Croydon to Shoreham-by-Sea Great British Railway Journeys

For Edwardian Britons, a Bradshaw's was an indispensable guide

to a railway network at its peak.

I'm using an early 20th century edition to navigate a vibrant

and optimistic Britain...

..at the height of its power and influence in the world.

But a nation wrestling with political,

social and industrial unrest at home.

My rail journey that began in North Norfolk continues south

and has now cleared London.

On this leg, I'll discover that Hiawatha came to Croydon,

that Bloomsbury descended on Charleston,

while a Hummingbird landed in Shoreham,

and how Cambridge will be joined to Brighton.

I'm following a route that has taken me

from a Norfolk holiday resort to Cambridge's venerable university

and onward to the delights of Edwardian London.

Having continued south and reached the coast,

I'll wend my way westwards via the Isle of Wight

towards my final station, Poole, for Brownsea Island.

The third leg of my journey begins

with a musical interlude in Croydon,

then moves to a hi-tech rail hub at Three Bridges.

I'll pursue the avant-garde in Lewes,

and take flight at Shoreham-by-Sea.

Along the way, I'll dress up to spruce up some rolling stock...

-We're going to clean this Class 700, are we?

-We are indeed.

-Very good.

-What are your tips?

-Try and stay dry.

..encounter a progressive group whose private lives

would have scandalised Edwardians...

They were living in still very restrictive times, and they couldn't

be publicly open about their sexuality or their relationships.

..and go up-diddly-up in my flying machine.

We are away.

If I were to ask you, "Who was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor?",

you'd probably say a poet, but that I'd got my tongue twisted

and produced the names in the wrong order.

But no, here is a cutting from the Globe newspaper

of September, 1912, telling me that,

"Large crowds assembled in Croydon yesterday

"to witness the funeral of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,

"the well-known composer."

To find out about this now little-known figure,

I've come to the church where that service was held.

I'm meeting conductor Jonathan Butcher...

-Welcome to St Michael And All Angels West Croydon.

-Thank you very much.

..singer Paul Sheehan and pianist Michael Papadopoulos.

# Onaway

# Awake beloved

# Blood of my beating heart

# Behold me

# Oh awake

# Awake beloved

# Onaway

# Awake

# Beloved. #

Thank you, Paul. I think you probably awoke your beloved there.

Yes! No-one can sleep through that.

THEY LAUGH

And Michael, thank you so much.

One can imagine that this was being performed in the drawing rooms

-of Edwardian Britain.

-Oh, absolutely, yes.

This particular song, very, very popular in its time.

It's a song of love and a song of longing.

The singer, his beloved, Onaway, is asleep,

and he sings to wake her because he is bereft without her,

and to pre-empt Barry Manilow, he can't smile without her.

THEY LAUGH

Coleridge-Taylor may have been virtually forgotten today,

but at the turn of the 20th century he was a celebrity

in Britain and America.

Always elegantly dressed, Coleridge-Taylor wasn't afraid

to stand out from the crowd in Edwardian Croydon,

despite suffering racist abuse.

The Globe newspaper tells me that in this magnificent church,

there was a crowded funeral for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Who was this man? Where had he come from?

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a mixed-race composer

whose father came from Sierra Leone

-and whose mother was English.

-Mm-hm.

And he was born out of wedlock,

and he went to a school just down the road here.

He showed musical promise from a very early age,

and he got a place at the Royal College of Music.

His peers at the college included the future famous composers

Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst.

And Coleridge-Taylor himself was soon celebrated.

What was he famous for in Britain?

Well, he was really famous in Britain for writing

his secular oratorio Hiawatha's Wedding Feast.

It really only contains about four or five melodies.

Four or five absolutely cracking melodies.

MUSIC: Hiawatha's Wedding Feast by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

It was based on the poem The Song of Hiawatha

by the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,

who was inspired by Native American stories.

This was at a time when choral societies,

which were numerous in England,

this was a really popular pastime,

their mainstay works were Messiah, Elijah, that sort of piece.

And so something that had a narrative

and was a secular work, like Hiawatha's Wedding Feast,

they just lapped up,

and suddenly they were being performed all over the country.

How well-known was he in his day, do you think?

He was absolutely a celebrity. He was instantly recognisable.

Was there interest in his music in the United States?

Very much so.

When he went to America, it was, I imagine,

something like Michael Jackson arriving off a boat.

There were crowds to greet him.

Coleridge-Taylor's remarkable life was cut short

when he died at just 37 years of age.

Surely this forgotten, black,

British composer deserves to be rescued from obscurity.

In the early 20th century,

Britain's rail network reached its zenith of some 20,000 miles.

Since then, it's shrunk to half that size,

but in some parts of the country, a railway renaissance is afoot.

For some years now,

trains like this have run a service called Thameslink,

which connects towns to the north of London, like Bedford and Luton,

with Gatwick Airport and Brighton to the south, running through

the City of London, making use of an old Victorian tunnel.

Now there are plans to vastly increase the service,

bringing in cities like Cambridge and Peterborough.

I'm on my way to Three Bridges,

which scores a number of mentions in my Bradshaw's Guide,

to see how the enormous new fleet will be kept ready for service.

Once a small hamlet, Three Bridges grew

with the arrival of the railway in the 1840s,

and has now merged into the town of Crawley.

To get the inside track on its new train depot,

I've come to meet engineering director Gerry McFadden.

-Gerry, hello. I'm Michael.

-Hello, Michael.

So, you've got behind you here this vast range

of brand-new train facilities, and this is part of a new Thameslink.

What's the big picture?

The demand on this railway has doubled over ten years.

So, we're creating a tunnel under London.

We've designed trains that can operate through that tunnel

astonishingly quickly,

and the trains hold enormous numbers of people.

Each train holds the equivalent of 21 London buses.

The rebooted Thameslink service will expand capacity

for north-south travel across the capital,

just as Crossrail will for east-west routes.

You've got to pass trains through that tunnel in central London

-at rates that are like a metro.

-Yes, we do.

And that's where the train design has effectively delivered

both a metro train, an underground train,

as it goes through London, automatically operating,

automatically stopping, automatically opening

all of its doors, as well as a suburban train

linking up Cambridge to Brighton, linking up Luton to Kent.

So, providing fantastic new journey opportunities

and cutting down some journey times extraordinarily.

The roll-out of the fleet of new Class 700 trains has started.

Three Bridges is one of two new depots which will keep

the hi-tech rolling stock working efficiently.

Ian McLeod is responsible for train maintenance.

-Hello, Ian.

-Hello.

Ian, when you've got your full complement of trains,

how many are you required to supply to the system each day?

So, we are required to supply 109 out of 115 trains,

leaving six spare for maintenance each day.

Tell me about the passenger features of the train.

-Well, let's go and have a look.

-Good.

-These trains are really doing a number of different jobs, aren't they?

-Of course, yeah.

Because they're like Tube trains in the centre of town, but they're also sort of

quite long-distance travel for some people.

I notice that it's two-by-two seating, so you've got a much

-wider passageway between the seats than on many trains.

-Absolutely.

And of course, we're getting used to this nowadays,

but a long tube with no interruptions at all.

Yes. From 2018 onwards, 24 trains an hour through the centre of London.

We need to get a huge number of people on and off the train,

and being able to pass through in the gangway

and between seats is very important for the train operator.

What passengers won't see are the workings tucked beneath

these state-of-the-art trains,

which are accessed via an inspection pit 12 carriages long.

Trains today are much more reliable than they used to be.

That's true, yeah. If some equipment fails on the train,

other systems are there to take over to allow the train to continue

in operation until the end of the day, where it can be repaired.

So, what work needs to be done under the train?

For example, what are these guys up to?

They're doing a general inspection, looking for any damage that might have occurred, stones,

or things that might have hit the train

from the underside during operation.

Working on the trains is specialised stuff.

But there is a job that can be tackled even by somebody

with my woeful lack of technical skill.

-You look the same species as me. What's your name?

-My name's Vince.

-And we're going to clean this Class 700, are we?

-We are indeed.

Very good. What are your tips?

Try and stay dry.

Try and stay dry.

Attack it with vigour.

You've done this before.

Argh! Take that, you Class 700!

Vince, don't tell me

-you do the whole of the side of the train this way as well.

-We do, yeah.

-What?

-We do, yeah.

-That must take you forever.

Yeah, well... Not really.

About six hours.

Six hours?!

Six hours both sides.

Well, don't they have, like, a...

-Like, a carwash?

-We do, yeah.

Unfortunately, some of the brake dust doesn't come off

with the carriage wash, so we have to hand brush like this.

-So, it still needs the human touch?

-Yeah.

The human touch is needed every 56 days, in general.

Sometimes more often.

-Vince.

-Yes?

-As clean as a train whistle.

-Very nice.

-Good job, Michael.

-Good job, Vince.

I feel I've certainly earned my bed for the night.

This manor, now a hotel, once belonged to the family

of the Duke of Norfolk, then to Queen Elizabeth I,

and to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I wonder whether they'll have me.

A new day, and I've crossed the breathtaking

Ouse Valley Viaduct to continue my journey south.

I'm following in the footsteps of early 20th century Londoners

who sought to swap the city smoke for the Sussex countryside.

At the time of my Bradshaw's Guide,

the Bloomsbury group of artists and intellectuals

was becoming known.

Their lives were high drama, and part of it was played out

at Charleston in East Sussex, to which I'm now headed.

I hope to discover how the band that included

Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey

scandalised, entertained, influenced,

and above all fascinated the outside world.

I've left the train at Lewes,

tucked among the undulating chalk hills of the South Downs.

It's known for its ruined Norman castle

and its Georgian brewery.

But I'm making a beeline to nearby Charleston House

to meet curator Darren Clarke.

-Darren, hello.

-Hello, Michael. Welcome to Charleston.

Well, thank you. And it is the most beautiful house.

I'm absolutely stunned by it. Who was it who lived here?

So, this was the home of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

And what had brought them to Charleston?

They came in 1916, so the height of the First World War.

Conscription had been introduced at the beginning of the year,

and Duncan Grant and his lover David Garnett were both conscientious objectors.

So, they needed to find work on a farm or go to prison.

So, one day, in September, Vanessa Bell came down

and found them a local farmer that would employ them,

and a house that they could all live in,

and they moved here in October of that year.

And they had been, before the First World War,

part of the Bloomsbury Group in London. What was that?

So, this was a group of young people all coming of age

just as the 19th century was ending,

just as the Victorian age was ending.

And they were looking forward to new ways of living

-and new ways of thinking.

-What was new about it?

They were looking at new ways...

Pretty much new ways of perception, new ways of seeing things,

new ways of representing things.

Virginia Woolf was looking at that stream-of-consciousness,

of really getting inside the character's head.

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the artists,

were looking at how you look at things and how you represent things.

And Clive Bell talking about how you appreciate art, and how appreciation

of art crosses different cultures and different classes.

As well as breaking new ground artistically,

this avant-garde set rejected Edwardian morals.

Some of them were homosexual, bisexual, they were promiscuous.

-Was this also a new way of living?

-I think it was.

It was all about honesty.

Honesty within your relationships, honestly with your feelings.

So, even though they were living in still very restrictive times

and they couldn't be publicly open about their sexuality

or their relationships, within their friendships,

they believed in honesty.

-Were there jealousies?

-Lots of jealousies.

When they arrived here,

you had Duncan Grant being in a three-way relationship with

David Garnett and Vanessa Bell,

almost torn in two by the pressures of that relationship.

Over the years, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell

painted every nook and cranny of the interior of Charleston House.

Though now a museum open to the public, it's filled with

personal possessions, as though the group of friends still lived there.

Darren, I'm mesmerised by the whole house.

It is so homely, so beautifully preserved.

I noticed every surface seems to have been

-decorated by the inhabitants.

-They were very industrious.

So, it's 60 years of creativity here, from 1916,

when they moved in, until Duncan Grant died in 1978.

And it covers the walls, the fireplaces, the tables.

They would design their own textiles, ceramics.

And it's very much of that idea that art

doesn't stop at the picture frame,

that it spreads across your whole life, your whole room,

what you eat your dinner off, what you have on your curtains,

what you have on your bed is all to be beautiful and lively and lovely.

And the creativity continued in the garden,

where the original design has been brought back to life,

tended by Fiona Dennis.

-Fiona, how lovely to see you.

-Lovely to see you.

-And what a beautiful garden.

-Thank you.

-This is really lovely.

Is this Vanessa Bell's and Duncan Grant's garden, in essence?

Yes. In essence, it absolutely is.

The actual layout was designed by Roger Fry, the art historian,

but it was Vanessa and Duncan who really selected the plants.

The garden is abundant.

I think this is a style that many people like to emulate today.

-Yes.

-Was it rather revolutionary in their time?

-I think it was.

Remember, they were following on from the Victorians,

so they were very anti-formal.

So, the front of the garden was originally

quite Victorian and evergreen.

They wanted things to be really colourful,

and they were looking for plants to paint, because they didn't tend

to go out of the garden much, they tended to paint in the garden.

They were painters, not gardeners, and I think that's really important.

My journey continues towards the west,

stopping briefly at Brighton to change trains.

I have time to admire the cast-iron and glass station roof

that follows the curve of the platform.

My destination is seven miles down the track.

I have here the original programme for an air show

at the Brighton Shoreham Aerodrome in December, 1913.

I'm promised upside-down flying and looping-the-loop

by Mr BC Hucks,

who is prepared to fly in almost any weather.

When you think that the Wright brothers

had flown for the first time just about ten years before,

and here is Mr Hucks performing aerobatics, you have to say,

"Those magnificent men in their flying machines."

I will go to Shoreham to the scene of that heroism.

Today, Shoreham-by-Sea is part of the continuous ribbon

of urban development that stretches along the coast

from Brighton to Worthing.

There's been a port here since the days of the Norman conquest,

and in the 1840s, the railway arrived.

But just after the turn of the 20th century,

a new form of transport was making its mark.

I'm exploring Shoreham's historic airfield

with airport historian Tim Hogben.

-Hello, Tim.

-Oh, Michael. Welcome to Shoreham Airport.

Tim, what then is Shoreham's place in British aviation history?

Oh, goodness.

We are one of the original flying grounds.

We are the oldest licensed airport in the country.

And as far as I know, we are the only one of the original

client groups that is still used day-to-day for aviation.

-How did it all start?

-It started in 1909.

There was a local solicitor, George Wingfield,

and he basically saw an opening in the market.

And he found this piece of land

which was low-lying, rough pasture land, liable to flood.

But, I guess at the time it was cheap,

and that suited him admirably.

It was just six years since the first-ever sustained, powered

and controlled flight by the Wright brothers,

who'd then flown their plane in Europe, winning over many doubters.

Who were the customers in those days?

Well, Shoreham's first tenant, customer if you like,

was a London-based artist, Harold Hume Piffard.

He arrived in the early months of 1910,

put up a shed in the southeastern corner of the field,

and in there he erected his flying machine.

An old boy of Lancing College, the public school adjoining

the field, Piffard was the first to fly from here in 1910,

In his Hummingbird plane.

Soon he was joined at Shoreham by an assortment of flying enthusiasts.

Then, in the 1930s, the town councils of Brighton, Hove

and Worthing clubbed together to build

a striking Art Deco terminal building, still in use today.

And could you fly to the world from Shoreham in those days?

Well, not quite.

We were still low-lying grass, and after a few days' rain,

the whole site would simply turn into something like porridge.

So you could turn up for your flight to be told,

"Sorry, delayed a week while the ground dries out."

-So, not a huge success.

-Not really.

Though unsuitable for large-scale passenger flights,

this is still a busy airfield today,

used by private pilots, the police,

coastguard and businesses, and home to a flying school.

I've been promised a private flight,

but the weather has turned pretty grim,

and even with modern navigation aids, my trip is uncertain.

But finally there's a gap in the blanket of cloud, so pilot

James Piper and I slip into the cockpit of a twin-engined aircraft.

I'm just going to get the weather for the airfield before we depart.

I can save you the trouble, James. It's filthy. JAMES LAUGHS

-We'll be all right, though, will we?

-Oh, absolutely.

Normally, if you learn to fly, you'd learn in good weather,

but, however, as you advance through your flight training,

you'd go up in weather very similar to this.

INDISTINCT

All right, so we are cleared to taxi.

We're going to head out towards the start of the runway.

So we're going to take off.

We'll try and maintain visual flight. However,

if we do enter any cloud then we will have to adopt instrument

flight rules and then go through any necessary procedures as a result.

-You need a hand any time, just let me know.

-No problem.

The wind sock is puffing out there,

telling us that we've got quite a strong headwind as we take off.

That's it.

So James has now lined up the DA42 Twin Star at the end of runway 20.

A surge of power as we zoom on.

UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS

Flawed takeoff, but we are away.

Now at 400 feet.

The view back there over the aerodrome.

The runway points directly towards the English Channel,

and within moments we are approaching the beach.

Coming back now over the English coast.

There on my left now is Lancing College's enormous chapel.

Runway is in sight.

We can see the white lines on the runway ahead.

And down we go.

And we are down.

Thank you so much.

Some creative Edwardians, such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,

have now been largely forgotten,

but those in the Bloomsbury Group continue to fascinate us,

as much for their way of life as for their work.

Their bohemianism presented an avant-garde affront to

Edwardian conventions.

But a trip to Shoreham Airport would have given a better

indication of the future,

because the aeroplane would play a major role in mechanised warfare,

in which the Edwardian style of life would perish.

Next time, I encounter an Edwardian duo who made motoring history...

Excuse me, I'm off for a little R&R.

..learn the secrets of the royal nursery...

Albert Edwin would fly into rages and got very sort of frustrated.

..and for one night only, I tread the boards.

You are real thespians! LAUGHTER