Thames Barge Britain's Lost Routes with Griff Rhys Jones

Britain was once a difficult country to cross -

roads were few and paths obscure.

And yet, our ancestors travelled -

for work and for pleasure,

for faith and for fortune.

But the routes that they followed are lost.

I'm going to rediscover them and the people who took them,

what they saw and why they travelled,

who they met and where they went.

I'm following the forgotten routes that made this country great.

100 years ago, there were 300,000 horses

living and working in central London.

All those horses pulled or carried everything that London needed

to keep going.

In fact, all those horses produced over a million tonnes

of dung a year.

They were the engines of the capital.

But how were those engines fuelled?

I'm going to find out.

And I'm going to do this by following the amazing journey that

massive amounts of hay and straw took through the Thames Estuary.

I'm off to the secret waters of the Essex coast -

to marshes, to creeks

and to lonely farms.

These were the haunts of the sailing barge men who carried

all the heavy goods that the capital needed.

-What are they taking?

-Swedes, carrots, beets...

Straw, barley...

'And bricks!' Pah!

I want to find out what these in-shore sailors left in their wake...

..how they shaped our grand maritime traditions,

-how they moulded our defences...

-Three, two, one...

Blast!

..and I want to experience their way of life as they worked

these shallow waters.

'I'm ready for stirring stuff...'

I'm getting emotional. Emotional feeling.

'..on a journey into the heart of Britain's capital.'

This is Landmere Quay in the Walton backwaters.

It's an obscure but very,

very beautiful corner of north-east Essex.

I'm hoping to take what is a sort of lost motorway

into London,

going on Dawn -

a sprit-sail barge - which used to come here often

to pick up goods and carry them into the great metropolis.

And here she comes - Dawn. She's a stackie.

She was built in 1897

specifically to transport huge haystacks from East Anglian farms.

In 1900, when we're imagining our trip, there were over 2,000

Thames sailing barges loading at little quays like this.

Very difficult to imagine these soggy creeks, miles from anywhere,

were ever part of a massive commercial network, but they were.

We've got a bit of a problem here,

because we've really got to move as quickly as we can -

here comes the dinghy - because unfortunately,

we get about ten minutes

before the water all runs out into the North Sea.

Today, Dawn is run by a very small crew, who,

like their predecessors, understand the rules of these shallow waters.

-Can I throw you that?

-Sure.

-Up you come.

-I'm Griff.

-I'm Gerald, how do you do?

-Nice to meet you.

-Let's go and meet Gerard.

-Gerard? Gerald and Gerard.

-Welcome aboard, Chris. Welcome aboard Dawn.

-Nice to be here.

-Good.

We really must get going, so do you want to go and set the topsail,

cos we're running out of water.

-Anything I can do?

-Yes, go and give Gerald a hand.

-Gerald, I'm coming!

Righto!

'Following skipper Gerard's swift orders,

'we get the boat under sail, just as we would have done in 1900,

'so that we can follow the narrow creek out towards the sea.'

So this is a topsail.

You can set this without the mainsail.

'It will catch the wind blowing above the dykes.'

-And how much goods could you carry?

-About 120 tonnes, this one.

-Right.

-80-foot long, 120... And how many people looked after it?

-Two.

-Two? So we're overmanned?

-Exactly, yes.

Overburdened!

-So we're going to set the foresail.

-A man and a boy, as they say.

A few small sails are enough

to pull Dawn out past the half-submerged islands

of the Walton backwaters.

And I have time to explore the accommodation.

This is the cabin.

You've got a rather capacious double bunk sort of hidden away over there.

It's actually quite a lot of space.

A cabin boy like me would come aboard with what was known as

a shirt bag, which had... Well, a shirt in it,

which was probably all they needed - one change of shirt,

then a few things to eat - a bit of bacon and some cheese...

And some bread and just a few tins, and the tins were there

because from time to time, the barge would get wind-bound.

She couldn't leave.

If the wind was blowing in the wrong direction,

she was completely stuck, because these boats had no engines.

They were entirely dependent on the weather and the tides.

'As we reached the deeper inlet of Hamford Water,

'we can put up the mainsail.

'Or rather, pull it down.

'What makes a sprit-sail barge like Dawn so versatile

'is in fact her sprit - it's that big pole,

'sticking up diagonally from the foot of the mast.

'The sail hangs from it like a giant Roman blind -

'some 3,000 feet of red cloth is dropped, or furled up,

'depending on the strength of the wind.'

They were white when they were made, but they were dressed with

a mixture of brick dust, fish oil, red ochre - that sort of stuff.

Kept the weather out.

The Thames sprit-sailed barge seems to have jumped into being

fully formed somewhere in the early 1800s.

