Episode 1 Built in Britain

Britain faces an almighty challenge

and to get a sense of just how big it is,

you've got to start at the top.

Oh, crumbs!

'This is the Forth Road Bridge, just north of Edinburgh.'

Here you want to hold on.

'It looks magnificent, but key parts of it are wearing out.'

And in the waters of the Forth below me,

they're just laying the foundations for a brand new bridge.

All over Britain it's the same story.

Much of the civil engineering that holds our country together

is no longer up to the job.

You see, Britain needs more than just a lick of paint,

it needs some serious work.

It won't be easy, it won't be cheap,

but if we're ambitious for our future,

there's no better time to get on

with the job of building it than right now.

So I'm out to discover why infrastructure

is suddenly a hot topic.

I'll show you how we've rediscovered

the knack of pulling off those really big projects

and we'll see what lessons our history can teach us today.

In this series I'll be lifting the lid

on the stunning engineering that's transforming Britain.

I'll be finding out what still needs to be done,

and how on earth we're going to do it.

Tucked away in a narrow corner of West London,

in the shadow of the A40, is a remarkable project.

It busts a myth, that Britain can't pull off epic engineering.

This is one of the most ambitious, most complex,

most expensive infrastructure projects

you'll find pretty well anywhere.

This is just one site of Crossrail,

the new East-West railway, right across London.

Now, to get the measure of it,

I've got an appointment with Phyllis,

and I'm told she's not to be messed with.

Phyllis is one of Crossrail's eight vast tunnel boring machines,

which are about to worm their way under London.

She's from Germany, she carries quite a lot of weight,

and she costs £10 million.

But for that you get a lot of tunnelling.

'It's only when you see her teeth

'that you realise just what she's capable of.'

We've arrived at a bit of a moment actually,

cos you've got this tunnel boring machine,

weighs 1,000 tonnes, 150 metres long,

just a few centimetres of clearance above it,

and they've got to slowly inch it down

towards the point at which it's actually going to dig.

If you thought washing up liquid was just for the kitchen, think again.

Phyllis and her colleague, Ada, are heading beneath Paddington Station,

under Hyde Park, below the tightly packed streets of London's West End

and out to Farringdon to the East.

It's the big tunnelling drive for what will be

the new fast line across London when it opens in 2018.

You can talk about Crossrail being

the biggest construction programme in Europe.

It's £14.8 billion, we're digging 50 kilometres of tunnels under London,

and if you get on a train at Maidenhead and get off at Shenfield,

then that's about 120km long, so this is...this is as big as they get.

And as I enter the tunnel to see Phyllis in operation,

I'm left in no doubt what an extraordinary machine she is.

Boy, you can really feel the temperature has warmed up!

Even though we're only about 50 metres in.

'Steve Parker is the construction manager for this stretch of Crossrail's tunnels.'

This is just so enormous,

I'd no idea that one machine could be so big, it's incredible.

And there, right in front of me, is the back of the cutter head itself.

Think about what it's doing, it's carving out soil

that probably hasn't seen the light of day since the earth was created.

The cutter head scythes its way through the clay.

Behind it, tunnel engineers build a ring

made up of eight concrete segments,

slotted into place to within a millimetre's precision.

When that's done,

the machine braces itself against the ring it's just built,

and pushes forward to start the process again.

It's amazingly fast, how fast we're moving,

what 100 metres, 100 metres a week?

I'd like to think we could tunnel that,

because we're looking at a long average,

the long average 100 metres a week,

so to get the high outputs we need certain months, weeks,

with a higher output than that.

But what's amazing is, you're doing...

we're sitting out here, when it's all up and running

there'll be another one next door, being done at the same speed,

and then there'll be other ones dotted around

building other pieces of Crossrail simultaneously.

Yes, there's another, on Crossrail there are eight machines in total.

But this isn't just engineering for engineering's sake.

Phyllis is on a much bigger mission.

'There's news today about the new Victoria Walthamstow Underground.

'Tunnelling has begun at a number of places.

'The line will take five years to complete.'

When people tunnelled under London in the past,

they did it for a reason - to enable the city to keep growing.

'London must have people moving about in it freely,

'movement which is as vital to its life,

'as the circulation of the blood is vital to the human body.'

Today, the city is growing faster than ever.

The population's expected to rise

by nearly 2 million in the next 20 years.

That is the real driving force behind Crossrail.

So while London works and sleeps and parties,

the new stations are taking shape.

And Phyllis and Ada are on a mission

to ensure the capital can continue to grow.

I confess I love these big engineering projects.

I've even stolen a ball of clay as a souvenir.

I'll make a little ashtray out of it.

We used to be world leaders at this,

and we can clearly still do it when we put our minds to it.

And here's my thought,

should we be doing a lot more of this kind of work?

Now, I know I'm biased, because I like it,

but isn't there a case

for investing two or three times as much in infrastructure?

Simply to get Britain ready for the future.

You see, infrastructure is all around us,

it's the roads we drive on,

the lines we commute on,

and the energy that powers us.

Its what makes Britain tick.

And it's the flavour of the month right now,

all our main political parties say we need more of it.

But why?

Well, our problem right now is that our infrastructure

hasn't kept up with the changes that have been occurring around us.

In fact, some of it is wearing out.

My goodness, what a view!

Little diddy train going over the Forth Rail Bridge.

Here on the Firth of Forth just north of Edinburgh,

it's not the iconic Victorian rail bridge that's the problem,

but the 20th Century road bridge.

And its story is a neat little tale

about how our infrastructure was once world class,

but hasn't kept pace with the changing world.

Back in the post-war years there was no road bridge here.

NEWSREEL: 'Instead there was a ferry,

'a slow and cumbersome substitute in an age of speed.'

But that was a problem for the Scottish economy.

The crossing was a vital link between Edinburgh

and the north of Scotland,

and plenty of time was wasted waiting for the boat to come in.

Though some found a way to while away the hours.

'The queues of cars, longer each year,

'were a visible argument of the need for a new bridge - a road bridge.'

So, in the late '50s, construction started on a new road bridge,

in a rather different era for health and safety.

At the time, it was the biggest outside America,

a symbol of Britain's skill at civil engineering.

But here's the problem -

the bridge was built with capacity for 12 million vehicles a year,

it seemed like a wild over-estimate back in the 1950s.

But it hit that number 25 years ago.

Today, the bridge carries more than 24 million vehicles a year,

and it's showing the strain.

The constant maintenance work is once again causing delays.

So what are the kinds of problems

you're finding on this bridge now?

Corrosion in the main cable is an issue for us,

but the deck itself has suffered with the heavy goods vehicles

that have been passing over it every year,

and we need to replace joints and components of the deck,

which unfortunately means carriageway closures.

And it's seen as such a critical piece of infrastructure,

it's probably worth about £2 billion

to the Scottish economy each year,

so if this is out of action,

then the Scottish economy is severely hit.

The Scottish government's decided

it can't keep patching and mending the old bridge,

and so it's starting anew.

Soon, there'll be three bridges here,

19th Century, 20th Century, and 21st.

The great news is that British bridge building

has moved on since the 1950s,

and the new crossing will be a cable-stayed design,

where the load is spread across multiple cables,

rather than the two on the old suspension bridge.

The advantages of a cable-stayed bridge is it is stiffer.

It's also easier to maintain.

Because each of the individual cables that make the structure

can be taken out and replaced while the bridge operates.

I mean, when you imagine that it's three kilometres

from bank to bank, and the structure is this ribbon,

five metres depth from one end to the other,

of continuous geometry, absolutely beautiful.

In the last few months, the vast caissons have arrived,

the big cylinders which they'll sink into the Forth,

to enable construction of the towers for the new bridge.

They're the first pieces

of Scotland's biggest infrastructure project for a generation.

But there's another thing going for it too.

Although it'll cost £1.5 billion,

it's a useful fillip to the local economy at a difficult time.

# From the rocky canyon where the Columbia River rose... #

Ever since America built vast projects like this,

the Grand Coulee Dam,

during the great depression of the 1930s,

infrastructure has been seen

as one of the most effective ways of creating jobs.

# ..Just about the biggest thing that man has ever done. #

Many believe that the historical lesson applies today,

and Britain should be digging her way out of a slump.

There's a big argument over that,

whether we should build things to boost the economy.

In any event, these projects aren't a quick fix,

it's taken five years to get the new Forth Bridge to where it is today,

directly employing 1,200 people.

I wouldn't argue that we should go around building bridges and tunnels

simply to create jobs for construction workers.

But, if you know you've got to build one anyway,

doing so at a time when there are unemployed construction workers,

and when the economy is in the doldrums,

well, that makes an awful lot of sense.

The simple fact is, there's an awful lot more than bridge building to do,

given the changes unfolding around us.

Our population is growing fast,

we're set to hit 70 million by 2030.

In the late 1970s one in four of us worked in manufacturing.

Today, it's fewer than one in ten.

Climate change is threatening the infrastructure we already have.

And large chunks of our power network

are reaching the end of the line.

Yes, our fusty old country is in fact fast changing,

and our infrastructure has to keep up.

All our main political parties agree we need more infrastructure,

and that we should pay for it

through a mix of both public and private money.

