Stratford to London Victoria Great British Railway Journeys


Stratford to London Victoria

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For Victorian Britons, George Bradshaw was a household name.

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At a time when railways were new,

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Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them to take to the tracks.

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I'm using a Bradshaw's Guide to understand how trains

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transformed Britain, its landscape, its industries, society

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and leisure time.

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As I crisscross the country 150 years later,

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it helps me to discover the Britain of today.

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I'm nearly halfway through my exploration

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of the web of tracks that links up London.

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Today I'm approaching east London on Britain's first high-speed line.

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Upper and middle class Victorians viewed the East End of London

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with horror.

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Its slums were the scene of unspeakable depravity,

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its dark streets lent themselves to robbery and murder.

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And respectable folk feared revolution,

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the mob and cholera sweeping down the Thames.

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I hope to see how the East End was transformed by railways

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in the 19th century and again in the 21st.

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Supplementing my usual guidebook with Bradshaw's special London edition,

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I'm following a route from east London's

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railway hub at Stratford

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towards the centre of the metropolis,

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pausing at Temple en route to Victoria station.

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I'll learn how the Olympic Park sustains a Victorian ideal

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of providing leisure space for Londoners...

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-Whoa!

-Oh!

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..hear how a lawyer who learnt his trade in Victorian London

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went on to change the world.

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To this day, every meal served

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at the Inner Temple has a vegetarian option in memory of Gandhi.

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And meet a modern descendant of the Hackney cab drivers

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that Bradshaw would have known.

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How can you get from Bishopsgate to the Old Bailey without crossing a road?

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Ha-ha! By hiring a cab with a knowledgeable driver!

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My Bradshaw's tells me that my first stop is "an important junction"

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and at the time of my guidebook, it was also home to

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the Great Eastern Railway's locomotive works.

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A few years ago, I came here to Stratford to see how

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one of Victorian London's largest railway sites was being

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transformed to host the Olympic Games.

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Today, I want to see whether tracks laid at the dawn

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of the railway age coped with the crowds of spectators

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and whether the flame of regeneration still burns brightly in the east.

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The former Olympic Park has recently reopened to Londoners,

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creating a vast new public space the size of Hyde Park,

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studded with contemporary sculptures,

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including Anish Kapoor's striking ArcelorMittal Orbit.

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Parks, as we now know them, were invented in the 19th century,

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green oases, ringed by elegant homes,

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in the midst of industrial Britain's smoky cities.

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Dr Paul Brickell has been working to ensure that the Olympic Games

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bequeathed London a worthy park.

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Paul, I was here before the Olympic Games

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and the expectation was that many, many people,

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most people would come by train. Did it work out that way?

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Well, it did and there were many.

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You imagine the park down below us, quarter of a million,

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third of a million people every day.

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Plus the tens of thousands of people going to the shopping centre,

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plus the tens of thousands of people going about their normal business.

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And it worked. The railway was astonishing.

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It's such a connection with the Victorian period, isn't it?

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This was the most extraordinary railway works.

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Of course, you can still see the pattern of the railways all around.

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Yeah, I think they were the biggest railway engineering yards in Europe.

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Stratford works opened in 1847 and were the creation of the so-called

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"Railway King" George Hudson, chairman of the Eastern Counties Railway.

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At the peak of its 115-year history, the works employed some 6,500 people

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and to this day, the whole area is

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criss-crossed with railway lines dating back to Victorian times.

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One of the big challenges of building the Games was to

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weave this new piece of city around all this hard infrastructure,

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this hard railway and I think to get the beautiful view

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that you now see in the midst of all that is a tribute

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to the people who built the Games.

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Another thing that makes me think of Victorian times

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is that you have created a park here.

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Now, of course, Victorians had to create parks because their city was growing so fast.

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But it's a while since London had a new park.

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Tell me about yours.

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Like those Victorian parks, it's for the local population.

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Half the people who come here live around the park.

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But also it's a great park for London, for the world.

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We're here in the south with the stadium, the aquatic centre.

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The South Park Plaza is a waterside promenade,

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tree-lined promenade with lots of break-out spaces

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and lots going on in it.