These shallow tidal creeks needed flat-bottomed boats

which could float in just five foot of water

and could ride the tide

as it sluiced in and out of the gaping mouth

of Britain's greatest river - the Thames.

This whole estuary is made by a colossal slew of water...

-Oh, yes, sure.

-Going out and coming in...

You've got to work the tides,

otherwise you make it darn hard work for yourself and in the days

when they just were sailing, they had to be on top of their game

and use the tides to the best of their advantage, really.

And now, we're using that same falling evening tide

to sail into overnight shelter by Harwich.

We'll start to make our way south on the next rising tide tomorrow.

We need to get ballast to allow us to load our hay.

After that, we'll hitch a lift on another tide

to take us past Southend and upriver to Gravesend.

There, we'll wait for our final tidal lift up the Thames

to the heart of London -

just as barges did in 1900.

We cannot rush this. The pace is the pace of the phases of the moon.

And that's good, because it gives me time to consult with a farmer

who knows a lot about the old trading route into London.

Facing the modern super-port of Felixstowe

is the coastal farm of William Wrinch.

We've got a view of the biggest dock...

-Longest continuous dock in the world.

-Is it?

-Yes.

-A mile and three quarters.

-And one of the smallest continuous docks...?!

Well, it's not continuing much now, is it?

This now derelict dock was where the sailing barges loaded

from the Wrinchs' farm, which was one of many

that grew into considerable enterprises supplying the capital.

What fascinates me is that they still hold the old ledgers

and farm books.

-What's this?

-This is one of our great-grandfather's ledgers.

My great-grandfather had been farming 400 acres

and by the time he died, he was farming 3,500 acres.

3,500 acres?

During the First World War, yes. And he built this series of quays.

Feedstuffs were sent up to London.

When the business really got going,

-he had his own wharf up at Vauxhall in London.

-He had his own wharf?

-Up in London, yes.

-As a farmer?

-Yes.

And so what are they taking?

-Well, swedes, carrots, beets...

-Straw, barley...

-Oats, barley.

-Can I have a look at the photographs, as well?

-Yes. Right...

-This is the Snowdrop.

-And this is hay or straw.

-For either bedding or for feeding horses.

-Yes.

What we're looking at here is what seems to my eyes

almost totally unsafe!

The boat is piled up to such a degree that you wonder how

they actually managed to sail it.

The chap on the tiller couldn't see,

-so they had the chap on the top.

-There's a bloke standing on the top.

He has to be on the top the whole time.

-And this is in the Port of London, isn't it?

-Yeah.

There's something absolutely magnificent about these boats.

That's the main quay

and that's one of the last freights going off to London - that was 1938.

Is that about the last time that this was done?

One of the last times, yeah.

'Clearly, this unwieldy load will need steadying.

'We're going to have to get some ballast before we can put all that hay and straw on deck.

'And to find this, we begin our journey south.

'Leaving Harwich, I'm going up the mast to set the topsail -

'to unwrap it from its night storage.'

'We haul out the huge mainsail

'and quickly, the power of these great barges becomes apparent.'

Ready about.

Lee haul.

'Empty, this boat wins races.

'Gerald claims 12 knots - that's 15 miles an hour -

'a lot for 100 tonnes on water.

'As Dawn begins to pick up speed, we lower one of our leeboards.

'These massive wooden fins are a distinctive feature

'of sailing barges and steady them in the water.'

So if the wind is blowing on the side of the sail,

if you don't have something down to stop the boat, what happens

is the boat skids sideways...

That's it, yes.

And you need something to get into the water to transfer

-the power of the sail...

-Into forward motion.

You can vary the depth of them, so it depends where you are.

If you're in a shallow creek, you can have a half-board down,

and you've only got about five foot below the bottom.

But if you're at sea and you want full power,

you'd get the board right down, about ten feet.

We're charging. We must be doing about...

..five or six knots, I should think. Probably more.

MUSIC: Theme from "The Onedin Line"

These Walton cliffs

are about the most mountainous that Essex ever gets.

They're topped by the Naze Tower, built in 1720.

It's a beacon for Harwich and a reminder of how much traffic

used to pass through the sandbanks of this coastal road.

And here are the seaside resorts of Walton, Frinton and Clacton.

Playgrounds for Londoners

once brought here by paddle steamer to their famous piers.

The resorts were built by boat as well -

their bricks came by Thames barges very like Dawn.

Some brickies were called 42s,

because they could carry 42,000 bricks.

They used to unload their cargo onto horse-drawn carts,

waiting on the shallow sands.

The barges built London too and the bricks were made not far from here.

Peter Minter's business, near the village of Bulmer in Suffolk

still makes them in the traditional manner - each one by hand.

