Stratford to London Victoria 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.

I'm nearly halfway through my exploration

of the web of tracks that links up London.

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

Upper and middle class Victorians viewed the East End of London

with horror.

Its slums were the scene of unspeakable depravity,

its dark streets lent themselves to robbery and murder.

And respectable folk feared revolution,

the mob and cholera sweeping down the Thames.

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

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

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

I'm following a route from east London's

railway hub at Stratford

towards the centre of the metropolis,

pausing at Temple en route to Victoria station.

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

of providing leisure space for Londoners...

-Whoa!

-Oh!

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

went on to change the world.

To this day, every meal served

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

And meet a modern descendant of the Hackney cab drivers

that Bradshaw would have known.

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

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

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

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

the Great Eastern Railway's locomotive works.

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

one of Victorian London's largest railway sites was being

transformed to host the Olympic Games.

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

of the railway age coped with the crowds of spectators

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

The former Olympic Park has recently reopened to Londoners,

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

studded with contemporary sculptures,

including Anish Kapoor's striking ArcelorMittal Orbit.

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

green oases, ringed by elegant homes,

in the midst of industrial Britain's smoky cities.

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

bequeathed London a worthy park.

Paul, I was here before the Olympic Games

and the expectation was that many, many people,

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

Well, it did and there were many.

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

third of a million people every day.

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

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

And it worked. The railway was astonishing.

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

This was the most extraordinary railway works.

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

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

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

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

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

and to this day, the whole area is

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

One of the big challenges of building the Games was to

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

this hard railway and I think to get the beautiful view

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

to the people who built the Games.

Another thing that makes me think of Victorian times

is that you have created a park here.

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

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

Tell me about yours.

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

Half the people who come here live around the park.

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

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

The South Park Plaza is a waterside promenade,

tree-lined promenade with lots of break-out spaces

and lots going on in it.

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

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

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

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

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

Fagin from Oliver Twist

and then the terrible bombings during World War II.

Is all of this changing

the way we feel about the East End of London?

The positive side of that is that it was always

full of entrepreneurial vim and vigour, which has mostly

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

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

Some of them are old institutions.

We're talking to the Victoria and Albert Museum,

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

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

But hopefully more regulated, more legal.

-Stratford on track.

-Yes.

Just as the creators of Victorian parks sought,

the promoters of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park aim to provide

space for Londoners to mingle, relax and exercise.

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

amenities like the Copper Box Arena,

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

Get it back, Blue!

-Hello!

-Hi.

-Sorry to interrupt your game.

How does it feel playing in an Olympic facility?

It's really, really good.

We've been playing here for one season now.

We've been practising for some really interesting events

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

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

Hands up.

Yeah?

-Do you use the train?

-Yes, I do.

It's the perfect way to travel.

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

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

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

-I think so. Let's go.

-Here we go. Straight away.

-Someone throw to Michael.

To me, Michael.

Back to Michael. Let's go.

Don't make it easy for him, girls!

-Whoa!

-Oh!

Having caught my breath, I'm continuing my journey

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

I'm travelling from Stratford to Hackney Central,

passing straight through the Olympic Park.

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

Londoners travelled by carriage,

and its descendant still works the streets today,

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

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

which is the official name of a London taxi.

According to Bradshaw's London guide,

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

"deliver to the hirer a card whereon

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

"The utility of this ticket will be readily seen

"in the case of loss of luggage."

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

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

Taxi!

Spitalfields, please.

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

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

There's nothing written in stone

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

which was a horse-drawn carriage, I believe.

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

How long have hackney carriages been around then?

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

-Good heavens.

-I wasn't there at the beginning!

HE LAUGHS

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

and their drivers are famed

for knowing the city like the back of their hand.

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

"the Knowledge".

-How far back does the Knowledge go?

-Well before my time.

And my father's before him.

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

What did you have to learn?

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

So that's about 25,000 streets,

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

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

How can you get from Bishopsgate to the Old Bailey without

crossing a road?

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

With a knowledgeable driver who'll tell you that the

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

-Ah!

-Little bit unfair, I think.

-That's a clever one.

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

and new technology is still affecting business today.

-Nowadays we have these sat-nav Johnnies.

-Satnav Johnnies!

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

And the passenger in the back is asking me

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

and the sat-nav has really lost them.

So you can't beat the Knowledge.

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

at the time of my guidebook,

was the capital's multicultural melting pot.

Thank you.

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

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

and ventured from their counting houses as far as Spitalfields,

entered a different world.

Here they encountered foreign immigrants.

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

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

has been home to wave upon wave of immigrants.

Dr Daniel DeHanas has researched migration in Spitalfields

over the years.

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

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

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

This is probably from around 1720.

And you can see that Huguenots were masterful silk weavers,

that was their main trade.

But they were forced to leave Catholic France because

they were Calvinists, Protestants who were being persecuted.

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

some 50,000 Huguenots fled to Protestant England.

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

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

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

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

Overall, the Huguenots were quite a prosperous group who did

very well from their silk trade which was really

valued by the upper classes at the time.

-Did they face prejudice here?

-They certainly did.

There's record actually from Parliament about a swarm

of frogs which had invaded England.

And that actually is something which was mirrored by other

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

In the late 18th century,

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

and the Huguenots gave way to Irish immigrants,

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

They were drawn to Spitalfields by its abundant employment

opportunities in the nearby docks

and in the vast Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.

It's called Brick Lane because this was where

they would have carted bricks back and forth.

The bricks had to be made outside of the city walls

and this was actually a very, very busy and noxious

and loud and noisy sort of lane.

Then, around the time my guidebook was written,

Spitalfields began to change again as Russian

and East European Jews fleeing persecution settled here,

earning the area the nickname Little Jerusalem.

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

we've got curry houses,

so evidently there was another wave of immigration after that.

Well, there was.

The Bangladeshis are the wave since the '60s.

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

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

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

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

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

That's correct. The building is from 1743

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

for all of these successive waves of immigrants over time.

So it was built as a Huguenot chapel.

It spent part of its life as a Wesleyan chapel

and a Methodist chapel.

In the late 1800s, this became the great synagogue

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

living in the East End of London.

And today, this is the great mosque.

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

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

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

I hope you do.

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

towards central London on the District Line.

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

promises a "new and truly magnificent bridge".

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

which was new then.

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

Since 1831, when London Bridge was demolished,

there hadn't been a bridge

spanning the River Thames with buildings on it.

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

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

and the south bank.

My Bradshaw's guide loves statistics about railway stations,

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

of the Thameslink system.

And that this station has 4,400 solar panels.

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

where Victorian lawyers learnt their craft.

The Temple, according to Bradshaw's,

"formerly the residence of the Knights Templar,

"that was a medieval Christian military order

"and now leased by the common law students.

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

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

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

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

but its legal pedigree dates back to medieval times.

Patrick Maddams is a member of the Inner Temple

and is showing me around.

Patrick, the Inner and Middle Temple take their names

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

Inns of Court. What are Inns of Court?

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

where you would eat and drink and see friends.

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

It was a single building where at the basement

you would have the kitchen and where the servants lived.

On the ground floor you would have the chambers where

the barristers would see their clients.

Above that you would have the rooms where the barristers lived

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

called pupils, would live.

By the time of my guidebook,

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

as Britain exported its legal expertise across the Empire.

Is the opposite happening,

are students coming from the Empire to here?

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

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

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

Any notable examples?

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

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

But his extraordinary career began in Victorian London

as a young law student.

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

-Here he is.

-And these documents?

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

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

in an admission form.

Here we see in his own handwriting,

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

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

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

He took dancing lessons, he played the violin

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

There's a very poignant final entry in the diary

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

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

Gandhi's final thoughts on London.

"So much attached was I to London

"and its environments, for who would not be?

"London with its teaching institutions,

"public galleries, vegetarian restaurants is a fit place

"for a student and a traveller, a trader

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

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

And this reminds us of one final legacy.

Gandhi gave to the chef here some recipes

that his mother had sent him

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

It soon became very popular

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

a vegetarian option in memory of Gandhi.

-This place is full of traditions.

-It certainly is.

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

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

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

Indian barrister Ram Viraraghavan knows more.

-Ram, hello.

-Hello, Michael.

-Very good to see you.

What has brought you from India to London?

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

That was why I came to the Inner Temple.

What a lovely answer.

I've been learning about Mahatma Gandhi,

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

interested in politics, so what changes him?

I should think the provocation was he was

thrown off a train in South Africa

and that, I should think,

was the beginning of his political consciousness.

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

They threw him out of the train.

This is what he says:

"The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial,

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

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

"and suffer hardships in the process.

"Redress for wrongs I should seek only to the extent

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

And so began in a small way,

the road which ultimately leads to free India.

It's quite extraordinary when you think that such important

-history begins with an incident on a train.

-Of course it does.

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

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

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

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

meet the 1960s-built Victoria Line

and the result can be chaotic.

It's a complete mess.

They are at the moment doing some improvements.

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

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

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

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

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

-Yeah!

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

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

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

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

Not surprisingly then, Victoria has become cluttered, congested

and confused, and clearly in need of an upgrade.

Since 2009, the Underground station that serves this busy

terminus has been undergoing a £700 million makeover,

due to be completed in 2018.

David Waboso is showing me

what will eventually be a vast new ticket hall.

David, Victoria Underground station is very badly congested,

what is your master plan?

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

We have more passengers use just Victoria Underground station

than Heathrow Airport.

Over 80 million passengers a year come through here.

To link the new and old ticket halls

and to improve connections between the Tube lines,

280 metres of new tunnels are being squeezed in

amongst the existing underground infrastructure.

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

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

which is not very good material to tunnel through.

How do you cope with that?

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

Basically vertical columns of concrete that we pour

into the ground under controlled methods, and that stabilises

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

I walk past here probably most days of my life,

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

I just wish everybody could see it.

It's a great achievement that during these vast works

going on below ground, Victoria station has stayed open.

David is now taking me to the cutting edge.

DRILLING

-Hello!

-How are you?

-Michael.

-Eugene. Pleased to meet you.

-Good to see you.

And what is it that Eugene's doing?

I'm used to seeing great big boring machines.

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

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

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

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

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

but without these wonderful pneumatic tools.

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

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

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

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

Where exactly are we now?

So we're about 24 metres below ground level.

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

currently having a matinee concert.

Either side of that will be London buses

and there'll be taxis and cars

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

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

the running tunnels for the Victoria Line.

-Just behind that wall?

-Yeah.

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

and constant reinvention.

Today, as in Bradshaw's day,

its energy attracts visitors and settlers from around the world.

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

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

The East End is used to change,

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

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

After being insulted on a train,

Mahatma Gandhi led a movement that deprived the British Empire

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

Careless talk can be expensive.

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

made for spectacular theatricals.

Ben Hur was produced there twice.

To make it more exciting, they turned the treadmills round

so that the horses were running towards the audience.

Discover a Victorian luxury fit for a Queen...

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

And come face to face with my hero...

George Bradshaw.