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As you get further north, you can see the river winds, you get this

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sense of river valley, it's a much quieter park up there

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and it leads then of course to the Hackney Marshes and the Walthamstow Marshes.

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Now, you're a Stratford boy, I think.

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The East End was traditionally seen as the place of Jack the Ripper,

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Fagin from Oliver Twist

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and then the terrible bombings during World War II.

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Is all of this changing

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the way we feel about the East End of London?

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The positive side of that is that it was always

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full of entrepreneurial vim and vigour, which has mostly

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been on the right side of the law and occasionally perhaps not!

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The kind of people who are coming here are people who want to do new things.

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Some of them are old institutions.

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We're talking to the Victoria and Albert Museum,

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Sadler's Wells, University College London about coming to sites here.

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So, I think that that same spirit is here in east London.

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But hopefully more regulated, more legal.

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-Stratford on track.

-Yes.

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Just as the creators of Victorian parks sought,

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the promoters of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park aim to provide

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space for Londoners to mingle, relax and exercise.

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But no park in Bradshaw's day could offer Olympic-standard

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amenities like the Copper Box Arena,

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designed for sports as diverse as basketball, fencing and netball.

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Get it back, Blue!

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-Hello!

-Hi.

-Sorry to interrupt your game.

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How does it feel playing in an Olympic facility?

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It's really, really good.

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We've been playing here for one season now.

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We've been practising for some really interesting events

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while playing in the Copper Box. It's a really good experience.

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And make my day. Who comes here to play by train?

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Hands up.

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Yeah?

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-Do you use the train?

-Yes, I do.

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It's the perfect way to travel.

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That's the best thing about this location is how easy it is to access.

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We've attracted a lot of new players because of it.

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-Well, I guess I'm in the blue team.

-I think so. Let's go.

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-Here we go. Straight away.

-Someone throw to Michael.

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To me, Michael.

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Back to Michael. Let's go.

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Don't make it easy for him, girls!

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-Whoa!

-Oh!

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Having caught my breath, I'm continuing my journey

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on the capital's newest rail service, London Overground.

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I'm travelling from Stratford to Hackney Central,

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passing straight through the Olympic Park.

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Long before Victorian train tracks wove their way across the city,

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Londoners travelled by carriage,

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and its descendant still works the streets today,

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recognised the world over as a symbol of the British capital.

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Hackney Central seems like a good place to take a hackney carriage,

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which is the official name of a London taxi.

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According to Bradshaw's London guide,

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"Every driver of a hackney carriage shall, when hired,

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"deliver to the hirer a card whereon

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"is printed the number of the stamp office plate fixed to the carriage.

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"The utility of this ticket will be readily seen

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"in the case of loss of luggage."

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I must say, I would find it very useful if that rule still applied.

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So handy when you leave your spectacles in the back of a cab.

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Taxi!

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Spitalfields, please.

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My driver, Howard Taylor, has been a cabbie for 27 years.

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What is the origin of calling a London taxi a hackney carriage?

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There's nothing written in stone

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but most people think it derives from the French term haquenee,

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which was a horse-drawn carriage, I believe.

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Ah, so not necessarily anything to do with good old Hackney at all.

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How long have hackney carriages been around then?

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Over 300 years now. We were licensed at the end of the 17th century.

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-Good heavens.

-I wasn't there at the beginning!

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HE LAUGHS

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London taxis are the oldest regulated transport system in the world,

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and their drivers are famed

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for knowing the city like the back of their hand.

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That's because of the daunting exam they have to pass called

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"the Knowledge".

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-How far back does the Knowledge go?

-Well before my time.

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And my father's before him.

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My father was a taxi driver, that's why I am, in truth.

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What did you have to learn?

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I had to learn everything within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.

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So that's about 25,000 streets,

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and 70, 80, 90,000 places of interest.

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I reckon I know my city pretty well, but I'm no match for Howard.

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How can you get from Bishopsgate to the Old Bailey without

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crossing a road?

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Ha-ha! By hiring a cab with a knowledgeable driver!

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With a knowledgeable driver who'll tell you that the

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City of London has streets, alleys, hills and places, but no roads.