How long have you and your company been in these brickfields?

We've been here since 1936, so 75 years.

-But the brickfields were here long before that, were they?

-Yeah, 1450 being the earliest.

Before that, the Romans discovered the quality of London clay.

Yes, it's a nice, sandy clay

and loam which allows you to make a brick with the minimum of problems.

When we look at these levels here, what does that tell us?

We're looking at the estuary of the Thames 40 million years ago.

The basic clay was the deposits in the Thames estuary

and as it dried out, volcanic material was overlaid

on top of that - that's why it's so level.

OK, so volcanoes - we're talking a fair time ago?

There haven't been many active volcanoes around here for a while.

'Today, the 40 million-year-old clay, dug from this pit,

'is piled up, sometimes for over a year,

'before being mixed with water and moulded into bricks.

'John Affendale can produce up to 1,000 a day,

'so he's the perfect man to teach me how to do it.'

Hiya. Don't make it look too easy, cos that'll make me look bad!

Don't worry about that!

I'm hardly likely.

Pah!

Ugh!

That's it.

You've got a bit of hazel twig

bent over and a bit of wire.

So then we scrape over here...

-And...we end up with a big lump.

-That's it.

You want to put some sand back down...

-Like that.

-That's it.

-Now put the board behind it...

-Let's turn it ups...

-I'll be all right!

-That's it. Now lift the frame off.

Lift the frame off, carefully,

because you don't want to spoil your brick.

I want to show you now

just what sort of handmade brick you'd be buying here.

I think London would never have been built if it'd been down to me, because I'd still be here,

trying to manufacture the next batch of bricks.

The barges that took bricks into London often brought the capital's

rubbish out, which was then burned as fuel in the brick furnaces.

It was all efficient recycling.

The bricks that built London were trundled down the hill,

put into barges and then pulled by horses about 20 miles

to the mouth of the estuary, where they were loaded into sailing barges

and extraordinarily, they remained competitive - that route remained

competitive - for 100 years after the railways were invented.

I can't do it now, because it's no longer navigable for barges.

We can't use bricks as ballast, so what can we use?

Sometimes barges would bulk-load vegetables or root crops

like swedes to give them their stability.

But Essex is a source of another weighty commodity.

We're heading into the River Colne, up towards Colchester,

to the village of Fingringhoe, to get hold of some of that.

-Fingringhoe is a traditional barge stop, isn't it?

-Very much so, yes.

They've been taking sand out of here for...

For all living memory, really, to London, for the building trade.

Good sand, I think it is. Essex sand.

It's nice to know that Essex produces something

which is valued across the world.

'We're taking on 25 tonnes of best Essex sand.'

-On top?

-Yeah.

'This may feel like hard work,

'but it's nothing compared to the way it used to be done.

'Skippers would beach their barge on a bank at low tide

'and they and their cabin boy would shovel 100 tonnes of sand

'or shingle directly into the hold by hand.'

Here comes more.

I hope you notice we're doing it with 19th-century

health and safety standards.

-Which is... "Look the

-BLEEP

-out!"

Our ballast safely loaded, we slowly sail further south,

closer to our awaiting hay and straw.

We're used to speed, but these trips that today would just

take hours by lorry, could take days,

even a week. It was something our grandfathers took for granted.

It's said that a barge once took 30 days in high summer

to travel 20 miles.

This is the Hay And Straw Measurer And Ready Reckoner from 1870 -

tells you how to make a haystack.

Shows the solid feet or cubicle content of stacks of a square

or oblong form, measuring from one to 50 feet in length,

from 11 to 25 feet in breadth

and three inches to 18 feet...!

Not much of a haystack, is it?!

Three inches high.

There we are.

Pretty much covers everything, doesn't it?

And tomorrow...

we intend to make a haystack.

To reach our haystack, we must pass by the south of Mersea Island

and sail into the River Blackwater.

We're just coming into West Mersea

and this is where my father had a boat when I was a boy.

Not been here for years.

When my father wasn't steering the boat,

he was behind his Super 8 camera, and I was allowed to do it.

The yellow jumper has thankfully passed into oblivion,

but the place still looks much the same.

It's great deal of mixed emotions about coming in here.

It's absolutely typical that the day should become like this -

a sort of watery sun,

a putty-coloured sea, full of sort of yellow mud...

Just the same as when I was a boy.

HE INHALES

Smells like home, as well.

Leaving the Blackwater, we head up Salcott Creek.

Our next challenge is to navigate Dawn

up this dangerously shallow channel.

The mud beneath the waters is not always safe.

If our barge sits in it at low tide,

the flat bottom could be sucked down as the water rises.

We need to be here - at the top of the tide.