But how much is that going to cost?

I've come to Oxford, to see the economist professor Dieter Helm,

one of Britain's best infrastructure brains,

for a frank assessment of how much we need to do.

We've changed,

and you can't simply expect Britain,

to roll forward 20, 30 years,

add another 10 million people,

and say, "Well, you can make do with the roads we've got today,

"the airports we've got today, and all the rest of that infrastructure."

Right, if you wanted to put a figure on how much

we should spend on infrastructure,

what's the scale of it?

I totted up the total cost of the commitments

in government programmes for investment,

or government-driven programmes for investment,

in water, energy, telecoms, and transport.

So no houses, no schools, none of those things.

And I just added up the numbers,

and they came to a staggering 500 billion,

i.e., half a trillion, by 2020.

Now, you have to let that number sink in,

and it doesn't matter if it's wrong by 100 billion in either direction,

it's still an enormous number,

and it gives you a measure of the gap between the aspiration

and the sad reality of the position we find ourselves in.

What happens if we don't do anything,

what happens if we just carry on as we are,

don't take any big decisions?

If we just stick our heads in the sand and do nothing,

then it isn't going to be a pretty sight going forward.

And the British economy is not going to be in a fit state

to take on all those other countries

which are confronting these problems.

And it's a process of gradual, insipid decline.

That's the consequence of not facing up to the issue.

You can see why a chancellor

wouldn't necessarily want to borrow heavily

from the frazzled debt markets right now,

but infrastructure is not all government spending,

it can be public or private.

What is true, is that in the end it's us who have to foot the bill,

either as consumers or taxpayers.

500 billion pounds sounds scary,

but think about it, over 10 years

it's just a bit more than 3% of our economy,

and spend it well,

and it'll make your economy bigger than it would have been anyway.

No, my point is, don't we need to spend more

to give our economy space to respond to change,

to give it room to dodge whatever punches are thrown at it?

To keep it flexible?

Above all I should say, to allow it to respond to the changes

that have always occurred and will occur

to the nature of the economy itself.

Here's the really tricky bit about infrastructure,

none of us know what direction our economy will take

in the next few decades, but we still have to prepare for it now.

So we're bound to get a lot wrong.

Just as they did in the past.

This is Kielder Water in Northumberland,

the biggest man-made reservoir in Northern Europe.

It's a beautiful part of the landscape of North East England,

but it is just 30 years old this year.

Back in the 1960s, there was no reservoir here,

just a picturesque valley.

NEWSREEL: 'The North Tyne valley.

'Not pretty, exactly, but abrasively beautiful,

'in that un-self-conscious northern way.'

But demand for water was rising,

and there soon wouldn't be enough

to feed the furnaces of the North East's factories.

So they found the best site for rain catchment...

..moved out the people...

and in the mid '70s, the diggers moved in.

'The lake, seven miles long and four miles wide,

'would be bigger than Ulswater.'

By 1982, it was ready for its grand opening.

So, 20 years of planning,

seven years of construction, and the reservoir was ready

to meet the water needs of the heavy industry of the North East.

Just one hitch. By the time of the recession of the 1980s,

there was much less of that industry than anyone had expected.

All of a sudden, this beautiful place was a white elephant.

The world outside had changed even more quickly than the valley.

Kielder is a monument to the way the British economy

has evolved in recent times.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have built it.

You'll always get forecasts wrong,

that's in the nature of infrastructure.

Think of it as an insurance policy which didn't get used.

Heidi Mottram is the Chief Executive of Kielder's owner,

Northumbrian Water.

My feeling about that, this is a long-term game,

water resource planning, you know.

It's only 30 years, that's a blink of an eyelid really

in terms of, I think, how populations grow and develop.

So, yes, undoubtedly that heavy industry did wane.

But you know, there may come a time when things change around,

population changes around, you know,

as we think about the way we want to use our country differently.

So I think you have to think of these things in terms of

sort of hundreds of years not necessarily 30 years.

There is one other idea, instead of moving the water down south,

you could move the people up north.

Well, that's one where I do think

we should seriously give that some thought.

This is not only a very beautiful part of the country,

in which we live with a fantastic quality of life,

but it can welcome, you know, the industries that need this resource,

it can welcome additional population growth,

and that's got to be, I think,

a sensible, sustainable thing to do, hasn't it?

To, you know, use the assets that you've got in the best possible way.

The lesson of Kielder

is that the world sometimes changes faster than infrastructure can.

But that doesn't mean we should do nothing.

Instead we should appreciate

that infrastructure needs to give us options.

Room for manoeuvre in the future.

A really interesting question to ask is,

what kind of economy do you think we're going to have

in 20 or 30 or 40 years' time?

Are we really going to be able to survive on the service-based economy?

Is the future just a bigger and bigger Canary Wharf?

Is it just more and more large accountancy firms

in the middle of London?

Because if that's the future,

then you should stick the infrastructure in the south.

And you should provide stonking good airport facilities, broadband,

urban transport systems, etc., for all those city slickers

that we're going to have in the future.

If, on the other hand, you think that model has had its time,

just like our old manufacturing had its time in the '60s and '70s,

and we're going to move a bit back towards manufacturing,

then you have to ask, what sort of infrastructure would that need?

And here's the chicken-and-egg question.

If you don't provide the sort of infrastructure

that a manufacturing economy might need, you won't get one.

And then it will be self-fulfilling,

you'll end up with a service-based London economy.

So infrastructure isn't easy.

Which sort of Britain do we build it for?

And, crucially, where?

Do we try and re-balance our lopsided economy

by building afresh in the manufacturing heartlands

of the Midlands and North,

or do we lay on more and more in the South East,

where the population and the service sector

have been growing fastest?

Or are we content to do neither,

and have no options at all?

No example sums up the difficult choices

and our endless capacity to dither over them better than Heathrow.

As we've moved away from manufacturing and towards services,

it's played an ever bigger part in our economy.

But we face an awkward question.

Do we invest in more airport capacity in London, or not?

Before I tackle that, I'm going to get some hands-on experience

of just how finely-honed an operation

a crowded airport like this has to be.

Right, I've got my two high-vis table tennis rackets,

ear protection, a 747 coming my way,

and butterflies in my stomach.

I've been entrusted with marshalling this 747 to the stand.

That's 400 tonnes and around 350 passengers

out of the 190,000 who arrive and depart here every day.

No pressure, then(!)

You might not know it to look at me,

but I've actually had a couple of hours of training,

and my tutor Simon is watching carefully on.

It's a stressful old business, but I did manage

to get it bang on the centre line, if maybe half a metre off its mark.

Well, the pilot gave me a really bad thumbs down then,

he really did - he looked a bit annoyed.

I think it's probably because we stopped quite suddenly.

Simon...

-Evan.

-How did I do?

-How did you do?

Well, for a novice marshaller, that was excellent.

400 tonnes in your fingertips, and you got it bang on the mark there,

excellent, very well done. It's very, very important

to make sure that this aircraft parks on the correct stopping position.

Because if it doesn't, they can't get...

They can't get the passengers off, exactly.

And Heathrow's operating at 99.2% capacity.

As soon as an aircraft pushes back off of a stand,

another one arrives on to a stand.

There are people waiting to turn that aircraft around,

as quickly and as safely as possible.

And occasionally,

planes are queuing up waiting for their parking space, really.

Correct, but provided we have a blue sunny day today,

then everything should be working like clockwork.

But thankfully a good day, today.

And very well done, that was really very, very good.

Marshalling day is over.

Most planes are now guided automatically to their stands,

though some are still marshalled by the experts.

The airport has seen phenomenal change in its 65-year history.

And its reacted to it in a very British way.

Because whereas other countries have master-planned their big airports,

Heathrow is a classic case of "build as you go".

-BROADCASTER:

-'Civil flying gets going again,

'and Britain begins the fight for her old place on the skylines of the world.'

It was built as an RAF base,

and handed over to civilian use in 1946.

That year, it handled 63,000 passengers,

from tents alongside the runway.

-BROADCASTER:

-'Here, a major air junction's being operated,

'while the buildings and runways are still growing up around it.'

By 1951, it was shifting 800,000 passengers a year, and rising.

It's managed to keep raising the number of passengers year on year

because planes have got bigger

and by gradually building bigger terminals.

'The architecture and interior decoration of this building

'provide an atmosphere in keeping with its importance

'as one of the greatest centres of international air traffic in the world.'

Today, it's still building,

and it handles 69 million passengers a year,

off no more runways than it had in 1946.

That means the people who make this place tick

have been forced to become ever more ingenious,

to get the most out of what they've got.

The airport seems to build piece by piece.

They've never quite finished it, always something else going on,

how does that affect what you guys do?

Well, that adds to the challenge and complexity every day

because it's like a big fluid jigsaw.

All the planes keep coming

and we have to find a space for them,

but the picture keeps changing.

Um, bits of taxi way are taken away from us

so we have to work round that, stands are closed, etc., etc.

Give me some of the tricks of the trade that you guys use

when you're trying to get the maximum use of the runways?

It's not a first-come-first-served basis.

We get the air craft and we shuffle them around at the runway,

to maximise the runway use.