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-Ah!

-Little bit unfair, I think.

-That's a clever one.

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In Bradshaw's day, the railways rivalled the hackney cab trade

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and new technology is still affecting business today.

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-Nowadays we have these sat-nav Johnnies.

-Satnav Johnnies!

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Private hire vehicles, if that's what you want to call them, pull up next to me totally confused.

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And the passenger in the back is asking me

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for directions cos the driver's not sure where they're going

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and the sat-nav has really lost them.

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So you can't beat the Knowledge.

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My hackney cab has brought me to a part of town which,

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at the time of my guidebook,

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was the capital's multicultural melting pot.

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Thank you.

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I'm a few yards from the City of London,

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but those who broke off from investing in the Victorian railway bubble,

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and ventured from their counting houses as far as Spitalfields,

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entered a different world.

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Here they encountered foreign immigrants.

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Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

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For hundreds of years, this area just outside the old city walls

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has been home to wave upon wave of immigrants.

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Dr Daniel DeHanas has researched migration in Spitalfields

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over the years.

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Dan, you've really taken me back in time,

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but a long way back, way before my Bradshaw's guide?

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Absolutely, we've moved into a Huguenot weaver's house.

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This is probably from around 1720.

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And you can see that Huguenots were masterful silk weavers,

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that was their main trade.

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But they were forced to leave Catholic France because

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they were Calvinists, Protestants who were being persecuted.

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In the late 17th century, following violent persecution in France,

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some 50,000 Huguenots fled to Protestant England.

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Within the City of London, the textile trade was tightly controlled

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by the city's guilds, which were largely closed to foreigners.

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So a community of Huguenot weavers set up shop here, just outside

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the city walls, where they found a ready market for their beautiful silks.

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Overall, the Huguenots were quite a prosperous group who did

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very well from their silk trade which was really

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valued by the upper classes at the time.

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-Did they face prejudice here?

-They certainly did.

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There's record actually from Parliament about a swarm

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of frogs which had invaded England.

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And that actually is something which was mirrored by other

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waves of immigrants that have come to this area as well.

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In the late 18th century,

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the opening up of global trade led to the decline of the London silk weaving industry,

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and the Huguenots gave way to Irish immigrants,

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escaping the great famine of the 1840s and '50s.

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They were drawn to Spitalfields by its abundant employment

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opportunities in the nearby docks

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and in the vast Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.

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It's called Brick Lane because this was where

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they would have carted bricks back and forth.

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The bricks had to be made outside of the city walls

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and this was actually a very, very busy and noxious

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and loud and noisy sort of lane.

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Then, around the time my guidebook was written,

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Spitalfields began to change again as Russian

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and East European Jews fleeing persecution settled here,

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earning the area the nickname Little Jerusalem.

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And now, as I look around me, we've got balti houses,

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we've got curry houses,

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so evidently there was another wave of immigration after that.

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Well, there was.

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The Bangladeshis are the wave since the '60s.

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They've really reshaped Brick Lane as a real curry mile.

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But beneath the trappings of so-called "Banglatown",

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it's possible to glimpse this area's many-layered past.

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Well, it seems that the minaret has been purpose built,

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but the mosque behind is not, I think, tailor-made.

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That's correct. The building is from 1743

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and what's remarkable is that it's been a place of worship

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for all of these successive waves of immigrants over time.

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So it was built as a Huguenot chapel.

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It spent part of its life as a Wesleyan chapel

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and a Methodist chapel.

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In the late 1800s, this became the great synagogue

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and at that time, there were more than 100,000 Jews

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living in the East End of London.

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And today, this is the great mosque.

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It's like the archaeology of all the religions that have been

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here in Brick Lane. Anyway, thank you so much.

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I'm off to see if I can have a really spicy evening!

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I hope you do.

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My journey is now taking me away from the East End as I travel

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towards central London on the District Line.

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I'm alighting at Blackfriars, where Bradshaw's Handbook of 1875

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promises a "new and truly magnificent bridge".

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Indeed it is, but Bradshaw was referring to the road bridge,

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which was new then.

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Today we can admire a bridge which arguably might have excited him even more.