Just about enough room to get between the moored boats

and the withies over here - these poles - which mark the edge of the channel.

Here we are, in the middle of nothing, there's a little jetty.

That's our destination.

'The tiny jetty belongs to Abbotts Hall Farm at Great Wigborough.

'It's one of the few farms left in Essex with a working jetty,

'which has been recently restored.'

OK, drop ahead, then get the sheet down, guys.

'We're coming in at quite a speed,

'a few hours before high tide in what is still very shallow water.'

Use the leeboards to slow her up, Griff. We'll drop them in the mud.

She's got the wind up her pants, so she's got a bit of weight on...

-So you need to slow her down.

-That one down a bit more, Gerald.

-She's slowing up nicely.

-Yeah.

Coming alongside.

'She's grounded on the mud.

-'Now we need to pull ourselves alongside the jetty.'

-Lovely.

We get the boat round, we can get a rope ashore.

'Waiting for me is David Smart, who runs the farm,

'and has got a load of hay and straw ready for us...

'somewhere.'

-David, hello.

-Welcome, Griff.

Welcome to Essex Wildlife Trust and Abbotts Hall Farm. Good to see you.

Perhaps we should go and have a look

-and see what we're going to load up, shall we?

-Yeah.

Hey, look at this - fantastic! Horses.

What sort of horses are we looking at here?

We've got Suffolk Punches here, which is the traditional

East Anglian heavy horse.

We've got 30 bales of straw on here,

sitting quite nicely on top of this old 1920s harvest wagon.

-Yeah.

-Which traditionally have been used to transport hay and straw.

A working farm in about 1900 would have had a number of wagons.

A number of wagons and of course a number of people,

probably 20 or 30 people working on the farm as labourers.

They'd have needed those, the muscle power to put that stuff on the boat.

-Have we got any muscle power today?

-We've got a bit lined up!

-Have we?

I love it - the straw, just wafting in the breeze around us...

'This will be the first time almost in living memory

'that straw and hay have been loaded from this quay

'onto a barge bound for London.'

Whoops!

'They've certainly done us proud, and we'll need all the help

'we can get at we have just over 1,000 bales to load before the tide drops.

'To speed things up, we turn to horsepower of a different kind.

'But even with all this assistance and modern machinery,

'we're not going to get the full load on board in just one day.'

The tide has already gone down about a foot,

so we're running out of time already.

We've got...less than an hour to get as much as we can aboard.

'We have to work quickly, but also very carefully -

'an incorrectly-built stack could topple over once we're at sea.

'Stackies did lose their loads fairly often.

'But Dawn, exceptionally, never did -

'so we don't want to spoil her record!'

You've never stacked a barge before, have you?

No, but a haystack is the same.

So it's the same principle?

-You're stacking bales.

-You're assuming it is, anyway?

-Well, yes.

Yes!

-How long have you got now before the tide goes out?

-Ten minutes.

-Ten minutes? So we're racing against time now?

-Yes.

Chop chop, boys.

'Just as we think we've made it, the wind catches Dawn's bow

'and she wedges against the mud.

That's it, that's it!

'If we don't get her back into deep water,

'she could be left high and dry by the rapidly falling tide.

'And with her two ends straddling an empty channel,

'the hull would fall into the gap and break her back.

'This is a real emergency.

'We need that rope ashore.'

Pull, pull! Pull, pull!

Go on, pull!

That's it! Tug-of-war. There we go, that's it. Good, good, good.

Keep pulling.

'We get her nose off the mud

'and even the paintwork escapes unblemished.'

CHEERING

With half our load on board,

we retreat and wait for the water to come back.

Later that evening,

Gerard tells me the story of how his father saved Dawn.

He just got a bit romantic and decided he wanted a sailing barge

and bought it knowing nothing about it and learned the hard way, really.

I was about five then, I think.

I can't hardly remember a time without Dawn.

Dawn has always been in it, in some shape or form.

Eventually, I became skipper and went and skippered other barges,

but kept coming back to Dawn, really.

-And here I still am!

-And Dawn then went for a massive restoration?

Yes, Dawn ended up in a state of disrepair in Kent.

Dad had sold her and retired and the people who owned her decided

they were going to break her up.

Father decided he wasn't going to let her die, basically.

Eventually, he formed a trust with the help of a lot of other people

and 20 years later, here she is.

Secured her future really, now.

Dawn may be safe, but what about her world, of marsh and shallow creek?

I want to explore this area and have time the following morning.

The water's edge of Abbotts Hall Farm

is the scene of a continuing battle between land and sea.

In the past, coastal farmers built dykes to make fields

out of the mudflats.

Some of them may date back thousands of years,

but now rising sea levels are threatening to overwhelm them.

It's a huge job to rebuild,

so they've decided here on extraordinary measures.

Now over here, we have what are known as saltings -

they're natural saltings created as it were by nature - half land,

half water, every day, they're inundated by the sea

and so they're salty and they're saltings.

But over here, are some that were made recently.

Here, at Abbotts Hall Farm, they have cut holes in the dykes

and deliberately flooded the land

and these breaches fulfil an environmental need.

Rising sea levels have meant that 80% of the East Coast mudflats

on the creek side of the wall has vanished over the last century.

Since these are vital wildlife habitats,

this farm has controversially re-flooded land

to make more saltings for the benefit of the wildfowl.

This is their preferred habitat, obviously.

I mean, if you've got short bird legs, then you need somewhere

to wade, but the point about the saltings is it allows them to nest

and keep away from humankind

in a sort of marshy, muddy paradise.

Shelduck I can see, over there - beautiful.

But it's not just the birds. Fish like to, um...

They like to breed there.

Seabass in particular.

So we all like a seabass - we need to provide places for them to breed.

It's great for a wading bird, but not so great

if you're an arable farmer whose income is reliant on that land.

Now, the question is, as the sea levels rise,

do we spend a fortune repairing these ancient buttresses?

Do we take up the Dutch option?

Or do we let the water come in?

It's quite an issue here on the east coast.

Well, that tide is coming in now and it's time to continue our loading.

Rather wonderfully, Gerard's parents, Gordon and Madeline Swift,

have come to witness their old friend Dawn returning to work.

Took a long while getting it, you know, from the wreck it had become

to, you know... It was hard going, wasn't it at times?

It was a little bit. A bit worrying.

And what about this now, getting the hay aboard?

Well, this is absolutely marvellous, you know.

I want to really see her under full sail, you know, going to London.

Such a thrill to be able to see it again, you know.

It was what she was built for, wasn't it?

Bye-bye!

-Bye!

-Bye!

Our stack is neatly made.

We're a floating piece of bygone agriculture.

Finally, we drop anchor and I head off for a drink

in the small village of Rowhedge back on the River Colne.

Rowhedge is a community that likes to boast of its past associations

with smuggling and even piracy,

but what astonishes me is that I can sit and drink with Jim Lawrence,

who once worked on a barge that traded by sail alone.

-How old were you when you started on the barge?

-I was 15.

I'd just left school and the terms of the contract was

£1 pound a week and me grub.

-I didn't get much grub and I hardly ever got the pound.

-When was this?

1948.

But was it already at that stage,

just after the Second World War, beginning to decline a bit?

Yup, very much so.

I was ever so much advised by my parents, who didn't like the idea,

school tried to talk me out of it -

that made me all the more determined that I should go,

because I wanted to go while I could and do something under sail.

Why did sail get you going?

I don't know why that was so attractive to me,

because my old skipper used to say,

"Don't you mind them old motor barges, boy, they don't last.

"They're all against nature."

-I said...

-What, the motor barge was, gradually people would realise, too expensive?

-Wouldn't work!

-Too fiddly?

-Yeah.

-Bound to go wrong,

-but a sailing barge would always get you there in the end.

-That's right.

We're going to sing some songs.

I used to go around with a couple of old boys from Faversham way,

and they used to sing, "A is for the anchor that hangs from the bow."

-That was a song.

-The Bargeman's Alphabet.

-Is it?

-Yeah.

I thought I'd sing you a song, sir, before I...

CHEERING

Do you know The Bargeman's Alphabet?

CHEERING

-I've been through...

-Sing it to us, Griff!

-Thank you!

# A is for the anchor that hangs from the bow

# B is for the bowsprit that we lower down

# C is for the cat's head where the anchor is stowed

# D is for the davits where our boat is holed

# So merrily, so merrily, so merrily are we

# There's none so blithe as a bargeman at sea

# Sing high, sing low As we sail along

# Give an old barge a breeze and we'll never sail wrong. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Yes!

-Encore!

-Was that what you were expecting, sir?

-Er, no.

OK, all right.

It's our fifth day under sail and ahead of us,

we have one of our greatest challenges yet.

Well, the next bit of this journey

is going to take us out...

..beyond Bradwell

and through the Maplin Sands.

'These perilous flats stretch some 20 miles out to sea.

'Heavily-laden coastal traffic would have to sail through tiny channels

'and if the weather deteriorated, barges faced the danger

'of huge waves building up in these dangerous shallows.'

They weren't designed to be seagoing boats, were they?

They were coastal trading boats.

They went low in the water, didn't they?

Yeah, I mean now, she's loaded to her marks, about 120 tonnes,

so the water would be aboard and if it was really rough,

the seas would, you know, potentially wash...

-Straight over the top?

-Straight over the top, yeah.

And if a barge did take on water in bad weather,

it could find itself running aground.

-These yellow marks on our chart...

-Drying sand, yeah.

They literally show above water as land when the tide goes out?

-Yep, treacherous really.

-The worst thing for a boat was to go aground.

-Absolutely.

-Waves come up...

-..swamped them.

They used to scour out a hole

and the ship would sort of get sucked into the sand

and then get overwhelmed and that was it, it was curtains, they were gone.

So, many boats foundered in these difficult approaches to the Thames

that nearby Southend became one of the earliest outposts

for the Lifeboat Service.

In 1879, the resort's famously long pier was adapted

so that lifeboats could be lowered quickly.

Today, the rescue team have a rather different way of tackling

the shallow water and mud.

Southend is famous for having the longest pleasure pier in the world.

This one, one and a third miles.

The reason for that is because

it's so shallow at the mouth of the Thames, it's so flat

and the only way to get around, for the lifeboat anyway,

is by hovercraft.

They're taking me out to look at the treacherous sands at close quarters.

In Edwardian times, this place was branded

"the most perilous byway in England."

This is the hidden East Coast -

hundreds of thousands of acres

of mud and sand and gloop,

stretching four miles off the coast and then there are runnels,

but then there are another miles and miles of sand banks.

What the hovercraft does, of course,

is come out to rescue people who've gone out for a walk

or chased their dog then got caught by the tide.

Oh...

Yeah, now I've been told what to do in these circumstances

and instinctively, I'm doing the wrong thing.

You mustn't lift up your feet

because you put more pressure on the other foot

and the other foot starts to sink in.

What you have to do is get down and lean on your side.

That way, you simply drown instead of being sucked into the mud!

Hup!

The flat sand does finally merge into flat land

and though very close to London, it remains remote and inaccessible.

A bridge to the mainland was only built in 1922.

Before that, a difficult semi-submerged causeway

across the Maplin Sands was the only way to walk to Foulness Island.

So it was our flat-bottomed sailing barges creeping up the creeks

that provided the means to pursue its rather specialised work.

There's a sort of eerie magnificence to this place.

Over there, that tower is a place where they tested ejector seats.

Over there, the forts that guard the entrance to the Thames.

Down there, that's not Southend Pier, that's an anti-submarine boom.

It is forbidden England.

You still need a pass to visit any part

of what is the fourth largest island off the coast of England.

The Ministry of Defence commandeered this place

as a weapons testing site almost a century ago.

Thames sailing barges brought shells

and gunpowder from the Woolwich arsenal further up the Thames.

After all, sail was a safe form of propulsion

if you happened to be carrying huge loads of high explosives.

Foulness became a perfect trial ground. It still is today.

A defence technology company

is currently testing shells bound for Afghanistan.

-So this is the gun we're going to fire today, is it?

-Absolutely, yes.

And you shove the round in from this end?

It doesn't have a sort of magazine, these things?

No, the round itself will be loaded manually,

placed in the back end and rammed by hand

with a wooden rammer as it's always traditionally been done.

So these shells that you're firing today, they're going to explode?

These today will explode, yeah. Absolutely.

-Can I fire one?

-'Go ahead, load.'

'All in good time, Griff.'

For obvious reasons, health and safety is a bit of a priority here.

Gun TCO, round warmer one, circuit resistance, 150 right at the gun.

-All personnel under.

-'Roger.

'Confirm you're ready.

'10 figure countdown. Nine...

'Eight... Seven... Six...

'Four... Three... Two... One. Fire.'

BOOM

Like a really big bass woofer in a hip-hop car.

The whole "boom" like that, the stomach sort of goes.

The shell travels five miles across the barren island in 20 seconds,

before the preset fuse detonates it in mid-air.

And now, it's my turn.

'Nine... Eight... Seven... Six...

'Four... Three... Two... One. Fire.'

BOOM

-'Clear the gun. Who did that one?'

-That would be Griff.

'Roger. clear. Break cover.'

Comments? That question was a little bit pointed, I thought!

"Who did that one?"

Firing the gun is only half the story.

The trajectory of each round is monitored in minute detail -

especially mine, by the sound of it.

Were you the ones who asked, "Who shot that one then?"

There was a little bit of a delay.

-Was there? I was just being safe, I was told...

-Noticeable delay.

..whatever I do, I must not fire the thing

until I hear the word "fire!"

What a great day for it as well.

One of the finest pictures I should think you've ever had of anybody

firing one of those things.

You want the sun out, yeah.

Quite often you find yourself adding your own sound effects.

There's no sound on this one, but, you know,

you just find yourself sitting there going "pchoo."

Whoomp! Pchoo!

'It's difficult to believe that

'we're less than 45 miles from London.

'I could lob a shell from here into Westminster if I felt so inclined.'

And London is where we continue to sail.

Now we're at the mouth of the Thames and the first barge in over 70 years

to be laden with cargo of hay and straw.

Just making history here again, you know.

I always dreamt about doing it but now we're actually doing it,

it's just an amazing feeling, amazing.

Today's tides will get us as far as Gravesend,

before we make our final push up the river itself.

As cabin boy,

I want to cook a traditional bargeman's meal for the crew -

a pudding, which is supposed to be a treat. Sailors long for it.

It was apparently also the favourite

of Rear Admiral Sir John Jack Aubrey,

the fictional character in the famous novels of Patrick O'Brien.

This is Griff's cooking with lard, because I'm going to make plum duff.

The origins of plum duff can be traced back to the medieval period.

It's similar to Christmas or plum pudding, but with rather less fruit.

And to this, I add my melted lard.

Plum duff was but a dream for a lowly cabin boy.

You often had to rely on handouts from passing fishing boats.

According to one old skipper,

he got the odd bucket of whelks if he was lucky.

Now comes the funny bit. Take your muslin...

There we go.

And then you fix it all together...

There we go.

Plum duff was the traditional treat of the working man.

So, after six hours of steaming,

what do today's working men think of it?

-What?

-I haven't said a word!

I don't know! You're sitting here with the expression of somebody

about to meet their doom on your face.

-That's about it.

-Just a minute, OK...

It's like something out of a Hammer horror film.

-The brain...

-Oh, no!

LAUGHTER

Big slice or small slice?

-I'll try a small slice.

-A small slice to start.

-It smells all right.

-It's good.

-Looks all right, doesn't it?

-You want a bit of jam on that, boy!

-All right.

-You do.

I have to tell you, for seafarers of old,

they sat all week anticipating their plum duff.

It was the only treat they had in the entire week, the plum duff.

The old bargemen were always on about it.

-Were they?

-Yeah, they were, yeah.

-Lovely, thank you.

-There we are.

You can't call yourself a proper barge man

until you can get on the other side of a piece of plum duff.

-Nick, you're not game?

-No, thank you, Griff.

SNIGGERING

Well, the jam's good, isn't it?

You haven't swallowed it yet!

-A little bit of duff goes a long way, if you ask me.

-It should do!

LAUGHTER

It's the last day of our trip,

but we still have to wait till noon

for five knots of incoming tide to rush us up to London.

I'm jumping ship in search of a present,

heading back downriver a few miles, along the south side of the Thames,

to Chatham dockyard.

This river was not only a place of barges.

There was another part of our maritime tradition

that once employed thousands and yet we seem scarcely aware of it.

You see, I think I associate the south coast with the Royal Navy -

Portsmouth and Dartmouth and Plymouth -

but in fact, even at the very beginning,

it was only 14 ships that came from Plymouth to defeat the Armada.

The rest came from the Medway

and the Thames Estuary is rife with the senior service.

Here we made the ships that defended Britain and built its empire.

In the 18th century, Chatham built 125 ships

and employed nearly 2,000 men.

In the 1700s, this was the largest industrial complex in the world.

I've come here to buy a present...

on the rope walk.

When it was constructed in 1790,

the ropewalk, where lengths of rope were spun,

was the longest brick building in Europe.

At a quarter of a mile long,

it supplied grand sailing ships and barges alike.

And today, it's still making rope in the traditional manner

and at the heart of the process is master rope maker, Fred Cordier.

And the principle of the technology

is simply to wind the things together by opposing twists,

effectively holds it all together.

-That's right, yeah.

-And you're knotting onto another bobbin there.

Does it matter that it's got a knot in the middle of it?

No, because it goes in the centre of the strand, so it's gone.

And you don't want them all to come to an end at the same time,

so you have different sizes of bobbins.

What's happening? There's a bell going off.

That's the warning bell telling me they're nearly there.

Nearly there. What's nearly there?

The machine at the other end.

We'll have to go and look at that happen.

The rope making machinery here is the oldest surviving in Britain.

Parts of it date from 1811.

Whoa!

I'm riding the iron horse here.

Fred, what is making us move that way?

It's the twist of the rope against the nose at the top.

So it's just the twisting that's making us go?

'The technique of twisting and then countertwisting into ever larger strands

'remains the same as it was then.'

And here it is. Beautiful! Beautiful rope.

-What circumference is this then?

-It is a four inch circumference.

-Right. And that's how you measure old ropes?

-It is.

And you've made ropes for... some famous boats, famous ships.

-Certainly have.

-Victory?

-The Endeavour. The Victory.

-Yeah.