Here's what Dave and his fellow controllers have to do.

If they put big planes in front of small planes,

they have to leave bigger gaps to account for the vortex

the big planes leave in their wake.

So instead, they try to bunch planes of similar sizes together

to reduce the gaps.

So when I am in a plane,

circling around somewhere over the South East of England,

that's cos you're shuffling my plane into the right kind of queue

to get the most out of the runway?

That's correct, and I don't apologise for that,

it's all about maximum runway usage.

Heathrow often gets a bad press,

but really, you can only marvel at the resourcefulness of the people

who make it work within all the constraints.

And in a way, it's a good example of British approach to infrastructure.

You under-provide it and you use ingenuity to get by.

We're world champions at muddling through.

As I say, you can marvel at it

and then remember, muddling through can only get you so far.

We're at a crunch point, because Heathrow's full.

Other airports have space, but Heathrow is special -

it's one of the world's hub airports.

That means passengers don't just fly here to get to London,

they fly here to catch planes onto somewhere else.

Britain's aviation bosses argue that's good for us all,

as it allows them to lay on routes which otherwise wouldn't be viable,

routes to parts of the world which might be crucial to the future of British economy.

We're not very well connected to growth economies,

so I've stopped using emerging economies

because, you know, China is the second biggest economy in the world.

Brazil has overtaken the UK, so you can't really call these emerging -

they've emerged but they're growing at a significant pace.

And if we're serious about playing a leading role in the global economy,

you're going to have to connect to these destinations,

and that's really going to be a challenge for Heathrow and for the UK.

'Good evening. In the coming age of Jumbo Jets

'and supersonic speed,'

how and where will we make room for new airports

in England's green and pleasant land?

You see, this question is nothing new.

The problem of how to maintain airport capacity

in the South East has bedevilled successive governments for decades.

-BROADCASTER:

-'London faces erosion

'of its position as the hub of international air transport.'

And now the issue is back.

Do we build an extra runway at Heathrow,

as Willie Walsh wants, or a brand-new airport in the Thames?

All options are being looked at by a government review, none is easy.

Now, if you build a third runway at Heathrow,

is that going to do it or will you be saying,

in 30 years' time, "We need a fourth, a fifth runway"?

At which point, we may say, "Why didn't we build an airport somewhere else

"where we could do all that in the first place?"

I think that is the question that needs to be answered.

My own view is that a third runway isn't the long-term solution.

I think a third runway gives you 25 years. It keeps you in the game.

So, you know, you're quite right,

I think it'd be wrong for me to try and convince people

that if you build a third runway at Heathrow that's it

and we're now future-proofed.

With the projected growth in air travel

I don't think it would do enough.

But at least it gives you time to consider options.

But notice, almost all of those options are in the South of England,

which means that airport capacity is a classic example

of a very British infrastructure dilemma.

Here's the problem - Britain needs more infrastructure.

But the very places that it needs it most

are the places that are most crowded, have most people.

And yet it's the place where the crowds are

that there isn't room to build anything,

where you meet most objections.

Yet when it comes to a decision over airports,

where and whether you build another hub,

well, this touches on issues around where we expect people to live,

what kind of economy we want to have.

These are issues way above the pay grade of people involved in aviation -

these are questions of grand national strategy.

Difficult questions, mind you, but they really can't be ducked.

North, South, East, West, hub airports or alternative investments.

There's a huge menu of infrastructure opportunities in Britain.

You can argue about them all

but just because decisions are difficult,

doesn't mean we shouldn't face up to them.

And there's an additional economic reason

for looking at how much we invest in our future.

To understand it, an example from our past.

It's pretty obvious that WE have the power to change our infrastructure.

What's more interesting,

is that infrastructure has the power to change us.

To be transformative, to alter our behaviour, our way of thinking.

Often in very unexpected ways.

This rather beautiful locomotive is Planet,

a replica of the very first one to run down these tracks,

in 1830, as part of the Liverpool and Manchester railway,

'Britain's first intercity line.'

Gosh, nice and warm up here.

'Today, it's part of Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry.'

But back then, it was 30 miles of track,

which changed Britain for ever.

This was built in '92,

but it's pretty well the same as the one that was built in 1830.

Visually, it is, but it's made with modern materials,

and we've got modern safety features like brakes.

EVAN LAUGHS

Did they really not have brakes originally?!

They were more interested in making it go.

THEY LAUGH

The original motivation for the Liverpool and Manchester railway had been to carry freight.

Local businessmen had wanted to link the two cities, but guess what?

Once the line had been built,

it actually turned out that PEOPLE wanted to travel, as well.

And pretty soon, passengers were the dominant traffic.

What had happened was, the line had transformed

the geography of the region in a way that no-one had anticipated.

This railway, it took the brakes off

the development of the economy of the region.

Yes, here in Manchester, well, of course,

not only were the needs of the existing cotton mills satisfied,

but a lot of other people said, "Right, now we've got

"the opportunity of setting up further cotton mills."

The textile industry expanded very, very quickly.

And as soon as the railway opened and made it so much easier

to get the cotton imports, the food imports,

and all the other 101 other things that were required here in Manchester,

then, of course, the numbers of ships

coming through Liverpool instantly doubles.

It was a huge, huge increase,

and that made an enormous difference to the port of Liverpool.

You buy a railway and you get a flourishing port for free.

The Liverpool-Manchester railway showed how infrastructures had

a transformative effect on Britain's economy in the past.

When you bring people together, you create

new economic opportunities that you couldn't have anticipated.

There are huge benefits to shrinking distances between people.

It made our economy more productive back then

and there's evidence it can do that now.

And there are plenty of ways to do it.

Go further and faster in linking the cities of the North of England, for example,

or go further and faster in creating space for London to grow.

We can use infrastructure to bring people closer together,

but the question is, where should we focus our investment?

If we spend all our money around London,

as it sometimes feels we ARE doing,

then you drive people to London and it becomes self-fulfilling.

That's not a very good idea.

If you don't spend money in London

and you invest it all around Manchester, for example,

well, then you're in danger of choking the economy in London

which is a fast-growing part of the country.

So THAT'S not a good idea.

Isn't there a case for doing both?

For investing everywhere?

Maybe we just have to give our country some options.

This government and the last have recognised these arguments

and THIS is their big hope for bringing us closer together.

It's Curzon Street in Birmingham,

built by Robert Stevenson in the 1830s

as the magnificent terminus for the London-Birmingham railway line.

Today, it's rather faded, but there is a plan.

It's the proposed site for the new Birmingham station for High Speed 2...

..the new fast rail line from London to Birmingham

and, in time, beyond that to the north.

The government hopes it can shift the nation's centre of economic gravity.

Doug Oakervee is a wily infrastructure veteran

and the Brit who oversaw the building of Hong Kong's new airport

in the middle of the South China Sea in the 1990s.

'Today he's got an even bigger job on his hands,

'making High Speed 2 become a reality.'

Doug, this looks like a bit of a wasteland at the moment?

Some might call it a nature reserve or a park,

but what is this going to be if you get your way?

This is going to be the real hub of High Speed 2,

this is Birmingham station,

with the platforms going off in that direction,

and the old Curzon Street station that was built in 1838,

will be brought back into the new station and refurbished completely.

So bringing in the original history of Birmingham's railway from 1838

up to the modern day.

Infrastructure has the power to change the geography of the nation.

We're talking about shrinking the distance

between Birmingham and London. What does that do?

Does that accentuate the concentration of activity in London

which already has a lot of activity in it?

Or does it disperse activity out of London?

I think it'll probably do both things -

make life very much easier for those who want to commute to London,

but I think the key thing is with H2,

when it develops itself and establishes here,

and the development that takes place around it,

will encourage many more companies to Birmingham,

which in a sense is a better location for a lot of industries

and there will be greater connectivities between the north and the south.

I mean, some might like to say it'll bridge the north/south divide.

High Speed 2 MIGHT bridge the north/south divide,

or it might suck yet more economic activity down south.

As we saw with the Liverpool-Manchester railway,

infrastructure often has unexpected effects which nobody bargained for.

So until we've built it, no-one really knows.

Like so much infrastructure,

it's really hard to know what the effect of HS2 would be.

You can do your detailed passenger projections

but, frankly, you're likely to be way off the mark with them.

No, with transformative infrastructure,

it bears on much, much bigger issues.

HS2 isn't really about journey times,

it's about the whole shape of our nation.

Are we a country called Britain with a capital called London,

or are we a country called London

with a huge great suburb called Britain?

That is the really difficult question facing us.

The case for investing more in infrastructure

is to make this difficult question easier -

to build space for the economy to grow in all parts of the country.

But, wait, there's a case against too, not just the financial cost,

but the effect development has on our quality of life and environment.

It's a case that has to be answered.

This is the practice of Norman Foster -

a British architect with a global reputation.

He's designed infrastructure around the world,

including airports in Hong Kong and Beijing.

And he has his own vision

for how Britain could and should invest more.

I've come to see how he answers the critics,

those who think more infrastructure means concreting over Britain.

We probably have the greatest

heritage in the world,

in terms of inspirational individuals.

You look at Brunel -

he created tunnels, bridges, ports, ships.

I mean, the breadth of that ambition,

we should be creating in that spirit,

for present generations, as they grow older,

future generations unborn.

Do you recognise that there are a lot of things

we want to leave younger... future generations?

We want to leave them a country that is intact, that is beautiful,

and where nature has been preserved.

And for every Brunel fan out there

saying Brunel is the sort of great Great Briton who represents...

And there are lots of others.

..there's another one saying it's the countryside that represents

the greatest asset we have - it's that.

And I wonder whether you recognise

that there's this...perhaps a bit of a conflict?

There's always a conflict. It's always a balance.

Of course, at the same time, we can preserve the countryside.

We can integrate infrastructure in the countryside

in another great tradition -

the landscaping tradition of a century earlier,

before the Industrial Revolution.

What happened to that landscaping tradition?

Why is that seen as something separate from infrastructure?

Now there's a thought.

In recent years, the story of British infrastructure

has been a string of costly battles

between developers and protesters, with both sides digging in.

But does it have to be a battle?

Is it possible to build for the future,

while preserving our natural heritage?

This is the Devil's Punch Bowl in Surrey -

a beauty spot with a past.

'Dame Fiona Reynolds heads the National Trust, which owns the land.'

So, Fiona, I used to drive down this section of the A3 -

it is just an unbelievable and spectacular change,

it's just incredible.

Yeah, it is, I mean, I did too...

or, you know, stop sometimes in the queues,

but I think what's amazing is how quickly nature's reclaiming it.

And this is what it used to look like.

For decades, the A3 snaked along this valley,

a scar on a stunning natural amphitheatre.

But the road needed expanding,

and rather than taking the cheap option - a flyover -

they chose to exploit the great British talent for tunnelling.

-I mean, it was phenomenally expensive, actually.

-Yeah, it was.

It was about £370 million,

which is an enormous amount of money,

but the benefit is absolutely huge and the alternatives were horrific.

I mean, there would have been a huge...

kind of flyover across the Devil's Punch Bowl -

one of the most important landscapes in southern England.

OK, we know you like infrastructure, expensive as it can be,

that improves the countryside.

What about your view of the stuff

that doesn't improve the countryside

but gives us jobs, development, homes, roads, transport -

all those things, other things, that we want in our lives.

We always, as a society, have aspirations for the future.

We have aspirations to get places faster,

we have aspirations for the economy, we have aspirations for jobs.

But we also have aspirations for quality of life,

and I think what's happened over the years -

and I've seen this in practice over many years of being involved

in the environmental movement -

infrastructure projects are led by economic benefit,

and then it's almost the environmentalists have to kind of campaign against.

And what we have been trying to do over the years is to say,

"Infrastructure projects can deliver more benefits

"than the single economic driver that started them off."

And if you can find ways of meeting all those objectives -

environmental, social, as well as economic,

then actually you get a project that is better from all perspectives

and is the right thing to do for the long term.

When it comes to infrastructure in this country,

we've often been paralysed by a dilemma

between countryside, environment, quality of life and development.

But if you are willing to spend a bit of cash,

you can actually make your infrastructure countryside-friendly.

Not all of it, you're never going to make an airport very sympathetic,

but a lot of infrastructure can be made so.

So here's a thought - do we have to make a choice

between environment and development?

Maybe we can have both.

Rather than being paralysed by the dilemma,

maybe we should see it as a spur to action.

We should just get on with doing more, not less.

Now, if you're one of the many people

who feel uneasy at the prospect of building more and think

I'm in danger of overstating the case, I have a final thought...

one very close to home.

TANNOY: 'This is Ashtead...'

TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT CONTINUES

# The old home town looks the same

# As I step down from the train

# And there's that old oak tree that I used to play on... #

This is Ashtead in Surrey, where I grew up -

quintessential, leafy south-east England.

# ..to meet me

# Arms reaching, smiling sweetly

# It's good to touch the green, green grass of home. #

Today I'm coming back for the annual village day -

a festival of candy floss, dog shows

and good old-fashioned entertainment.

Slide a pint! Try your luck.

-Can I have a go? What do I have to do?

-Land it on the red dot.

I've got to land it on the red dot? But that's impossible.

No, it's not.

OK. I've just got a little bit weighed up,

got to push it more to the right.

-A little bit more.

-I've got to push it quite a bit harder.

Not that hard!

THEY LAUGH

Thank you very much, not close enough.

Great stuff! I'm afraid my hand's a bit wet actually.

Oh! Sorry!

'It's just like old times and that is rather the point, in a way.'

CHEERING

Never win.

So this I where I was brought up.

This was the local recreation ground, the rec,

spent many happy hours here.

But for many of my childhood years, Ashtead lived in fear.

It had a nightmare vision

and that nightmare was called the M25 -

hadn't been built then, of course,

but it was set to come very close to here.

Now, pretty well everybody I knew

thought whatever motorways the south-east needed,

they didn't want one close to Ashtead.

When the M25 orbital motorway around London is completed,

it will be a 118 miles long

and a journey that now takes six hours will be cut to two.

When the route of the M25 had been announced, it brought uproar

right around the south-east.

PROTESTORS SHOUT

NEWS COMMENTARY: 'The ceremonial opening of a motorway enquiry...'

..and the good people of Ashtead and Leatherhead rallied to the cause.

The Transport Minister will have to decide whether or not the M25 Leatherhead interchange goes ahead.

PROTESTORS SHOUT

We were fired up by what was going to happen to our environment here.

When they changed the route of the motorway from several miles out

to bring it in-between Ashtead and Leatherhead, it really got our dander up

because they were going to impact on so much that we hold dear.

'John Earle was one of Ashtead's original protesters -

'a pillar of the community who became an unlikely rabble-rouser.'

We got emotional about what was happening to us.

Like British bulldogs, we were going to shake this one until it stopped.

What was the most outrageous thing you did?

I suppose disrupting the inquiry at Bookham with foghorns -

those compressed-air things that make a lot of noise

and nasty smells and generally...

-Smells as well?

-Smells as well, yes.

-Stink bombs?

-Yes.

Being a chemical engineer, you know about these things, so yes.

Erm, looking back on that - am I ashamed? Not really.

You know, when you get excited about what you're trying to do,

you'll do anything to stop and make people listen.

But John lost his rather admirable battle,

Ashtead got a brand-new Junction 9

and the south-east got its orbital motorway.

-THATCHER:

-Now some people are saying that the road is a disaster.

I must say I can't stand those who carp and criticise

when they ought to be congratulating Britain on a magnificent achievement

and beating the drum for Britain all over the world.

Here's the thing that strikes me whenever I'm back -

things are just the same.

The M25 is far from perfect,

but the world didn't stop turning and Ashtead wasn't ruined.

That's my personal feeling but what about theirs?

I want to ask you a question, so listen carefully,

if I could click my fingers

and at a stroke remove the M25,

so obviously you wouldn't have the noise

and obviously you wouldn't have the motorway to get around,

can I just see how many of you

would like me to click my fingers and remove the M25?

-No!

-No!

How many of you would like to keep the M25?

Yes!

Very interesting. Well, those votes will be taken into account.

Would you click your fingers and hope it went away?

I think, to give you an honest opinion, it's got to say where it is.

I wouldn't click it away because the amount of traffic has increased so much.

I mean, the roads around here,

when the motorway has got a problem at these local junctions,

it's gridlock around Ashtead and Leatherhead.

In a twinkle of an eye,

you know when something's happened on the motorway

cos all the streets fill up, people are piling off the motorway.

ROCK BAND PLAYS

Even the local band are called Junction 9,

in honour of the motorway.

And I think there's something encouraging here

because what a trip to Ashtead reminds me

is that while humans often instinctively resist change,

when that change eventually comes, we rise to the challenge.

So with infrastructure you find

a community adapts itself to the infrastructure around it.

They don't want anything new but give them something new

and they'll adapt to that and then be perfectly content.

And it seems that's what's happened here.

Back at Crossrail, Phyllis is still burrowing her way under Paddington

and that London clay is being shipped out by rail

to make a new nature reserve on the Essex coastline.

This place is proof that Britain can pull off the re-engineering we need

and we've seen that we do need it -

to replace the fraying fabric of the country,

to give the economy options for growth,

to make people more productive,

to enhance the environment.

But at £15 billion, Crossrail doesn't come cheap

and nor does the shopping list for Britain's infrastructure needs.

Yet if we want a future-proof Britain in a fast-changing world,

we might just have to bite the bullet.

You may believe we should invest a lot more in infrastructure,

but have one last nagging doubt that we will somehow screw it all up,

end up wasting money.

So many of these big construction projects go wrong, don't they?

Well, I've some good news -

we appear to be getting the hang of them

and next time I'll show you why

we have no reason to be scared of big projects

and every reason to allow ourselves to be a lot more ambitious.

From the infrastructure that made the Olympics work...

..to the engineering marvels of High Speed 1...

..how we're learning from some spectacular mistakes

to become a can-do nation once again.

What benefit has the last 150 years

of infrastructure development in Britain brought to the country?

You can find out with the Open University's Timeline.

Just go to our website

and follow the links to the Open University.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd