From Old Bones to Precious Stones Heritage! The Battle for Britain's Past

Modern Britain loves its heritage.

It's become a vital part of how we define ourselves as British.

The fascination that people show for history,

I think it's extraordinary,

but I think it comes from a really deep human need

to understand where we've come from, why things matter

and, actually, to help us locate ourselves in the present.

But it could so easily have been a different story.

It's taken a revolution

to make us a nation that values our ancient buildings and monuments.

And, even now, it's an ongoing argument about what to save

and what to let go.

Heritage isn't really about the past, it's about the future.

And it's about what you do with the future

and what bits of the past you want to take with you into the future.

That's quite a tricky subject,

because what's important, particularly about the recent past,

to one person, it's not important to another person.

Britain now has some of the most powerful conservation laws in the world.

But in the 19th century, hardly any of our best-loved landmarks

were protected or even valued.

It was a dangerous time for old and ancient buildings

caught up in an age of industry and profit.

TRAIN WHISTLES

Because Britain was expanding

and was, therefore, beginning to destroy the material past,

there were visionaries who realised

that the landscape, the built environment, represents memory

and memory was something that shouldn't be lost.

The pioneers of the movement were clever,

passionate and argumentative.

They changed the history of this country by saving it.

Sometimes, they looked like antiquities themselves.

But they all challenged society in surprising ways.

The fascinating thing is

that the conservation movement has been, at times,

really, really radical, even to the point of being quite revolutionary.

Some chose Parliament to further their cause.

Others campaigned in pressure groups.

Many supporters were rich and powerful,

others took to the streets to make a point.

Some were freethinking civil servants,

a handful even operated undercover,

theatrical in their stunts to save history.

This is the story of how the heritage movement was ignited

by the modern science of evolution and archaeology,

of how a century of astonishing change nearly wiped out the past.

And the ghastly fallout of war.

SIREN WAILS

It's about who decided what was worth saving,

why they did it

and how they shaped the Britain we recognise today.

CHEERING

We boast that an Englishman's home is his castle.

But for centuries, it has been this very belief

that threatened the survival of Britain's past.

Every historic site belonged to someone

and that someone could do whatever they liked with it.

There's a number of terrible examples

of buildings being demolished by their owners,

just because people were interested in them.

New Place, in Stratford-on-Avon,

Shakespeare's house,

was demolished in the 1750s by a... He was a clergyman...

because he was irritated by people coming to see it, and so, he pulled it down.

And, of course, you have wonderful Vanbrugh

pleading for the preservation of Woodstock Manor,

which the ghastly Duchess of Marlborough was going to demolish.

At the beginning of the 19th century,

Turner, the great painter,

who'd just moved to Twickenham,

was furious to find that Pope's Villa nearby

was just being demolished by Baroness Howe,

who again was irritated that people were curious

and wanted to see this house.

There's a terrible history of this sort of thing -

of private individuals thinking they have the absolute right

to destroy something just cos they own it,

even if they are of, you know, wide interest

or indeed of national importance.

For centuries, the right to own property

without interference from the state had been at the heart

of the British Constitution.

To compromise this principle would be revolutionary stuff.

Why was Britain different from the rest of Europe?

They'd had revolutions.

Revolutions that eliminated private property.

The state had taken over responsibility in France

for ancient monuments, for forests and so on.

In Britain, private property was all and there was a general feeling

that was the key to Britishness, why we were a success,

as we were perceived as being then.

It's cos we respected people's property.

In the 19th century,

Britain controlled the largest empire the world had ever seen.

Queen Victoria had even added the title Empress of India

to her property portfolio.

At home and abroad,

the idea of British land rights had never seemed stronger.

Yet, in the summer of 1873,

they were about to be challenged

in, of all places, the House of Commons.

The battle for heritage began with John Lubbock,

Liberal MP for Orpington, in Kent.

He was 39 years old, the son of a London banker and baronet.

He was posh and rich

and a hyperactive champion of loopy causes.

Lubbock loved nature.

He even kept a pet wasp,

still lovingly preserved by his descendants.

The cartoonists had a field day.

He even claimed to have taught his dog to read.

But he won popular support

when he introduced Britain's first bank holiday.

It was such a hit

it was nicknamed St Lubbock's Day.

As a boy, he never stopped drawing and cataloguing the natural world.

His great-grandson Lyulph and grandson Eric

have dug out his scrapbooks.

Some of these are more primitive than others.

-Butterflies.

-Butterflies.

-But he was interested in butterflies long before that.

-Indeed, yes.

-From the age of what, four?

-I think so, yes.