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Since 1831, when London Bridge was demolished,

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there hadn't been a bridge

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spanning the River Thames with buildings on it.

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But that's all changed now with the new Blackfriars station.

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It spans the river and it has entrances on the north bank

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and the south bank.

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My Bradshaw's guide loves statistics about railway stations,

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so let me tell you that it's part of a £6.5 billion refurbishment

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of the Thameslink system.

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And that this station has 4,400 solar panels.

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I'm making my way just upriver, to the so-called Inner Temple,

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where Victorian lawyers learnt their craft.

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The Temple, according to Bradshaw's,

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"formerly the residence of the Knights Templar,

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"that was a medieval Christian military order

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"and now leased by the common law students.

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"There is, in the tranquil retirement of these buildings, and the garden

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"facing the river, an appearance of delicious quietness."

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And yet it was the brief of one of those students to shake the world.

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Much of the Inner Temple was rebuilt in Bradshaw's day,

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but its legal pedigree dates back to medieval times.

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Patrick Maddams is a member of the Inner Temple

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and is showing me around.

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Patrick, the Inner and Middle Temple take their names

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from the Knights Templar, but then lawyers came here and occupied

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Inns of Court. What are Inns of Court?

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Inns of Court were places where you would work, where you would sleep,

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where you would eat and drink and see friends.

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You have a good example of an Inn of Court here in King's Bench Walk.

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It was a single building where at the basement

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you would have the kitchen and where the servants lived.

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On the ground floor you would have the chambers where

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the barristers would see their clients.

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Above that you would have the rooms where the barristers lived

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and right at the top in the eaves was where the student barristers,

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called pupils, would live.

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By the time of my guidebook,

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this quiet corner of London was becoming a global centre for law,

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as Britain exported its legal expertise across the Empire.

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Is the opposite happening,

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are students coming from the Empire to here?

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It is. It's a two-way trade.

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By the time of the late Victorian era there are many, many,

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for example, young Indian barristers practising English law in India.

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Any notable examples?

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Well, of course, the most famous of all is Gandhi.

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Mohandas Gandhi would become the leader of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule.

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But his extraordinary career began in Victorian London

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as a young law student.

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So here we have, clearly, a bust of the great man.

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-Here he is.

-And these documents?

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These are very important because Gandhi arrived at the Inner Temple in 1888

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and, as every student has to do to this day, he has to fill

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in an admission form.

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Here we see in his own handwriting,

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"I, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, of 20 Baron's Court Road, West Kensington,"

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signing his declaration that he is a fit and proper person.

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Luckily for historians, Gandhi kept a diary during his three years here.

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He took dancing lessons, he played the violin

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and he just seemed to be absorbed by everything that London had to offer.

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There's a very poignant final entry in the diary

0:20:020:20:06

when he is on the boat leaving London and there's

0:20:060:20:11

a copy of it there, Michael, if you'd like to have a look at it.

0:20:110:20:15

Gandhi's final thoughts on London.

0:20:150:20:18

"So much attached was I to London

0:20:180:20:20

"and its environments, for who would not be?

0:20:200:20:23

"London with its teaching institutions,

0:20:230:20:25

"public galleries, vegetarian restaurants is a fit place

0:20:250:20:28

"for a student and a traveller, a trader

0:20:280:20:30

"and a faddist, as a vegetarian would be called by his opponents.

0:20:300:20:35

"Thus it is not without regret that I left dear London."

0:20:350:20:38

And this reminds us of one final legacy.

0:20:380:20:41

Gandhi gave to the chef here some recipes

0:20:410:20:45

that his mother had sent him

0:20:450:20:47

and the chef took kindly on him and cooked a vegetarian curry.

0:20:470:20:51

It soon became very popular

0:20:510:20:53

and to this day, every meal served at the Inner Temple has

0:20:530:20:57

a vegetarian option in memory of Gandhi.

0:20:570:21:00

-This place is full of traditions.

-It certainly is.

0:21:000:21:04

After Gandhi qualified as a lawyer in 1891, he briefly returned

0:21:040:21:08

to India before heading to join an Indian law firm in South Africa.

0:21:080:21:13

Until that point, Gandhi had shown little interest in politics.

0:21:130:21:17

Indian barrister Ram Viraraghavan knows more.

0:21:170:21:21

-Ram, hello.

-Hello, Michael.

-Very good to see you.

0:21:240:21:28

What has brought you from India to London?

0:21:280:21:32

I wanted to taste the waters at the fountain of justice.

0:21:320:21:37

That was why I came to the Inner Temple.

0:21:370:21:39

What a lovely answer.

0:21:390:21:41

I've been learning about Mahatma Gandhi,

0:21:410:21:43

it seems that when he was in London he was not particularly

0:21:430:21:46

interested in politics, so what changes him?

0:21:460:21:50

I should think the provocation was he was

0:21:500:21:53

thrown off a train in South Africa

0:21:530:21:56

and that, I should think,

0:21:560:21:57

was the beginning of his political consciousness.

0:21:570:22:00

He was brown and the South Africans would have nothing of it.

0:22:000:22:04

They threw him out of the train.

0:22:040:22:06

This is what he says:

0:22:060:22:08

"The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial,

0:22:080:22:12

"only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice.

0:22:120:22:17

"I should try, if possible, to root out the disease

0:22:170:22:21

"and suffer hardships in the process.

0:22:210:22:24

"Redress for wrongs I should seek only to the extent

0:22:240:22:28

"that would be necessary for removal of the colour prejudice."

0:22:280:22:33

And so began in a small way,

0:22:330:22:35

the road which ultimately leads to free India.

0:22:350:22:38

It's quite extraordinary when you think that such important

0:22:390:22:43

-history begins with an incident on a train.

-Of course it does.

0:22:430:22:46

It's time for me to take a train from the very same

0:22:490:22:52

station that the young Gandhi would have used all those years ago

0:22:520:22:55

and travel on the District Line to my final stop - Victoria.

0:22:550:22:59

Here the District and Circle Lines, constructed in the 19th century,

0:23:010:23:05

meet the 1960s-built Victoria Line

0:23:050:23:08

and the result can be chaotic.

0:23:080:23:11

It's a complete mess.

0:23:110:23:12

They are at the moment doing some improvements.

0:23:120:23:15

Do you think that's going to make it better?

0:23:150:23:17

I'm hopeful that it will, and just ease some of the congestion.

0:23:170:23:20

It's not intuitive, the way you get around the station.

0:23:200:23:23

They tell us that in a few years' time we're going to have great big new ticket halls.

0:23:230:23:26

-That's something to look forward to, isn't it?

-Yeah!

0:23:260:23:30

As Bradshaw says, "Occupying the site of the Grosvenor Canal basin,

0:23:340:23:38

"the Victoria station is now the busy scene of the arrival

0:23:380:23:41

"and departure of the West End and Crystal Palace, the Brighton

0:23:410:23:45

"and South Coast and the Chatham and Dover lines."

0:23:450:23:49

Not surprisingly then, Victoria has become cluttered, congested

0:23:490:23:54

and confused, and clearly in need of an upgrade.

0:23:540:23:57

Since 2009, the Underground station that serves this busy

0:24:010:24:05

terminus has been undergoing a £700 million makeover,

0:24:050:24:09

due to be completed in 2018.

0:24:090:24:12

David Waboso is showing me

0:24:150:24:16

what will eventually be a vast new ticket hall.

0:24:160:24:19

David, Victoria Underground station is very badly congested,

0:24:250:24:28

what is your master plan?

0:24:280:24:30

We want to increase capacity of this station by a whopping 33%.

0:24:300:24:35

We have more passengers use just Victoria Underground station

0:24:350:24:39

than Heathrow Airport.

0:24:390:24:40

Over 80 million passengers a year come through here.

0:24:400:24:43

To link the new and old ticket halls

0:24:430:24:45

and to improve connections between the Tube lines,

0:24:450:24:48

280 metres of new tunnels are being squeezed in

0:24:480:24:52

amongst the existing underground infrastructure.

0:24:520:24:55

The trouble with that, from an engineering point of view,

0:24:550:24:57

is we're having to basically tunnel through water-bearing sands,

0:24:570:25:00

which is not very good material to tunnel through.

0:25:000:25:03

How do you cope with that?

0:25:030:25:04

We've effectively here put in over 2,000 jet grouting columns.

0:25:040:25:08

Basically vertical columns of concrete that we pour

0:25:080:25:11

into the ground under controlled methods, and that stabilises

0:25:110:25:14

the ground so that we can then build these huge underground caverns.

0:25:140:25:18

I walk past here probably most days of my life,

0:25:180:25:21

I had no idea that this great big hole, this great big box was here,

0:25:210:25:25

I just wish everybody could see it.

0:25:250:25:28

It's a great achievement that during these vast works

0:25:280:25:31

going on below ground, Victoria station has stayed open.

0:25:310:25:35

David is now taking me to the cutting edge.

0:25:370:25:40

DRILLING

0:25:400:25:43

-Hello!

-How are you?

0:25:450:25:48

-Michael.

-Eugene. Pleased to meet you.

-Good to see you.

0:25:480:25:50

And what is it that Eugene's doing?

0:25:500:25:53

I'm used to seeing great big boring machines.

0:25:530:25:55

I'm quite surprised to see Eugene doing kind of hand-mining, really.

0:25:550:25:59

Yeah, when you get this close in, the space is so limited

0:25:590:26:02

that you really need manual methods of doing it, and we exploit

0:26:020:26:07

the skills of people like Eugene who have hand-mining capabilities.

0:26:070:26:11

In Victorian times, they had to do all this hand-mining,

0:26:110:26:14

but without these wonderful pneumatic tools.

0:26:140:26:16

They must have been really good men, mustn't they?

0:26:160:26:18

Yeah, they were, it's heroic stuff and we owe them a huge debt

0:26:180:26:22

because a lot of the stuff we use today is based on

0:26:220:26:24

the Victorians who built the first sections of the Tube in the 1860s.

0:26:240:26:28

Where exactly are we now?

0:26:280:26:30

So we're about 24 metres below ground level.

0:26:300:26:32

Right on top of us is the Victoria Palace Theatre, which is

0:26:320:26:35

currently having a matinee concert.

0:26:350:26:36

Either side of that will be London buses

0:26:360:26:39

and there'll be taxis and cars

0:26:390:26:42

and people walking around and all this stuff is going on underground.

0:26:420:26:46

Just behind us, about a metre behind that clay, will be

0:26:460:26:49

the running tunnels for the Victoria Line.

0:26:490:26:51

-Just behind that wall?

-Yeah.

0:26:510:26:52

On this journey I've witnessed London's insatiable restlessness

0:26:540:26:58

and constant reinvention.

0:26:580:26:59

Today, as in Bradshaw's day,

0:27:010:27:03

its energy attracts visitors and settlers from around the world.

0:27:030:27:07

As a new Underground station takes shape in the heart of the capital,

0:27:090:27:13

in East London, Victorian railway sidings have become an Olympic Park.

0:27:130:27:18

The East End is used to change,

0:27:180:27:21

because waves of immigration altered it from one generation to another.

0:27:210:27:26

As the son of a refugee, let me urge you to speak kindly to foreigners.

0:27:260:27:31

After being insulted on a train,

0:27:310:27:33

Mahatma Gandhi led a movement that deprived the British Empire

0:27:330:27:38

of what had once been the jewel in Victoria's crown, India.

0:27:380:27:43

Careless talk can be expensive.

0:27:430:27:46

Next time, I'll discover how 19th century engineering

0:27:500:27:53

made for spectacular theatricals.

0:27:530:27:56

Ben Hur was produced there twice.

0:27:560:27:58

To make it more exciting, they turned the treadmills round

0:27:580:28:01

so that the horses were running towards the audience.

0:28:010:28:03

Discover a Victorian luxury fit for a Queen...

0:28:030:28:07

If I dab this behind my ears, I can smell like Queen Victoria.

0:28:070:28:12

And come face to face with my hero...

0:28:120:28:15

George Bradshaw.

0:28:150:28:16

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