so big

that it may have to transfer part of the business back to Harwich.

In Victorian Britain, the railways were part of an extensive

and efficient network that sped up delivery times from dockside

to marketplace.

Thousands of dockworkers worked long hours in all weathers

to unload vessels onto rail wagons.

With small cranes, winches and sheer brute force.

Things today are rather different,

as Andy Lambert is about to teach me in a modern dock crane.

What I'll do, Michael, I'll just line up over this box

and then I'll let you have a go, if you like.

The cranes, the largest of their type in the world,

are the workhorses of the dock.

Loading and unloading ships, trains and lorries.

-So, you've lined us up over the container.

-That's right, yeah.

What next?

With your right-hand side, just bring it up nice and gently.

Pull it up nice and gently. Here we go. Box coming up.

Beads of sweat coming on my brow here, as I concentrate on this.

-Down it goes. Don't go away, Andy.

-I'm here.

-Don't go away.

That's it. Little bit more. Little bit more. Little bit more.

That's lovely, there.

-And then, just lift your frame up.

-By pulling back on this one.

-That's right, yeah.

-I'm getting the hang of this, Andy.

-Absolutely.

And off goes the vehicle.

Now, we've just got another 25 to do. So...

MICHAEL LAUGHS

-Thank you, Andy. A fantastic lesson. Really enjoyed that.

-Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

After Andy and his colleagues have unloaded a few thousand containers

from each ship, more than a quarter go

onto freight trains leaving Felixstowe 28 times a day.

So, I don't have to wait long to be able to depart

on one of the freight trains.

And now for something really exciting.

A ride in a brand-new, highly powerful, class-70 locomotive,

pulling 30 wagons behind.

The engine is pulling 1,335 tonnes, substituting for a very large

number of lorries that would otherwise throng our roads.

Much though I love passenger trains,

nothing gives you the feeling of power like a freight locomotive.

And we're heading down the single track line

that George Tomline pioneered more than a century ago.

Nowadays, for international travel, most of us think of planes

rather than boats. But as far as freight is concerned,

the vast majority of our imports, like the ones that we're towing

on the back of this train, still come by sea.

And, in that respect, our world is not so very different

from George Bradshaw's.

On the next step of my journey,

I'll be coming face-to-face with a medieval politician.

Goodness, that is grotesque.

Sharing the Victorians' fascination with the freakishly stout.

Bags you're on our team.

How many have we got?

And journeying overseas

on one of the world's first electric railways.

This is a great thrill for me, cos I used to come here as a child.

I've never been in the cab before.

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