-Cutty Sark.

-Yeah.

-You name it, all of them.

This is where people who need a traditional-looking rope.

-Quite right.

-And I can tell you that's what The Dawn wants as well.

-OK.

So I'm going to have to take some away with me, I think.

I've got to get this coiled up. Coil away.

'And it is heavy stuff.

'Money for new rope.'

-Gentleman, I went to Chatham and I thought of you.

-Wow.

-Blimey, the real thing.

-That's what you use, isn't it?

-It is, yeah. Lovely.

-Have you been there and seen it done?

-We have. I have, yes.

-Great.

-You've never ridden on the machine, have you?

-No.

As long as I've done something that you two haven't,

-that's all I'm concerned about.

-You've done loads that we haven't.

We now have just 30 miles to go.

Up the Thames to St Katherine's Dock.

Port of London Authority's told me that in the old days

50 million tonnes used to go up and down the Thames.

And today?

50 million tonnes goes up and down the Thames,

but they all go further down the river, they don't head up to the Pool of London.

So where we're going now looks utterly peaceful.

The dockside warehouses fronting the whole length of the river

have lost their purpose.

Casualties of containerisation.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Royal docks.

Only 50 years ago this area employed more than 100,000 people,

unloading cargo from across the world.

But sailing barges were in decline earlier than that.

After the First World War, engines began to take over.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s,

nearby Woolwich Reach became home to a solid mass of idle boats

which their hungry crews named the "starvation buoys".

It was a hastening of a slow death for the working barge.

-So the barges would hang around waiting for work?

-Yeah.

It must have been a misery for our boys.

As we passed through the Thames Barrier,

the emptiness seems to give way to overcrowded incident -

Greenwich, the Dome, Canary Wharf

and the glass towers of the city rise above the river banks.

There she blows. There's the City of London coming into sight.

I'm getting emotional!

Emotional feeling as you come up here.

It's a tremendous feeling to come up into London like this.

There's no doubt that the modern metropolis of London owes

a part of its greatness to the humble Thames sailing barge.

These wind-powered HGVs made London's great Victorian expansion possible.

They brought the bricks and sand for building,

the barley for the beer,

and of course the fodder for all those working horses.

At the time when this barge was working,

as it made its way further up the river,

so it would become busier and busier.

People would come down in the evening to see what was going on.

Dickens liked to walk down there and stand on London Bridge,

not Tower Bridge because Tower Bridge was built towards the end of the century.

But London Bridge, to see the Pool of London

and to see all the ships that arrived,

the packets that had come from France bringing the news,

and the place thronged with activity.

And here, just beneath Tower Bridge,

the modern gateway to the western river,

lies our final destination -

St Katherine's Dock - and our final challenge.

Now we have to manoeuvre 120 tonnes of barge out of a rushing river

and into her berth.

The narrow entrance and the great press of water

make this a matter of careful leverage and a fine judgment.

A bit of way.

Ooh!

That's the leeboard, isn't it? Sorry.

But apart from that momentary bounce on our leeboard,

amazingly, we passed through the eye of St Katherine's Needle.

Ship and her precious cargo safe in port.

Right, here we come. If you lift it round you.

There we are. Thank you very much. Whoa!

We're going to transport it much as it would have been transported,

to some hungry horses near Hyde Park.

So how many do you take?

Well I think about 20 on there would be a nice load for a single horse.

OK. Well, we've got about 1,000 here. So plenty to choose from.

We've got a long day then.

That's it. We're all loaded up. We're off now, Gerard.

Thank you for having me.

-I'll just leave you with the other thousand to unload.

-We'll enjoy that(!)

-Thank you.

Thank you for a great trip.

Thank you, guys. See you again.

Just over 100 years ago, a sight such as this would have been commonplace.

Now Londoners stare as the product of a great working route

that once fed London and its sources passes by.

But that route created so much more.

It shaped our capital.

It contributed to our defences.

It kick-started our coastal rescue service.

It even brought the raw material for the roads that ironically

contributed to its downfall.

OK, I think what we'll do is we'll stop here.

There we go, great.

What I need to get... There we are.

All right. OK. Lovely. Thank you very much.

'But the point about the Thames barge route was that it wasn't just one way.

'Barges rarely left London empty.'

Where do you want the hay?

-Just stick it on the floor in the corner.

-All right, lovely.

It's a bit dispiriting, isn't it?

We have brought it all this way and Sovereign doesn't want it.

Still, it's not an entirely wasted journey,

because in fact this was a two-way trip.

The hay came in and another cargo altogether went back out.

It was called "London mixture" and it made its way

to Essex by the barge load to fertilise those fields.

In the full circle of life, at the end of the day,

what goes in must come out.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd