Stoke-on-Trent to Winsford Great British Railway Journeys

In 1840, one man transformed travel in the British Isles.

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 these isles to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

I'm at the mid point of my journey from Buckinghamshire to Aberystwyth,

and at this point I'm going to make a small diversion,

dragged northwards from my direct route to Wales

by that magnet for train enthusiasts,

the railway works at Crewe.

On today's journey, I'll explore one of the greatest

locomotive factories in railway history.

The records are sketchy but they talk about 20,000 people,

so that the size of it was immense.

Discover the dark side of the Industrial Revolution.

The place was very heavily spoilt by pollution,

and the stench of the sewage, it was like a large cess pit.

And learn how in Victorian times the potteries

brought their products to the masses.

This is incredibly difficult. This is fiendish.

So far my journey has brought me from the rural home counties

into the heart of the industrial Midlands.

I'll soon be heading west, through the Severn Valley,

along its heritage railway, before venturing into Wales,

and my final stop at Aberystwyth.

Today I'm making a detour to explore Stoke-on-Trent,

en route to the fabled railway works of Crewe,

finishing up in the Cheshire town of Winsford.

My Bradshaw's contain a gripping description of my first destination,

Stoke-on-Trent, at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

"There may be seen the surrounding hills,

"crowned with towering columns and huge pyramids of chimneys,

"and great rounded furnaces clustering together like hives."

Yes I'm headed for the Potteries,

sounds like my cup of tea.

At their Victorian peak, the six pottery towns,

strung along the North Staffordshire Railway,

were home to 250,000 people,

almost all employed in the manufacture.

Those communities have since merged into modern Stoke-on-Trent,

but the story began in Burslem, the so-called "Mother Town".

I'm exploring with local historian, Fred Hughes.

This is the Wedgwood Institute.

As you can see, it rather is a magnificent building.

It's a statement, it's a picture of what the Potteries were

in Victorian times. This is the image

that the people of Burslem wanted to portray to the rest of the world.

We gave birth to pottery and Josiah Wedgwood,

the great Josiah Wedgwood, was born here,

and this is a tribute to him.

Pottery began in this area as a cottage industry,

using the abundant local coal and clay.

Then, in the mid-18th century, Josiah Wedgwood,

inspired by the scientific advances of his day,

applied industrial methods for the first time.

Over the years, thousands of bottle kilns dotted the landscape.

Bradshaw's guide gives me a very powerful description

of the Potteries towns in the middle 19th century.

Give me an idea of what they looked like, and felt like, and smelt like.

It was satanic, it was dark, it was dingy, it was dirty,

you couldn't see the sky.

Grit got in your eyes all the time, people were chocking, virtually

to death, on the smoke and the pollution coming out of these places.

Out of this inferno came some of the finest porcelain ever made.

By the turn of the 18th century,

delicate bone china had been developed,

and local red clay was abandoned in favour of finer white clay,

imported from southwest England.

At first it was brought by sea and canal, but by the mid-19th century,

the smoke of the bottle ovens mingled

with smoke from railway locomotives.

The railways sped everything up.

First of all it could carry more ware, and more clay in.

It still had to come from Cornwall, round the coast to Liverpool.

It sped up that transportation from Liverpool into the Potteries.

The rails also exported the finished goods across the country and beyond,

helping the industry flourish for over a century.

The region remains an important centre for British ceramics,

though it's a far cry from its Victorian heyday.

Electrification certainly did away with coal and smoke,

and of course the Clean Air Act,

but I think the most important thing was the big change

in the way other nations had come in.

I mean, we'd had our Industrial Revolution,

we started the whole thing.

All of a sudden other nations wanted a piece of the action,

so they followed on where we left off.

-We led it and we lost it.

-That's absolutely right.

Luckily, not every trace of the Victorian trade has disappeared.

Close at hand, the Middleport Pottery has survived virtually

unchanged since the 19th century.

I'm taking a tour with company historian, Jemma Baskeyfield.

Was this state of the art when built at the end of the 19th century?

Yeah, people came to visit this factory

because it was a very cutting edge factory.

The most cutting edge factory you could wish to visit.

Today we are possibly the most backwards factory you'll ever visit,

but, yeah, that's part of the charm, certainly.

A few years ago, the historic buildings here had fallen

into such disrepair that the factory was at risk of closure.

However in 2011, the Prince of Wales's Regeneration Trust

stepped in with ambitious plans to redevelop the site

on behalf of the whole community.

So this remarkable snapshot

of the Victorian pottery industry will survive.

So, this is the largest collection of the blocks and cases,

master copies of moulds, left in any factory anywhere.

We've kept all of them, and there's 15,000 plus.

Piled up, well, as high as you can see and it goes on for ever.

Yeah, in all directions.

Once of the most extraordinary sights I've ever seen.

Mass production, using moulds like these,

helped Victorian potters to meet unprecedented demand

from the new aspirational middle class.

And to supply decorated products on an industrial scale,

they embraced the art of transfer printing.

It's a way you can affordably, to a high quality,

decorate pottery over and over again.

And that's replacing the hand painting process

which is what went before.

This is the only pottery still using the method.

The pattern is printed onto sheets of tissue paper,

before transferring the colour onto the pottery.

These ladies are incredibly skilled.

Traditionally it takes seven years to learn how to do this job.

So they take this sticky paper, and they've got to apply it

to the once-fired pottery, what we call biscuitware.

They apply the print, but they can't peel it off and put it on again,

because it sticks, so it's first time every time.

The colour pigment is oil-based, so when you wash these items,

the tissue paper washes away,

and you're just left with the print on the surface of the pottery.

-I'm amazed.

-Yep, well, if you'd like to have a go...

I'll be more amazed! Ha, ha, ha!

The transferors work with amazing speed.

Time to see how I measure up.

Try to get your hand down to the bottom

and swing it round this side, like a cone.

-Like a cone. Oh!

-The scissors are there.

'The trick's to minimise the creases and joins,

'so they won't be detectable.

'But I begin to see why it takes you seven years to perfect the art.'

This is incredibly difficult.

-We make it look easy.

-This is fiendish.

That's better, you've got the hang of it now. That's it.

Covering the outside is one thing, but the inside is quite another.

-Now begins the really difficult bit.

-That's it.

Seven years down the line, you might be on the production line.

Oh, dear, I've got a hole.

You can repair it, and then cut it off when you've pressed it over.

-That's it. Perfect match.

-Where's the reject bin?

We don't reject anything.

I think I'd better stop distracting the skilled transferors,

and continue my tour of Victorian Staffordshire.

The phenomenal success of the Potteries here

had unforeseen consequences for some,

and before I leave Stoke-on-Trent, I'm visiting a place

which reveals the drawbacks of rapid industrial growth.

I've come to Trentham Park, which is described in my Bradshaw's,

as, "The Duke of Sutherland's seat on the River Trent, of great extent.

"The old seat has been rebuilt by Sir Charles Barry,

"the Trent is made to spread into a fine lake planted

"with ornamental timber, the work of Capability Brown,

"the famous landscape artist."

Here is the Trent, here is the lake all beautifully described,

but where is the house?

When my guidebook was published,

Trentham Park was one of the most fashionable houses in the land,

having been remodelled in the 1830s by celebrity architect,

Sir Charles Barry, the man who built the Houses of Parliament.

To learn what became of this magnificent pile,

I'm meeting estate manager, Michael Walker.

-Hello, Michael.

-Hello, Michael, very nice to meet you.

There are certain disadvantages to using a guide book 150 years old.

I'm looking for a house, and I rather fear it's not here.

-Is that right?

-That's absolutely right, the majority of Trentham Hall

-was demolished in 1911 by the Duke of Sutherland.

-Why?

What brought that about?

The pottery industry was expanding all the time in the 1840s,

and so was local housing.

But there was no provision for proper sanitation.

And the sewage from the houses pretty much ran

directly into the local brooks and rivers.

And at that time, the River Trent used to feed directly into

Capability Brown's mile-long lake.

So the place was very heavily spoilt by pollution, both in the air,

sometimes it could be black, and the stench,

the stench of the sewage, it was like a large cess pit.

It's quite an interesting antidote,

because I get very enthusiastic about the Victorian period

from my Bradshaw's, but it's worth remembering

that there was a pretty ghastly downside to it all.

By the turn of the 20th century, the problem had become so bad

that the Sutherlands chose to abandon the park.

No buyer was found for the house,

so it was demolished for its building materials.

All that remained of Charles Barry's masterpiece

was his remarkable formal garden.

So what we're seeing here, this is Charles Barry, is it?

This is Charles Barry, it's a very, very grand Italian garden,

in the neo-classical style.

And this formality suited the Victorians, did it?

I think this was the must-have accessory

for the aristocracy at the time. It was a new trend, a new fashion,

and one which was really pioneered in this country at Trentham.

Visiting the park today, it's possible, with a little imagination,

to savour its Victorian zenith.

The garden was of course designed to be viewed from upstairs

within the grand bedrooms of the house, looking down,

and it's only really from above you get the detail, formality.

It's really tremendous, isn't it?

How was it that the garden was able to survive?

Well, after the house was demolished,

Trentham ran as a private business for the local people,

as paid for public visitor attraction.

For most of the 20th century,

the gardens were the playground of the Potteries.

There were dance halls and a bandstand, and a new branch line,

opened in 1910, enabled visitors to flock here to enjoy the attractions.

Trentham Park took visitors within five minutes walk

of the front gates of the estate, that was very important,

during the holiday period that train service was

very, very well used indeed.

Sadly, by the end of the 20th century,

the gardens themselves had fallen into decline.

But in 2004, a major renovation project began.

Barry's Italianate parterre was restored,

and new areas were landscaped by leading garden designers.

So George Bradshaw might be pretty astonished that the house is gone,

-but he probably would recognise the garden.

-I hope he would.

The manicured elegance of Trentham is stunning,

but I'm now taking to the tracks in search of a wilder landscape.

My last stop of the day was a favourite Victorian beauty spot.

As evening approaches, I'm on the train to Kidsgrove.

"Mow Cop," says Bradshaw's, "is a mountain in miniature.

"From the summit of this hill, 1,091 feet high,

"the finest views imaginable are attainable in every direction."

I suppose that depends on the weather,

and I'm hoping my luck will hold.

Built by the North Staffordshire Railway,

and originally called Harecastle, Kidsgrove Station opened in 1848.

Soon readers of Bradshaw's would alight here

to admire the vista from a nearby park.

Guide, Des Ball, is showing me the way.

You know, Des, my Bradshaw's

has quite a long paragraph about Mow Cop.

I was thinking, "What is all the fuss about?"

Because it's only 1,000 feet high, but now I get here, I see.

I mean, you have got this 360 degree view,

haven't you? Amazing.

Seven counties are visible from here,

and my guide book tells me that on a fine day

you can see as far as Wales.

First we have Shropshire over there.

Then we have Denbighshire, Welsh mountains there,

go all way up to north Wales there.

And over to this side, we have Derbyshire.

My Bradshaw's also points out

"an artificial ruin, which has a good appearance

"in every point of view."

Built as a folly in the 1750s,

by the time my guidebook was published

it was in use as a summer house, complete with windows and doors.

These days, romantic as it is, it's rather windswept,

so Des is leading me to a more hospitable venue.

Here is the pub, Michael, I mentioned, called the Cheshire View,

but it used to be called The Railway Inn,

and of course, in the hollow there is the railway and Mow Cop Station,

that used to be. No longer here, I'm afraid.

An ideal spot for a thirsty railway traveller

to revel in the English landscape that unfolds below.

It is an amazing view, isn't it?

Yes, wait until the sun sets in a moment.

And to think that you and I can see it without

-the smoke and pollution of the Victorian era. Cheers.

-Cheers.

My Midlands railway adventure continues,

and my next stop is almost hallowed ground.

"Crewe," says my Bradshaw's, "is a railway town,

"and a first class depot. Nearly 2,000 men are employed.

"Here are immense rolling mills for the rails and locomotive factories.

"An engine with its tender is made up of 5,416 separate pieces,

"and a new one is turned out every Monday morning.

"Any self-respecting great British railway traveller must visit Crewe."

The works at Crewe were once among the foremost in the world,

and the town still has a place in every train buff's heart.

-Morning.

-Morning. Thank you very much.

So I'm going to the very heart of the railways, Crewe.

-Crewe.

-Can you imagine that in the 1860s

apparently a locomotive and its tender was made up

of 5,416 separate pieces?

-That's amazing, isn't it?

-Bet you didn't know that?

-No, I didn't.

-I bet you didn't before you read that.

-Certainly so!

-Have a good day.

-And you.

The story of the immense works at Crewe

began as a meeting point of major railways.

Even with its elegant 19th century architecture covered in scaffolding,

the station remains a key hub, as it was in Victorian days.

Crewe started its railway history as a major junction,

and in the next few minutes there will be

trains leaving from here for Liverpool,

for Manchester, for Edinburgh and for south Wales.

In the early 1800s, there was a hamlet of just 360 souls,

but the arrival of the railway in 1837 changed that.

In 1877 the Borough of Crewe was established, and by 1881,

its population exceeded 24,000, complete with rows

of railway workers' cottages.

At the heart was a vast factory,

which I'm exploring with general manager, Tony Webb.

-Hello, Tony.

-Hello, Michael, welcome to Crewe.

-Thank you.

The first line to reach Crewe was the Grand Junction Railway,

which linked Birmingham with the pioneering

Liverpool to Manchester line.

It was soon joined by other routes, and Crewe found itself

at the junction of three of Britain's busiest main lines.

It was the ideal spot for a railway works on an epic scale.

My Bradshaw says 2,000 people were working at the site,

but I think it got to be much more than that, didn't it?

Yeah, the war years, the records are sketchy,

but they talk about 20,000 people, so the size of it was immense.

Is this the full extent of the works?

You get some idea of the scale,

there's a football ground here, which is kind of lost in space...

It is huge, you're talking about erecting shops and buildings

which were hundreds of metres long.

Obviously it created not only a works,

but it created a town as well. How were the people housed?

The railway was a very paternalistic organisation,

There would have been railway schooling, railway homes,

it had its own hospital on site.

The accident book is very interesting reading,

not uncommon for people to lose eyes, fingers and even limbs.

There are some old drawings that were created at the works

of artificial limbs as well.

More than 8,250 locomotives were built here,

from Victorian steam engines to modern electric trains.

These days, however, the works focus on renovating bogies,

the wheel systems that sit beneath carriages.

They start in a pretty filthy condition, don't they?

You can imagine running round for half a million miles or more, yeah.

At the end of the process you wouldn't recognise them,

and I'm offering a helping hand with the finishing touches.

It all looks now so beautiful, so pristine.

It's ready for another half a million miles, yeah.

Just as it comes down now, Michael, you just steady it.

Beautiful, beautiful. Spot on.

If you can just remove the stand and let it swing into position.

-Just take that away?

-Yeah.

-Whoa!

-There we go.

-Did I do that?

-You did that, yeah.

By building their tracks through Crewe,

Victorian railway engineers shaped the town's history.

Today, it remains an important junction,

and a magnet for some of Britain's most committed railway enthusiasts,

like Tom and William Snook.

-Tom and William, hello.

-Good afternoon.

-Nice to see you both.

-You're a father and son team, is that right?

-We are indeed, yes.

Now I quite like trains, but I'm not a trainspotter,

for those of us not in on this,

can you explain the intrigue of photographing trains,

and taking down numbers, and so on.

Well for me, of course, it started in 1952.

By the time of eight, I was travelling on my own to London,

and seeing all sorts of things,

which of course you can't do these days,

and the camaraderie of all the youngsters together,

and screaming and shouting when something really unusual came in.

You know, it's the enthusiasm to try and see everything, for me,

I want to see everything, my dad has nearly seen everything,

and I'm not that far behind him.

-What's that you're clutching there?

-Well, my son compiled this.

I've created this book over three years,

I finally finished it last year. So, it goes from locomotives,

passenger trains, the testing trains

that run around the country for Network Rail.

So I thought I'd bring you up a copy,

it's yours to keep and take away.

Oh, my goodness, I mean...

I'm really flattered, but it's not easy reading, is it?

How can I put this? You wouldn't go to sleep reading this.

Or, actually, maybe you would!

It's really a historical document, like Bradshaw's really,

in as much as it tells you what is totally on the network,

at that particular time in the summer of this year.

It's no replacement for my trusty Bradshaw's guide,

but it's good to know that for some

the romance of the railways lives on.

It's a class 350!

For me, the best thing about train travel

is the chance to discover the remarkable range

of Victorian industries that were served by the railways.

I'm on my way to Winsford, which Bradshaw's tells me is situated

in one of the most important salt districts in the country.

"There are 28 salt works here,

"some of them being like small towns in extent."

Now, other towns around here are Middlewich, Northwich and Nantwich,

which is very interesting,

because I think "wich" is the Anglo-Saxon for salt.

Beneath Cheshire's "wich" towns lies an enormous salt deposit,

formed from a sea bed 200 million years ago.

Ever since Roman times, the brine that bubbles up in local springs

has been evaporated to make salt,

and by the 1600s, rock salt was also being mined in the area.

Then in Victorian times,

a fresh rock salt deposit was discovered in nearby Winsford,

and a mine dug to extract it. It's still in operation today.

I'm heading 180 metres below ground with mine manager, Gordon Dunn.

Now in Victorian times, I guess they didn't go down

in beautiful lifts like this, how did they go down?

They went down in the same buckets that was used to lift the salt.

It wasn't really regarded as unsafe,

it was just regarded as the only way to do it.

Prospectors looking for coal first discovered

the extent of the salt seam.

Using explosives, picks and shovels, they began to carve out

vast subterranean rooms, supported by pillars of salt.

I was rather expecting I was going to be crawling on hands and knees,

but this is like walking into an underground ballroom, isn't it?

-It's huge.

-Yes, it is. It is very large.

As well as being needed for the Victorian table,

the 19th century saw demand for salt rise

thanks to the growing chemical industry,

which used it for everything from caustic soda to chlorine.

Between 1844 and 1892, one million tonnes of salt

were mined at Winsford - an extraordinary feat,

given the basic equipment that the miners were using.

You can see the black marks on the roof from the soot from the candles,

cos that was the only way they were able to light the...

-Seriously?

-Yeah, seriously, it was all candlelit,

and we've found evidence in the old workings of old tallow candles,

and old small packets of cigarettes,

cos they were allowed to smoke underground in those days.

And where we are now is the old two-foot gauge railway line.

And once they'd taken the salt up to the surface,

was it also transported by train?

Yes it was, some of it was transported

by train in special carriages

that were timber lined to stop the salts reacting with the steel,

and other salt was put into barges, sent to Liverpool

and shipped round the world, and traded as Liverpool salt,

although it was really from Cheshire.

Victorian mining was so efficient

that by the late 1800s prices had plummeted,

and Winsford was forced to close.

But it reopened in the 1920s when a local competitor flooded,

and since then has prospered.

Today, the salt mined in its 142 miles of underground tunnels

is used mostly for gritting the roads.

And you're still at it?

We certainly are, we mine over a million tonnes a year,

and we've got enough reserves for the next... For up to 100 years.

Despite the mine's resources, a decade ago,

it began to diversify in a highly unexpected direction.

The salt in the rock here helps to regulate

the humidity in the disused tunnels, creating stable conditions

which are excellent for storing historic documents.

I'm hunting out archive manager, Stuart Selwood.

Stuart?

This is bizarre, rows and rows of bookshelves, in a salt mine.

-Hello.

-Hello. Why are there all these records in a salt mine?

Well, this is the National Archives off-site storage facility.

And the repositories in Kew,

where the National Archives is based, are filling up,

and we needed a safe and secure environment to hold them in.

The National Archives, formerly known as the Public Record Office,

was established in the 19th century

to impose Victorian order on Britain's official records.

Nowadays the collection holds material from the Middle Ages

right up to the present day.

This census was taken in this area at the time of my Bradshaw's guide.

Inside, you've got the actual printed and then written record,

from the night in 1861 when they took the census.

And indeed, the first person listed here is a salt maker,

George Witton, then his wife, Martha Witton, gives her age,

then their daughter, Maria Witton.

Quite a thought though, that those people there, those salt workers

might actually have dug these tunnels,

and now their records are housed here in perpetuity.

Yes, indeed. I mean, we will be keeping them safe down here

for the foreseeable future, and beyond, really.

Once again, my 19th century guidebook

has led me to fresh insights into Britain's past and present.

From the hidden underground archives

to potteries untouched by the passage of time,

this country is full of surprises.

Minerals have dominated this leg of my journey,

the salt and coal and clays buried in the ground

had been known about throughout history,

but they were exploited by the Victorians on an industrial scale,

shaping the destinies of Staffordshire and Cheshire.

In the mines, the collieries and the kilns,

workers toiled to make Britain prosperous.

They were the salt of the earth.

On the next leg of my journey,

I learn how Victorian blacksmithing was not for the faint-hearted.

It's very hard, physical work, there's no doubt about that.

I'll ride one of Britain's most modern trains.

And there we go, a surge of power.

And traverse the remarkable Victoria Bridge.

In its day it was the longest clear span in the world,

and it is, of course, majestic.

TRAIN WHISTLE HOOTS

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