Middlesbrough to Hexham Great British Railway Journeys

For Victorian Britons, George Bradshaw was a household name.

At a time when railways were new, Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them

to take to the tracks.

I'm using a Bradshaw's Guide

to understand how trains transformed Britain -

its landscape, its industries, society and leisure time.

As I crisscross the country 150 years later,

it helps me to discover the Britain of today.

My journey has brought me to England's North East.

The great rivers Tees and Tyne, and plentiful supply of coal

and iron made the North East a leader in the world's first

industrial revolution.

Centuries before that, the region had lead in piety,

rather than productivity,

in a world of monasteries rather than manufactories.

Following my guidebook, all this week my journey has taken me

up the backbone of England.

From Derbyshire and the industrial East Midlands, I headed

north in to the rugged Pennine hills, before travelling east

to historic Yorkshire.

Now I'm heading up the coast

to the industrial conurbations of the north.

My journey will end on the holy island of Lindisfarne.

On today's leg, I start in the industrial powerhouse

of Middleborough,

before heading to the spiritual home of the railway.

Continuing north, up the coast, I'll then travel inland to Hexham -

where the North and South Tyne rivers meet.

I'll feel the heat of a Victorian furnace.

Look at that - a nice little flambe for us.

'Learn how investigative journalism was born...'

He built the devil up and just like

any good newspaperman, he took great delight in knocking the devil down.

..and hear how a remarkable Bible survived for centuries.

-It's quite a large book to lose, actually.

-It certainly is.

My first stop will be Middlesbrough.

Bradshaw's tells me "it contains excellent docks,

"a town which was founded only in 1831."

The impact of the port, of coal, of iron,

and of railways converted it into rapidly into a major conurbation.

-You're getting off at Middlesbrough?

-I am, yes.

Do you know the town well?

Very well, actually, yes. I run a manufacturing factory there.

-Oh, what are you manufacturing these days?

-Hydraulic engineering systems.

-So manufacturing goes on on Teesside?

-It does.

It had a fairly depressed time a few years ago,

but it's picking up. It's picking up.

The area has got a lot of heritage of knowledge in the marine sector,

so there's an awful lot of good engineers we use in the factory.

-That's very good. So traditions continue.

-They certainly do.

-OVER TANNOY:

-'We will shortly be arriving at Middlesbrough,

'where this train terminates.'

My visit to Middlesbrough gets off to the best possible start

with a very beautiful station. The ticket office is a Gothic fantasy

with its hammer beams

built in the style of a baronial hall.

Middlesbrough was a hamlet on the Tees until the 1830s.

That changed when Quaker Joseph Pease

extended the Stockton and Darlington railway to the town

to exploit the greatest coal district in the world.

His railways served the North East collieries

and linked them to the port.

I'm meeting Middlesbrough historian, Tosh Warwick, to find out more.

Tosh, this is an extraordinary landscape

and vista of Middlesbrough past and present.

We're here at Middlesbrough Dock. This was the hub of

Middlesbrough's industrial activity

and this is where the early coal town developed

and then expanded with the iron and steel industries later on.

Take me through what I'm looking at here.

We're looking at Terminus,

the new structure there which was a recent installation.

Behind me, we also have the landmark Tees transporter bridge.

The tower - what did that used to contain?

The clock tower was actually an operating mechanism

with hydraulic gates for the actual Middlesbrough dock.

The iron works proprietors did not want their workers clock-watching,

so it has only has three faces and not facing the River Tees.

I'm very struck that Bradshaw's tells me the town was only

founded in 1831, so the rate of growth was phenomenal.

It was unheard of. Middlesbrough was the Victorian boom town.

From a population of just 25 in 1801,

we reached a population of 7,000 by 1851,

and exceeding 100,000 by the turn of the century.

The dock today is placid and deserted,

but what was it like in its heyday?

We would have been surrounded by cranes, there would have been coal,

iron and steel being shipped around the world.

It would have been a hub of activity.

It was so much so, that Middlesbrough was hailed as the Ironopolis.

German iron expert Henry Bolckow

masterminded its rapid growth to 140 foundries.

He exploited the huge deposits of iron stone from the Cleveland Hills

and transported it to the town.

The railways played an absolutely major role.

Every single iron works, every single major infrastructure

in Middlesbrough was underpinned by the railways.

I, personally, as somebody from Middlesbrough, am very proud

to go off to Sydney and climb Sydney Harbour Bridge, built by Dorman Long,

and on the steelwork there it has 'Dorman Long, Middlesbrough.'

Vestiges of the city's proud ironworking past remain.

I'm visiting William Lane Ltd,

one of the last cast iron foundries in the city.

Here they produce everything by hand

and some of their biggest customers are Britain's heritage railways.

They've made replacement parts for the North Yorkshire Moors Railway

and for the iconic Flying Scotsman.

I'm meeting Stuart Duffy, who is going to show me how to cast iron.

-Are you new to the business?

-I am not, no.

I've been part of the fixings since 1977,

so I've been here quite some time.

-You must have been very young then.

-I started when I was 15.

-An apprentice?

-As an apprentice.

'We're going to make a part for a steam engine - a carrot valve.

'Like a tap,

'it's used to inject water into the engine's boiler.'

-Now tell me this - if I did this with ordinary sand...

-Yes?

-..the sand would be all...just be crumbly.

-It would be crumbly.

Yeah, so what have you done to this sand?

This is a fine silica sand. We've added sodium silicate to it,

we've mixed it, and you get something that you can work with.

Now, this is a rammer, and you need to fill this twice.

-Compacting the sand down, really.

-Mm-hmm.

-So, up and down. Very good.

Ah, it's very satisfying work.

You could be our oldest apprentice.

THEY CHUCKLE

I'm thinking of all my old enemies as I do this.

It may look like I'm making a pie,

but in fact, it's the mould for the hot molten metal.

Well, look at that.

So you are putting carbon dioxide in there, and what's that doing?

It's having a chemical reaction with the sodium silicate.

-And that will make...

-That will harden it.

Harden it.

Well, that has really hardened up.

Hopefully...

What a beautiful mould.

'To stop the sand from collapsing,

'I need to coat the inside with a special oily seal.'

-Good.

-And there we go. That is burning on now.

There are a lot of similarities to cooking here, aren't there?

Look at that, a nice little flambe for us.

Then there is a process that's best left to the experts.

That metal looks very hot and I have a train to catch.

Will I ever see the product of what I've been doing today?

If it was that urgent, Michael, we'd probably knock it out

-within the hour.

-Would you?

-And then you would catch your train.

But my train is going quicker than that,

-can you show me what I've done?

-I'll show you what you've done.

Ah!

Oh, isn't that delightful?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Portillo's carrot valve.

Or at least one that was made earlier.

Indeed my train does await and I must press on.

I've joined the train at Middlesbrough and I'm heading west.

My next stop is Darlington, which Bradshaw's tells me

"is a market town in Durham on the River Skerne,

"over which over which there is a handsome bridge.

"With a population engaged in the cotton flax and worsted mills,

"foundries and glass works."

With the coming of the railways,

Darlington found itself well connected to two capitals -

London and Edinburgh.

A significant advantage at the dawning of the Victorian

age of information.

Before the 19th century,

most people in Britain lived a rural village life.

Quite suddenly, they could travel long distances fast,

send letters overnight, or commit urgent messages to the telegraph.

And one of the biggest beneficiaries of new technologies like these

was the newspaper industry.

I'm meeting Chris Lloyd, the deputy editor of the Northern Echo,

founded in 1870.

I'm thinking that Darlington was not a bad place to found

a newspaper because you could sell it in Edinburgh and London.

That's right. It was at the hub of the railway network.

Darlington is the birthplace of the railways, the Stockton

and Darlington railway of 1825, from which a network of railways

sprung out. So you could buy the newspaper at ten o'clock in the

morning in London and in Edinburgh, which the

paper in those days boasted that it was the first truly national

newspaper because all the London printed newspapers had to come up

past Darlington to reach Scotland.

Perhaps the paper's greatest success was achieved

under its second editor, William Stead,

who started at the Northern Echo in 1871.

He was just 22 years old. He'd been writing various highfalutin articles

from where he worked on the quayside in Newcastle,

sending them off to newspapers across the north of England,

trying to get them published. He got a couple published here and the

proprietor liked him so much that he went up and offered him the job.

And Stead had never been to Darlington before in his life.

He had never even been in a newspaper office in his life

and he only knew one person down here in distant Darlington

who was a congregational minister, just like his father.

So he wrote to him. I've got the letter here.

And it's April 1871. We can tell that his mind made is up.

He asks, "Where should I lodge? What sort of house should I be in?"

But really, his mind is made up because he says in the letter,

"What a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil, the job is."

For Stead, any establishment figure, any outrage, was a devil.

And he built the devil up, and just like any good newspaperman,

he took great delight in knocking the devil down.

I'm keen to find out about Stead's work as an investigative journalist.

This is the Northern Echo's library here, all our picture files

and all our bound files of archives.

This one is from 1873, and this is him at his pomp, really.

He is creating an absolute sensation here in March 1873.

This is about a mass murderess, Mary Anne Cotton,

who lived just down the road from here.

She'd murdered about 21 of her friends, lovers, husbands,

anybody who she could kill and get her hands

on their life assurance policies.

Stead was instrumental in convincing the police

to investigate the deaths, for which Mary Cotton was eventually hanged.

He was best known for his crusade against child prostitution.

He campaigns vigorously to get the age of consent raised

to protect young children who are being put to work in the brothels,

and it is a hugely successful campaign with hundreds of thousands

of people turning out to support him, to demand the government

to do something to stop this abuse of children.

Stead became so zealous in his determination to get

to the truth that he resorted to some very unorthodox methods.

During the campaign, he has bought a 13-year-old girl

from her mother for £5.

He puts her to work in a brothel in Regents Street...

-He puts her to work?

-He puts her to work in a brothel in Regents Street

and he writes a story about him being the girl's first customer.

Then he had taken this young girl to Paris where he had either

held her hostage or kept her safe, depending on your point of view,

whilst this maelstrom of outrage burst out in London.

Stead was sentenced to three months in prison

but remained proud of the consequences of his campaign.

Due to doing this, it created such a sensation,

the whole of London was inflamed and the government rushed through

the first child protection act in the world.

Just a minute, let me go and have a look.

'Chris has one final file to show me.'

This is where we keep our pre-computer packets of people -

national celebrities and otherwise.

Dead people are up the top, but you are still alive!

Portillo, Michael - what a cornucopia of embarrassment it is.

-Ugh, looking a bit stern.

-What a young person you are.

My life flashes before me, and I see my obituary photograph.

That's enough talk of death.

I feel full of beans to see

Darlington in such a summery and festive mood.

TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYS

My overnight stop is near Sunderland, so I'm catching

a Northern Rail train to Newcastle and changing there.

At the time of my Bradshaw's, Roker was becoming a tourist destination.

And the genteel Victorian holiday-maker

wasn't in the habit of packing light.

It wasn't unusual to take a servant, courier bags, waist bags,

handbags, holdalls...

even a travelling bath.

I'm meeting local archivist Norman Kirkland to fathom out

why the Victorians went all hot for the cold North Sea.

-Michael, pleased to meet you.

-Good evening.

I'm slightly confused - Bradshaw's tells me about the development

of a new commercial dock.

On the other hand, I'm seeing a Victorian resort.

So which one was it?

In 1835 and '36, Roker was industrial.

It was the docks and nothing else.

After the dock, we got a resort.

The North Dock was built by the great Victorian engineer

Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The dock company accepted his plan for a deep harbour

at an estimated cost of £30,000.

It opened on the 1st November, 1837,

and the excavated spoil was used to build

the Victorian resort of Roker-on-Sea.

That slope was built by the Victorians, was it?

That's right. That slope was put in by the landowner, Edward Williamson,

and we've now got wonderful access to the beach.

When the tourists got here, what was there for them to do?

The major thing were the beach huts. They are basically huts on wheels,

sheds on wheels, and the ladies would be brought down to the waterfront,

they'd go down the steps, and straight into the water.

Nobody would see them. Half an hour in the water, back into the huts,

and they'd be taken by horse and cart back to the hotel.

-What else?

-Well, the main thing here was the spa.

They call it a spa but it was actually sea water.

They would pump sea water up to the hotel

using big steam-driven pumps and the gentlemen would spend,

for one and sixpence,

you could spend all day in these wonderful sea water pumps.

Norman's making it sound almost good enough to try, but for me,

the warmth of my bed for the night is more tempting.

Today, I'm leaving Roker and travelling to Jarrow on Tyneside.

I've headed back to Sunderland Station,

but unlike Victorian travellers, I can make use of Tyneside's Metro.

With 60 stations, it's one of the UK's most extensive

urban railway networks.

Bradshaw's promises me that in the vicinity of Jarrow I'll find

"the remains of the monastery

"of which the Venerable Bede was a monk."

"He was venerated for his studious habits, which made him

"the Father of English History."

In the 19th century, Jarrow was rapidly growing into

one of the country's largest ship-building centres.

But back in the 7th century, Jarrow's focus was its monastery.

Founded in AD 681, it's where Bede wrote his famous book,

The Ecclesiastical History Of The English People.

'I'm meeting Bede expert Matt Storey.'

Do we know much about who this Bede was?

We don't know very much about Bede himself.

All we know is from a short autobiographical statement

at the end of his Ecclesiastical History,

which says he entered the monastery at the age of seven to be educated

and put under the charge of the Abbot Benedict, and then of Ceolfrith.

He's our earliest written contemporary source

for the Roman's even and the coming of the Angles,

the Saxons and the Jutes, and for early Anglo-Saxon England.

Was England the name used for the country then?

No, it wasn't. England didn't come for another three centuries or so.

Bede was writing about the English people,

a term we think that he coined to describe

a number of different cultures living in Britain at the time.

Researching and writing these books

would have been hugely time-consuming.

The scribing and illustration used natural dyes on calf skin.

How did he collect sources for this history?

We know he had access to a vast library because Bede

is a very good historian. He cites the work that he has access to.

He also had correspondence with other monks in other monasteries

which he used as the basis for his work.

Bede rarely left the monastery, but his pious studies

and reflective mind opened a window on heaven and earth.

Bede was writing about the fact that the earth was a sphere at a time

when commonly people thought that the world was flat.

He was writing about the fact that it was the moon that

controlled the earth and the tides,

when again, this was known but it wasn't common belief.

The Victorian Church recognised Bede's greatness

and Jarrow became a destination for pilgrims.

On the 1,200th anniversary of Bede's death in 1935,

50,000 Catholics came to pay homage to the saint

in ceremonies led by the archbishops of Westminster and Liverpool.

In the monastery's museum,

there's a Bible that still attracts the devout.

It's called the Codex Amiatinus,

and three copies were commissioned by this monastery's Abbot Ceolfrith.

This is the earliest surviving copy of the complete Bible in Latin.

Ceolfrith, towards the end of his life, set out to give this

copy of the Bible to the Pope.

Unfortunately, along the way,

Ceolfrith died in Langres, in Burgundy.

And at that point, we seem to lose the history

of this remarkable Bible.

It's quite a large book to lose, actually.

Certainly is.

'Fortunately, that Bible resurfaced.

'It's now in a library in Florence.

'I'm privileged to have a glimpse of this reproduction.'

After changing from the Tyneside Metro to the railway at Newcastle,

I'm heading for the final stop on today's journey.

-OVER TANNOY:

-'We are now approaching Hexham.'

Hexham is a picturesque Roman market town.

The Newcastle and Carlisle Railway Company brought the 63-mile-long

Tyne Valley line to Hexham in 1838.

I've come to visit a famous ginger beer emporium.

And I've been brought to this unlikely little alley.

I must say, in all my railway journeys,

this must be the narrowest business I've ever visited.

More than 100 years ago, the business began by chance.

When Thomas Fentiman made a loan, he was given, as security,

a prized recipe for ginger beer.

I'm meeting Eldon Robson, Fentiman's great-grandson

and the present-day owner.

I must say - I'm slightly amazed you can be in the ginger beer business

in such tiny premises.

-I came through such tiny crevice to get here.

-Yeah.

Well, this is the office. Hexham, Northumberland.

What we produce here is the other flavours

which are highly concentrated.

We do everything under complete sort of secrecy.

Then we send the concentrated flavour down to the brewers and they brew

the full liquid for us, label and bottle them, and then ship them off.

Why do you think Victorians would have enjoyed ginger beer?

Well, ginger beer goes back a long time.

The ginger spice was either brought in

from the Caribbean or China.

Many, many years ago when ginger beer was first made,

it went through a fermentation process,

which ours does now, the same process, and this process was like

a purification of water in those days.

I suppose, to a certain degree, there's a big belief in the fact

that these drinks had health-giving properties.

By the 1840s, sales of ginger beer were rocketing

thanks to the growing temperance movement.

Ginger beer was seen as a good alternative to the 'demon drink'.

Portable ginger fountains, often very beautifully made,

started springing up in the streets.

And in the north of England,

there were more than 1,000 ginger beer trade names.

Big business indeed.

In those days, it would take about a week to make the product.

Once you'd taken the top off...the stopper off the stone jar,

you had about three days to drink it,

otherwise the second fermentation would start.

But these days, we carbonate

and we pasteurise the product, so we now give it a good shelf life

of 18 months, so the product will last. And unlike the old stone jars

that used to blow up on hot summer days, that doesn't happen any more.

Today, Eldon's team works with other flavours besides ginger.

Our starting point is elderflowers, which are collected locally.

-Ah-ha.

-Here we go.

Yeah, they are fragrant indeed. Very much so.

HE COUGHS

A bit...a bit pungent as well.

This is a very traditional process which would have been done

in the Victorian days by taking these flowers,

mixing them with some sugar and lemon juice and water,

and then just letting them infuse.

-There you go. All the way in?

-All the way in. Yep.

Then give them a stir around.

'You need only about 20 flower heads to make one gallon of cordial.'

'And once again, I'm the willing guinea pig.'

Bubbles bursting on the tongue.

Very strong flavour of elderflower.

I think you're most of the way there.

-A million Victorian housewives can't be wrong.

-Indeed.

Let's see what the discerning palates

of the Hexham Bowls Club make of it.

Have a little sample of that.

-It's pleasant.

-Yeah? What is it?

What do you think it is?

Juniper berry?

Juniper berry, that's an interesting guess.

-Or pineapple.

-No. It's elderflower.

-Elderflower?

-Elderflower. Ever drunk elderflower before?

-Not knowingly!

-LAUGHING:

-Not knowingly.

And I was hoping to bowl them over.

Time to head back to Newcastle's Central Station

to continue my journey.

William Stead's mass circulation Northern Echo

shocked, swung elections, and got laws changed.

Within hours, his lurid prose was causing sensations

in Edinburgh and London.

By contrast, the monks of St Paul's

toiled for years to produce a single copy of a Latin Bible,

but whereas Stead's newspapers were tomorrow's chip paper,

the Bibles handed down from Bede's world are still influential today.

Next time, I explore the earliest surviving

water-powered swing bridge.

We have no brakes, so it's a guessing game!

I am humbled by the courage of a Victorian heroine.

-All of this in the tumultuous sea and wind and rain.

-Absolutely.

And I learn about the science of lime burning.

The temperatures are anything between

1,200 and 1,500 degrees centigrade at this level.