I mean, there's a nice tale of him

saying his earliest memory is of an insect under glass,

and Queen Victoria's coronation,

so that gives us a nice date of 1837, when he was three-and-a-half.

What would prove to be a fateful moment for British heritage

came when Lubbock was 14.

A neighbour was appointed to be his private tutor.

It was none other than the man

who would turn the Victorian world on its head -

scientist and philosopher Charles Darwin.

Darwin was yet to publish his great work, On The Origin Of Species,

but he'd already developed his ideas about evolution,

and the young Lubbock eagerly lapped them up.

What do you find of Darwin in the book?

Later on, in this book, you'll see parts of insect appendages

and this particular insect is called Labidocera Darwinii.

And that's actually an insect

that John discovered at High Elms in the ponds there.

And he named it after what, by then, I think he regarded as his mentor.

Darwin ignited in the young Lubbock a passion for archaeology,

a science still in its infancy in the 19th century.

Darwin knew it was the key to unlocking man's past.

Calculations based on the Old Testament

meant that most people believed the world was only 4,000 years old,

so the much older fossils and bones being dug up

were the new wonders of the age.

The first steps to building up a true picture

of man's prehistoric past.

John Lubbock was gathering evidence of human antiquity

to give a sense of evolution over time

and over geography,

of the human mind, of human culture,

of human innovation,

which was all part of the extension for him

of natural selection in animal species.

In a museum in south London,

we can still see Lubbock's passion for archaeology.

Such finds inspired him to write his first book - Pre-Historic Times.

It quickly became a bestseller

for the growing number of amateur archaeologists.

We were really very lucky

when the Lubbock family

very kindly decided to donate

some of John Lubbock's items.

We have here a hand axe.

This is actually 300,000 years old.

They'd have used it for killing and gutting their animals,

taking the skins off.

But if you look at it, it fits in your hand so beautifully,

it's been made so well.

We've also got one here,

in fact, from Orpington, and this is 60,000 years old.

So big, big difference, but you can still see

just how Stone-Age tools were evolving and changing.

And what we also have here is not such a local find, of course,

but these things here, these are Neolithic.

When John Lubbock published his Pre-Historic Times in 1865,

the main reason why the Pre-Historic Times book now is so well-known

is he came up with the two terms Palaeolithic and Neolithic,

which means old and new Stone Age.

So this is actually Neolithic,

you can see all the intricate details on it.

We're not quite sure what they mean,

what they represent,

we assume it's something to do

with someone's standing in society.

If you had this beautiful bit of carved stone,

it meant you were quite an important person.

Lubbock was inventing the science of ancient history

by giving it its own language for the first time.

Next, he would put flesh on prehistoric bones.

He commissioned the first illustrations

of how life might have been

for prehistoric man in Britain.

And, astonishingly, his pictures have stood

the academic test of time.

Ancient man hunting,

ancient man working with tools,

building shelters.

And Lubbock's work encouraged interest beyond mere bones.

The architectural remains of ancient Britain were suddenly big news.

One of the great things he did was to arouse a national attention

into ancient monuments,

into Stonehenge, the world of Avebury, of stone circles.

And this was hugely important,

because this was about the roots of our identity.

Who first settled these islands?

How the British developed?

And what really mattered - who were we?

But Lubbock knew Britain's prehistoric remains

were disappearing fast.

They got in the way of efficient ploughing

and, what's more, they were a free source of building materials

for landowners keen to cut corners.

Prehistoric sites that he saw being destroyed on a daily basis

through farmers building fences with stone

or ploughing fields and so on.

Every time that he went and visited those sites,

he saw them whittled down further.

And it was that threat

which would destroy the evidence

that Darwin had told him was so important

in all his work to date.

It was that threat that really...is what he was concerned about.

In 1871, Lubbock heard

that the land around Avebury village, in Wiltshire,

the site of Britain's largest prehistoric stone circle,

was about to be sold at auction.

Already subject to damage and dereliction for years,

the future of the stone circle looked perilous.

Lubbock decided something had to be done.

His great-grandson and grandson remember the story.

He got a letter from the vicar here

saying that there was a threat to the stones

and urgently could he come down and have a look.

They were basically knocking them down and using them to build structures.

-People wanted them for building material.

-Yes.

They're valuable original materials

for houses and others sorts of buildings.

And they had been ravished over a period of years,

but this was a sudden onslaught against the few remaining stones.

What they liked were these big ones,

cos they could then just take a slab like that

and create a house around it.

And people outside Avebury were coming in

and chipping bits off as well,

so it was just getting out of control, so something had to be done.

Lubbock moved fast.

He persuaded local landowners, mostly farmers,

to sell their land to him.

The stone circle was saved.

Inspired by what he'd achieved at Avebury,

Lubbock decided to go into battle

on behalf of ALL Britain's fragile prehistoric sites.

And, as an MP, he knew

the only place the battle could be won decisively was Parliament.

His Ancient Monuments Bill of 1873 proposed sweeping Government powers

to confiscate any prehistoric site deemed at risk from uncaring owners.

It was a revolutionary proposal.

As a Liberal, perhaps he felt

that he could challenge the whole notion of property rights,

but the Tories certainly weren't having it

and many Liberals weren't either.

And the notion that, in some way, the state could intervene

and could possible take from a freeborn Englishman his property

was anathema, it really was.

For eight long years, Lubbock tried and failed to get his bill through.

By the 1880s, backbench wags were even calling it

the "monumentally ancient bill".

Then, at last, in July 1882,

the bill was voted into law.

But victory had come at a price.

The original bill had been hopelessly watered down.

When the bill was eventually passed,

it'd lost its edge, because it had lost the element of compulsion.

And without compulsion, it was nothing, really.

Because what it meant was

that people had to voluntarily give their monuments to the Government.

The new act listed 68 prehistoric sites

the Government wanted to take over.

Lubbock knew it was going to be a challenge.

But he also knew just the man for the job.

Britain's first Inspector of Ancient Monuments

was to be Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers,

a retired soldier turned archaeologist.

His mission - to persuade owners

to hand over their prehistoric structures

in return for the Government taking on the cost of repairs.

Using the rapidly expanding rail network to crisscross the country,

Pitt Rivers and his team set out on their tricky mission.

And as they travelled the country,

they recorded the look and condition of every monument they visited.

TRAIN WHISTLES

The records they compiled have only recently come to light.

Here we have an album which is titled Our Ancient Monuments.

Most of the album is made up

of these watercolour images

and also the site plans.

In a number of examples,

we have members of the team

who were depicted actually in the field.

The sheer number of sites and monuments which he visited

and also worked on and surveyed is immense.

Pitt Rivers and his team travelled the length and breadth of Britain.

From Kent to Cumbria,

from Newport, in Wales,

to the Hebridean Isle of Lewis,

photographing, drawing, painting.

And there were even cork models

showing how monuments sat in the landscape.

The sites range from sort of cairns,

to sort of dolmens, to chamber tombs.

And so, the documentation that we have here,

the models and the watercolours and the site plans and the photographs,

I think is to show the historic condition

and to show how vulnerable it was, really,

to names been scratched into the stones

and to other forms of damage.

The first monument Pitt Rivers visited,

a Neolithic burial site in Kent, known as Kit's Coty,

was already badly defaced by graffiti.

But its owner willingly surrendered control to the Government.

It was a good start, but, almost immediately,

the complications of heritage became apparent.

When Pitt Rivers asked for money to erect protective railings,

still standing today,

the Treasury kicked up a fuss.

The bill was just £100.

In the first year,

24 monument across England, Scotland and Wales

were taken into the protective custody of the Government,

safe for ever from the hands of unsympathetic owners.

But, after the first year,

the rate of monuments handed over slowed to a trickle

as landowners showed their contempt for the act.

Worst of all, Stonehenge remained in private hands

and seriously at risk.

The rubbish left by Victorian picnickers

encouraged rats and rabbits,

which undermined the monument.

One of the uprights had fallen over

and a lintel had broken in two.

Within a few years, it would be up for sale for just £125,000

amidst rumours of it being shipped overseas.

Pitt Rivers felt powerless.

He found it terribly, terribly frustrating

that he was given this highfalutin title,

Inspector of Ancient Monuments,

he was given a budget that was totally inadequate

and he was endlessly arguing with the Treasury about it.

But, despite all that, he really couldn't make an impact.

It was a bit of a poisoned chalice, to be honest.

And, in the end, he more or less gave up, disillusioned.

And when Pitt Rivers died in May 1900,

nobody even bothered to appoint a replacement inspector.

The parliamentary initiative had failed.

The heritage movement seemed over before it had begun.

But for the ideas of heritage to get a hold,

it would need to gain support beyond Parliament.

It would need a prophet to win hearts and minds.

In fact, it already had one

in the form of Victorian art critic and aesthete John Ruskin.

Ruskin was speaking, I think, in a new way

and seeing buildings as part of a national culture

and suggesting that no one generation

has the right to destroy or to alter,

that historic buildings belong to a future.

With Ruskin, the idea of what we now call Heritage begins

and he was the first person to say, effectively, publicly,

"We do not own these things.

"They belong," he says, "partly to the people who made them

"and partly to the people who come after us.

"And we are just custodians and we have to think very carefully

"about what we're going to do with them while they are in our hands."

Ruskin grew up on the outskirts of south London.

His father was a successful wine importer.

But it was a family with intellectual and philanthropic interests.

But the Britain of Ruskin's early years was changing fast

and, by the mid-19th century,

there was industrialisation and urban expansion

on a scale never before seen.

To Ruskin, it seemed as though Britain had taken a wrong turning

to embrace ugliness and deprivation.

It's almost hard now to imagine the impact it had.

I mean, we all have some sort of vision of dark satanic mills

and smoke and railways,

but this was such a sudden, dramatic, huge change in human life,

human endeavour, human history and our common culture.

It truly ripped people away from the countryside, from rural values,

it urbanised people in a way that was...

at the speed of an express train.

TRAIN WHISTLES

Ruskin realised that the landscape,

the built environment represents memory,

and memory was something that shouldn't be lost.

Ruskin saw a world that was going to lose its memory,

lose its texture, lose its essence, in some way.

So he was revolutionary,

but that revolution involved turning back to the past

and using the past as a way of stabilising the present.

Ruskin spread his gospels through a string of books

and packed lecture tours.

And he went even further,

preaching that unlimited industrialisation

would result in catastrophe.

What he talked about then fiercely was the fact that now we had to act.

Our buildings are being spoiled by, basically, pollution,

we were breathing filthy air.

And as he gave those lectures

and as the newspapers said the man's a nutter,

he's an idiot, he's a fool, he's dangerous, he's a radical,

what history tells us is fascinating,

is that he was absolutely spot-on.

Ruskin also forged a link between the environment and politics,

arguing Britain's cities were out of control because, as he put it,

"We want one man to be always thinking

"and another to be always working.

"And we call one a gentleman

"and the other an operative,

"whereas the workman ought often to be thinking

"and the thinker often to be working."

What he saw was that, as the Industrial Revolution moved on,

combined with a political economy that was ruthlessly capitalistic,

where money mattered most of all,

the profit motive mattered more than anything to do

with the heart or the soul or the spirit,

that old buildings, old customs,

old ways of living would just be swept away.

Karl Marx, of course, was talking about the same thing in different words at the same time.

THUNDER CRASHES

In some ways, Ruskin's radicalism went even further than Marx.

He believed it was the right of everyone

to live in a beautiful setting.

And fulfilling his own prophecy,

Ruskin would repair to the Lake District.

He bought a humble Georgian cottage overlooking Coniston Water,

which he hugely, and not very beautifully, extended.

Here, he would come to think about the things that mattered

and try to escape the encroaching Industrial Age.

Brantwood was really the place that Ruskin almost fled to

to skip celebrity.

In his 50s, he had become celebrated

but also, in a way, pursued by the demons of his own creation,

his commentaries on social justice and so forth.

And he needed to come back to nature,

to come back to the environment,

that, in a way, had been the wellspring of all those ideas

and inspiration in his youth.

He'd been not to Brantwood specifically,

but to this field down in front of the house as an 18-year-old,

and sat and drawn the landscape opposite.

So it was somewhere he knew.

And the Lakes, of course, represented the heritage of Wordsworth,

the Romantics, the Picturesque movement

the great landscape tradition of British art,

all of the things that Ruskin absorbed in his youth.

It was here Ruskin entertained sympathetic friends.

Darwin came to supper three times.

But, even here, Ruskin fell prey to fits of gloom,

overwhelmed by the immensity of all that was wrong with the world.

So this is Ruskin's bedroom.

It's really the smallest little room in the house,

right on the age of the 18th-century cottage.

And a single bed, which reminds you, in a way,

of just how single and lonely Ruskin was,

but surrounded by the glorious colour of his Turner watercolours.

These were the most precious and prized paintings that he had,

that and a painting by his father,

which was particularly special to him.

So it's a room loaded from the beginning

with a certain emotional symbolism

and it was also a room that became, for Ruskin,

the centre of the breakdown that he had

when he had been here for six years.

And the room became a place, in a sense,

both of fear as well deep emotion to him,

and he wasn't able to sleep in here in later years as a result of that.

One thing he did use throughout that period

was the wonderful turret that he built on the corner of the bedroom,

because he converted this small, dark little Lakeland room

into a room that looks out, in a sense, on infinity.

And Ruskin needed a beacon,

a distant and romantic cause,

free from the confusion of chaotic Britain,

where arguments would crystallise

around absolute beauty facing total destruction.

And he found it in Venice.

A place he called "the golden city".

In Venice, the great questions about the past,

the present and the future collided.

It was simple - if nothing was done, Venice would be lost.

As Ruskin wrote, "The rate at which Venice is going

"is about that of a lump of sugar in tea."

So he made Venice the first conservation crisis

of the modern age.

And he went further.

History had to be saved in the right way

or it was worse than doing nothing at all.

Already, one of the city's most spectacular medieval buildings

had been changed for ever

by an overzealous and fanciful restoration.

If you look at before and after photographs

of the Fondaco dei Turchi,

you see a building which is turned into a kind of...

a bleached skeleton of a building.

"It was unforgivable," as Ruskin put it,

"to lose a building's golden stain of time."

Ruskin actually says that restoration is a lie,

that you cannot restore a building.

All you can do is prop it up...

..if you want to actually preserve its essence.

Now, that is a very, very radical position

and it's not a very practical one

because, obviously, buildings, you know, keep having to be repaired.

But that has the key difference between the 19th-century desire

to restore, according to certain imaginary principles,

and the Ruskinian principle, which is much more the modern principle,

is that you conserve...

and, if possible, your conservation is actually reversible.

For the first time, Ruskin was making the treatment of old

and fragile buildings a moral issue.

Making it an absolute responsibility to get history right.

In Britain, there had always been people who cared passionately about the past.

They were called antiquaries.

The problem was their grasp on history was often...shaky.

18th-century enthusiasts for Stonehenge

got the date wrong by several thousand years

and incorrectly attributed it to the Druids...

..but at least antiquaries knew the past mattered -

a bigger problem was their habit of trophy-hunting.

What better souvenir than a chip off the old monument itself?

The idea that historic things

should remain in the place from which it came

was still not the view taken by a lot of people.

There was a, kind of, going round and shoving into your satchels

things that you found

but, you know, that attitude is incredibly prevalent.

I always think of the Indiana Jones movies when, you know,

Indiana Jones was plunging into some temple and grabs an idol

and says, "This should be in a museum!"

and puts it in his bag, and off he goes.

In Holborn, in central London,

is the house of architect Sir John Soane.

It is still home to his great collection of ancient artefacts

and curiosities, many of them taken from historical sites.

It shows what Ruskin was up against

because, even for a brilliant man like Soane,

when it came to treasures and great monuments,

he had more of a passion for shopping

than a sense of place or authenticity.

All around are little, you know, rather resonant fragments

of Roman antiquities or, in this case,

you know, possibly even a little Egyptian piece -

probably a leg of a great throne or altar.

And then, coming round, you have a selection of friezes

and a selection of Greek and Roman busts as well -

all perched on the balustrade - and you look down and there is,

possibly, Soane's most splendid acquisition,

the sarcophagus of the Egyptian King Seti I,

about 3,000 years old...

..and then in the colonnade yet more trophies,

and a particular favourite is this splendid idol.

It's a statue of Diana of Ephesus

in this strange, sort of, quasi-Oriental garb.

A very splendid thing that Soane acquired in the 1820s

and he was inordinately proud of it.

The generation before Ruskin

revelled in its dilettante attitudes.

The first great collectors,

even in the way they organised their treasures,

had a different attitude from the one we know today.

During that period, what an object looked like and how it made you feel

was absolutely as important as what it actually was.

People were not so bothered by how old something was.

What they wanted to do was to use these objects

to create romantic interiors, which concerned the past

but which were not historical reconstructions.

Well, here we are in the Monk's Parlour,

in the basement of Sir John Soane's Museum.

And this is a very atmospheric room

that was devised by Sir John Soane in 1824,

and he created here a very strange room

which he used as a kind of sanctuary, shall we say,

for the medieval and Gothic objects that he'd acquired.

Indeed, I think the only practical use

to which we know this room was ever put,

he used to have people to tea here,

but otherwise it is a completely frivolous thing.

Ruskin was determined to overturn such attitudes

but it would fall to a more pragmatic disciple

to achieve results.

William Morris was a painter, textile designer

and libertarian socialist.

A supporter of the Arts and Crafts movement,

he looked for practical ways

of reconciling history and modernity.

And in an increasingly machine age,

he set himself against factories and mass production,

which he believed diminished people and their creativity.

Hand made was best, medieval craft skills the very best.

One summer day he set off from his home on the Cotswolds

in a horse and trap.

For Morris, any Cotswolds jaunt was an inspiration -

the finest in vernacular architecture to enjoy.

He could not know he was set on a collision course

with a Cotswold cleric.

Today, the fine medieval church of St John the Baptist in Burford,

on the Oxfordshire-Gloucestershire border, looks peaceful enough

but, not for the first or last time, a Church of England figure

had taken ancient architecture into his own inexpert hands.

Morrison's driving around the countryside near Kelmscott one day

and he sees at Burford Church, this was in 1876,

the vicar undertaking a part-demolition of the building

and he tries to find out what's going on, and he even goes inside

and sees the vicar removing some of the painted walls,

the medieval wall paintings from the interior of the church.

And he demands to know what's going on, and the vicar is said to have

replied, "This, sir, is my church and I can do what I like in it.

"I can even stand on my head, if I want to."

And Morris is so outraged

at the thought that people are having this attitude towards buildings

that they have inherited from the past

that he decides something must be done about it.

Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings -

SPAB, for short.

It was Britain's first effective pressure group

devoted to saving old buildings.

SPAB sent emissaries out across Britain

to identify buildings at risk.

It held public meetings to protest against overzealous restoration

and, most importantly, it supervised sympathetic rescue work

in a manner Ruskin would have approved.

It's important to remember that

S-P-A-B stands for the Society for the PROTECTION

of Ancient Buildings,

not the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. And...

what he, Morris, saw

was ancient buildings being given makeovers,

literally, by...

..ingenious amateurs who...

literally, scraped everything off the...

any evidence of the past was scraped away, everything was made to look

as new and nice as possible,

and he regarded this as... as, essentially,

the destruction of the evidence of time.

You can still see really horrible examples of this in churches

all over the country, where they scraped off the plaster,

thinking that the stone would be more authentic but, of course, it isn't.

I mean, that kind of rubble stone looks really rough

because the builders never intended it to be seen.

And a lot of the plaster they were scraping off was medieval,

and some of it had the remains of medieval wall paintings.

The SPAB approach is still practised today

as one of the most sensitive ways of dealing with an old building.

At a terraced house in Waterloo, south London,

owner and SPAB consultant Stephen Bull

remains true to William Morris's principles.

The SPAB ethos is that everything should be reversible

and you should be using materials which are sympathetic to the build.

When you start using modern cement, then it's really detrimental

to the structure of the building. It just...

The two should not really go together.

If we have a look at the doorframe, for example,

the doorframe has been damaged over a number of years.

So, what we've done here is, instead of using any modern fillers,

we've put inserts of timber in.

You know, they look lovely and they are perfect.

You know, you couldn't get a better finish on that, really.

These are the handmade nails

and what William Morris wanted, more than anything else,

was just to have that simple handmade nail

that's made by craftsmen.

And when you look at it, it's a thing of beauty.

You know, we're not using nail guns here and we're not talking about...

kind of, sabre saws. I mean, everything has its place

but I do draw the line at a nail gun and I think there's something

humble about a handmade nail and applying it with a hammer.

I mean, you couldn't get more basic than that.

As far as the works we're doing here at the moment,

it's essential that the house is put back into good heart

and it's a real priority to me that we are using

the materials as near as possible to the way it was actually built.

So, it's a repair that we're doing here -

we're not doing a restoration, we're doing a conservation and repair.

If I just show you the door knocker on the outside... We don't want

to replace this. This is part of the history of the house.

It has so many bashes on that, that every mark tells a story

and I've got great affection towards this door knocker.

Everyone says, "Well, why don't you replace it with a new one?"

To me, this is absolutely fabulous.

The last few decades of the 19th century

saw more urban expansion and more pressure groups springing up.

One in particular, though not directly concerned with old buildings,

would help shape the birth of the heritage movement.

The Commons Preservation Society

was dedicated to saving urban green open spaces

from being built on.

Influential in the movement was the formidable

figure of Miss Octavia Hill.

As the Bishop of London said of her, "She spoke for half an hour.

"I never had such a beating in all my life."

Born to a family of Victorian philanthropists,

Hill began her life's mission buying a row of tenement houses

and setting herself up as a landlady with a conscience.

Her philosophy on housing was very much that people needed decent places to live

and needed then to take responsibility for those decent places to live.

So, she had no hesitation in throwing people out who didn't look after

their houses and who didn't work,

and who were idle or inappropriate tenants, but if they did work

and they did take responsibility, she was an incredibly good landlord,

and she knew all her tenants intimately by name,

she took interest in them, she tried to get jobs for the children,

and to give them a sense of, you know, decent lives.

She was quite remarkable for her time,

you know, dealing with people in a way that women simply didn't.

Even today, Hill inspires a devoted following.

In Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire, Hill's birthplace,

another performance of An Evening With Octavia Hill is about to begin.

Linda Ekins, Jo Sherry and Lorraine Carver

assume the identities of Hill, her sister and a close friend.

You were a bit emotional then, weren't you?

I know, I had to write her another letter

to explain why I was in such a state, so that she wouldn't worry.

Seeing the letters, I found that I could actually get an insight

into her personality and the characters that she interacted with.

You know, these poor people would benefit from open spaces,

to help them feel human.

I think she was a selfless person who saw a need

and knew what to do about it, and went ahead and did it.

I think we want four things -

places to sit in, places to play in,

places to stroll in and places to spend a day in.

When it came to doing something that she was passionate about,

when she was campaigning, when she was writing letters,

when she was meeting people and talking about the things

that she wanted to do, she didn't stand for any nonsense.

"Give the fountain, you who will have the sea, plant the plane trees,

"place the seats, you, to whom the woodlands will soon be accessible.

"You, who know that soon, below your feet,

"will lie stretched the whole expanse of the sunlighted plain

"and over whose head will bend the great space of fair summer sky.

"I am, sir, yours truly, Octavia Hill."

The biggest battles were inevitably in the most overcrowded cities,

so the battle to save inner London green spaces was the toughest.

Hill lost her fight to save Swiss Cottage Fields,

but she resolved to fight harder.

She managed to save, in London,

Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields from development and, today,

those are two hugely loved areas.

Visitors to London can hardly imagine Hampstead Heath not being there.

When Octavia Hill started trying to save Hampstead Heath,

she was widely felt to be getting in the way of capitalist progress.

She was doing something terrible, but she believed very strongly

that there was such a thing as philanthropy.

The humorous magazine Punch depicted Hill's Open Spaces

campaign showing the urban poor in rapture.

Not to Hill herself,

but the rather more seductive figure of Nature personified.

Such successes spurred her on.

On 16 November 1893,

at the offices of the Commons Preservation Society

in Great College Street, Westminster, Octavia Hill,

together with Lake District cleric Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley

and post office solicitor Robert Hunter,

hosted a meeting for the great and the good.

Their aim - to set up an organisation that would address

the plight of historic sites and natural scenery.

It would be called the National Trust.

THUNDER CRASHES

Today, we associate the trust with country houses.

At the start, its focus was more radical -

to loosen the stranglehold of private ownership on the countryside

and increase public access.

One of the trust's first big campaigns was to save

part of the Lake District from development.

Brandelhow on the shores of Derwentwater in Cumbria.

There is nothing a hot bath can't sort out here, is there?

In order to acquire the Brandelhow Park in the Lake District,

the trust needed to raise about £6,500 in about six months.

They took their rattling cans to the cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds,

and they were gathering donations from ordinary working people

who were desperate to have places to go tramping at the weekend.

They received money, lots of money, this way.

That is the site of Manesty salt well

and this was in continuous use as a spa, believe it or not.

I should imagine, on a nice day, it would look...

To relax and look around, but, on a day like today, perhaps not.

Octavia Hill, together with Rawnsley and Hunter,

used the Lake District campaign to put the National Trust on the map.

-It's gorgeous, isn't it?

-It meets the eye.

You come round that bend and, suddenly,

you are presented with this magnificent view.

It takes a bit of imagination on a day like this.

So far, so good.

In addition to the support from factory workers and miners,

there was backing from the most influential, too,

not least in the shape of Queen Victoria's daughter Princess Louise.

It was an early example of how the cause of heritage can make for unexpected bedfellows.

Here we are. We are surrounded by four oak trees.

They each represent one of the three founding members

of the National Trust, plus Princess Louise, who was here

when Brandelhow woods were handed over to the National Trust.

She was part of that ceremony.

Brandelhow was safe.

The infant National Trust was all about landscape,

but then, almost by accident, buildings were on the agenda.

From a small church in Sussex, an anxious vicar put pen to paper.

He had begged the trust to rescue a broken-down medieval building

known locally as Alfriston Clergy House.

The trust was keen.

It represented another rapidly disappearing part of the landscape -

the rural domestic dwelling.

There was this real sense of the vernacular buildings being lost.

Alfriston Clergy House was strongly felt to

be in need of saving.

It was in terrible condition.

The baby National Trust was able to buy it for £10.

It has cost a lot more since then, I can tell you.

Alongside the open spaces was this strong sense of the importance

of vernacular architecture and nobody else being able to save it.

The National Trust would choose its now world-famous oak leaf symbol

from a finely carved detail on one of the building's medieval timbers.

But, alas, not many buildings or open spaces came as cheap as £10.

Five years after the trust was formed, its membership

and its resources were still pitifully small.

A new century dawned.

Queen Victoria died in 1901, and the era promised change

and modernity. Time to forget the past and look ahead.

Across the Atlantic, a young and vibrant economy was on the rise.

In America, self-made millionaires were in the mood to found

a dynasty or two.

What better way than going shopping in ye olde England!

There were plenty of people keen to sell.

Ancient architectural features and half-timbered medieval buildings

were bought up and shipped across to the States.

The cause of British heritage was in need of a new champion.

Not this time a backbench MP hampered by Parliament,

nor the well-meaning folk of charitable pressure groups,

but a heavyweight.

Enter the former Viceroy of India

and High Tory, Lord Curzon of Kedleston.

Nathaniel George Curzon had enjoyed a typically harsh

but privileged aristocratic childhood.

His superior bearing even inspired poetry.

'My name is George Nathaniel Curzon. I am a most superior person.

'My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,

'I dine at Blenheim twice a week.'

Curzon had been Viceroy from 1899 to 1905 and, in those six years,

he had enjoyed absolute power over the lives of more people than

any other ruler on Earth.

In his time in India, he also worked tirelessly to save beautiful

and ancient structures all over India,

including the Taj Mahal.

Curzon had introduced into India

protections that didn't exist in England.

When he left, as Viceroy, Nehru was to say of him,

"After memories of all the other viceroys have vanished,

"Curzon will be remembered because he cared for all that is beautiful in India."

Back in Britain, it wasn't long before Curzon's blood was up.

One of the most important buildings in the country was in peril.

The rare and wonderful brick-built medieval castle at Tattershall

in Lincolnshire was up for sale, and the Americans were sniffing round.

Tattershall had been in decline for centuries.

It had even been used as a cowshed and, by the 20th century,

the moats been filled in.

The castle keep was pretty much all that was left

and demolition looked likely.

But its greatest treasures were still intact -

the huge medieval fireplaces, with their fine carving.

In 1910, the castle came up for sale.

An American syndicate looked interested

and one American buyer bought the fireplaces.

They were torn out and hacked up,

ready to be shipped to the United States.

We're not sure what was going to happen to the rest of the castle.

One story was that one of these American gentleman wanted it

dismantled brick by brick

and transported to the States, which I think would have been quite

an undertaking, given the size of the building.

Letters appeared in the Times newspaper.

There was still a chance to buy back the castle.

But the infant National trust couldn't afford it.

It was Curzon's moment to raise the conscience of the British Establishment.

Lord Curzon stepped in at the last minute.

He, literally, was given a 24-hour window of opportunity,

after which the fireplaces were gone

and the castle would no longer be available.

He paid the princely sum of £2,750 for the castle

and the eight acres of land.

Although the fire surrounds had already been carted away,

Curzon was determined to intercept them and bring them back.

He used his power as an MP, some say, to have all the docks

and the harbours in the country watched and monitored.

It was all very elusive and dark and sinister what had happened to them.

At the 11th hour, the fire surrounds were discovered in a mews

in the East End of London and brought back to the castle.

They were paraded triumphantly through Tattershall village

to much local rejoicing.

Curzon felt at last the time had come for Parliament to take effective action.

Curzon, more or less single-handedly,

guided through Parliament a bill that was intended to stop

the desecration of a building like Tattershall Castle ever happening again.

In March 1913, the Ancient Monuments and Amendments Act was passed,

giving the Government real powers to act when ancient monuments

and medieval buildings were at risk.

Curzon's bill - and I think it was his bill -

enabled the Government, through a complex procedure, to step in

and prevent a private owner from desecrating an ancient monument.

Of course, it reintroduced the idea of compulsion.

The idea that was originally in Lubbock's act and had been biffed

by everybody in Parliament because they thought it was intolerable.

That was put back in. That was a very big change.

Appropriately, John Lubbock,

the MP who had started it all lived to see the bill become law,

dying just two months later.

As he had always wanted,

now landowners who abused the ancient monuments and medieval buildings in their care

could be forced to repair them or be fined.

Unpaid fines could even lead to imprisonment.

At last, Britain had taken steps to protect its heritage. Even so,

the legislation excluded anything built later than the medieval age

and any inhabited building.

Some people saw it as little more than a ruins charter,

but, at last, the freedom to do what you liked as a landowner was over.

In next week's programme, the clever men from the Ministry

who put the Ancient Monuments Act into practice after World War I...

..the revolutionary impact of the motorised lawnmower...

..the fight to save the English country house...

and Hitler's plan to destroy Britain's best buildings.

To find out how English Heritage is celebrating 100 years

of protecting the past, visit...

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd