Revolution British Isles: A Natural History

The countryside of the British Isles - beautiful!

And although most of us now live in towns or cities,

we still think of our land as one filled with rolling hills,

and velvety fields where sheep may safely graze.

SHEEP BAA

Today, farming's still intricately woven into the British landscape.

But 300 years ago, it dominated our way of life, almost everyone worked on the land.

HE WHISTLES

But something that had lain hidden for over 300 million years

was about to change all that.

A source of energy that would transform the world,

and it's right here underneath me feet.

What is it?

Coal!

It started on a small scale, but by the end of the 19th century,

Britain was mining more than 38 million tonnes of this stuff a year.

More than it extracted with all our modern machinery...today!

Coal transformed Britain.

It fuelled the Industrial Revolution making Britain the most powerful nation in the world.

But more than that, this rock that was so hard to win from the Earth,

caused the greatest change to our landscape since the ice age.

Under our cultivated fields lay a whole treasure trove of rocks and minerals,

just waiting to be dug out.

Our supplies of lead, iron, tin, and copper would all change the face of Britain.

We'd come to dominate the land

joining the distant corners of our isles by rail...

road and canal.

Britain would lead the world with its industrial innovation and urban growth,

and London would reflect this new-found power, becoming the biggest city in the world.

The great swathes of Britain's forests that had provided fuel and timber

for much of our history were now at a low ebb.

Early industries though looked after this source of fuel carefully.

They harvested the trees in a sustainable way,

and we can thank their early management system for the survival of much ancient woodland today.

Epping Forest, 6,000 acres that are a sort of living record

of the changes we've made to our landscape during the industrial 18th and 19th centuries.

And they're especially evident in the convoluted trunks of this old beech tree, a dozen or more of them.

Looking like something that Arthur Rackham might have illustrated in a fairy tale.

These ancient, scarred trees, with their roughened bark

and bulbous growths reflect years of harvesting at the hand of man.

In olden days the wood was cut from the forest in even-sized branches.

It was then burnt slowly to remove water vapour

and any impurities, producing a clean-burning form of carbon...

charcoal.

Charcoal was in great demand from gunpowder,

glass, and ironworks because of its purity.

To get even-sized branches, trees were cut off at ground level,

coppiced or pollarded - cut off at the top of the trunk.

Both forms of harvesting were done every ten years or so.

In woodland pasture the trees were always pollarded like this,

keeping the emerging new shoots well away from hungry mouths.

If you take a walk in the Forest of Dean, the High Weald

or Epping Forest today you can still see charcoal's legacy.

Regular pruning allowed sunlight to reach new areas of the forest floor,

creating enchanted glades.

There's one special creature which was common in Epping Forest right up to the 19th century.

But which is now extremely rare right the way across Britain and this is it.

It's a caterpillar and it feeds on foxgloves in woodland clearings where the sun warms up the air

much more quickly than underneath the tree canopy and as a result it has a special relationship with man.

For thousands of years the clearings formed by the charcoal burners provided the perfect hot spot

for these insects, which are susceptible to the cold.

Once they turned into adults they'd only need to fly

the short distance into another coppice clearing to breed.

Because of this, these heath fritillary butterflies

were said by the Victorians to be the woodsman's follower.

Today the heath fritillary is extremely rare in woodland

because coppicing and pollarding have declined.

Why? Well, another fuel was starting to take over from charcoal.

It was here, in Stoke-on-Trent, that this new alternative, coal,

was most appreciated.

Large quantities of coal and clay

were concentrated in the Trent Valley, providing perfect conditions for the manufacture of pots.

The potteries grew up in a haphazard way like this pot!

One or two small china works like this one at Gladstone,

expanded until the entire area was covered in bottle ovens, factories and houses.

Each potter would be expected to produce 2,000 of these in a day, that's one every 30 seconds...

I think I'm a bit slow!

I think that's a bit of a success.

But then so were the potteries.

The bottle ovens were never idle.

While one was being filled, another was fired and stoked for three days.

The unending supply of local coal produced all the heat need to ensure

the continued expansion of the potteries.

But there was one big problem,

burning coal was a dirty business.

Thanks to a complete lack of government legislation,

there came to be 2,000 of these bottle ovens, belching their black smoke into the sky,

turning this into one of the darkest, dirtiest and unhealthiest places in Britain.

This choking pollution was a sign of coal's greatest drawback.

While it kick-started the potteries, coal's impurities stood in the way

of industrial progress.

Solving this problem would remove a major obstacle,

and it happened here.

This may seem like just another English town, but a closer look reveals its unique past.

All these are made...

of iron.

This is Ironbridge Gorge, where Abraham Darby brought the Industrial Revolution to life.

It was here that he introduced a magic ingredient into iron smelting.

And this is it!

Darby managed to turn the local impure coal into coke.

In 1709, he developed a process to heat it up slowly and remove its impurities, producing pure carbon.

It was a turning point.

Blast furnaces, fuelled by clean burning coke,

were now freed from their dependence on charcoal.

The expansion of industry had begun.

Iron could now be mass-produced and cast into every conceivable shape.

Its uses seemed limitless.

And after all the patent making, the moulding and the casting,

comes a large pair of tongs and the moment of truth.

A special piece of 225-year-old design that made history.

Just knock the centres out with my sprigs, there we go...

And we've got...

the most beautiful piece of ornamental work.

It's a radial.

One of the 1,700 pieces that were used to create this. -

the world's first iron bridge.

Built in 1779 by Abraham Darby's grandson, it marked 70 years of industrial and engineering progress.

Spanning the River Severn, it allowed both the local people

and their coal to cross the water safely.

It also inspired a new generation of engineers,

spurring them on to greater heights and grand designs that are now as

much a part of our landscape as our castles and cathedrals.

These huge bridges still impress today.

You can only imagine their impact when they were first built.

Industry was now manufacturing goods and chattels on a vast scale.

The problem was getting them to market.

It wasn't like today with our many transport networks.

It was the age of the horse and cart.

What was needed was a form of transport that would enable goods to be moved smoothly and efficiently,

the canal!

One of the supreme achievements of canal engineering is this,

the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct,

a waterway through the sky.

Here, you're boating with the angels 38m above the River Dee!

On completion, it linked the coalfields and iron foundries of north Wales,

with the industrial Midlands.

Telford's aqueduct is the largest in Britain.

It's held together by nuts and bolts and waterproofed...

with Welsh flannel and boiled sugar!

The things you put your trust in!

Although the British Isles were well supplied with rivers,

many were of uneven depth

or too fast and treacherous for heavily laden boats.

Canals provided a safe alternative.

They were the motorways of their day.

Horses could now pull three times as much cargo as on the road.

Thousands of navvies dug through hills and along valleys,

on a scale not seen since the Romans built their roads.

Even today, there are still over 2,000 miles of canals crisscrossing the country.

The Caen Hill Rise at Devizes was heralded as one of the wonders

of the industrial world. Its 16 lock gates seeming to defy gravity.

Ten million people use these canals every year, mainly for pleasure now, and the water still pours through

John Rennie's tier of locks whose gates work as smoothly as the day they were hung.

But it's still a painstaking business to reach the top.

These new waterways that crisscrossed the country were soon claimed by wildlife.

BIRDSONG

The kingfisher is a favourite.

It's a shy bird, not much larger than a house sparrow, and it takes a bit of spotting.

Kingfishers love slow-moving streams and canals.

They're brilliant fishermen and they catch their own body weight

in minnows, bullheads and sticklebacks every day.

Such spectacular sights

from the deck of a narrow boat are thanks to our industrial past.

But there was another small guest who wasn't so welcome back then.

It challenged the talent and might of the canal engineers and navvies, with its own digging prowess.

The water vole.

This is Ratty from the Wind In The Willows,

seen as a pest for burrowing through the waterproofed, clay-lined canal walls causing the odd leak or two.

But today, canals have become a sanctuary for what's now one of our rarest mammals,

and with sharp eyes,

you might spot Ratty.

Not everywhere was lucky enough to have the canal system on their doorstep.

In places like Cornwall,

the rugged landscape had been left remote from the heart of industry.

But it was on these spectacular cliffs that the next great development took place.

I'm not far from Lands' End,

in one of my very favourite parts of the country not least because of all the wild flowers that grow here.

These cliff tops are simply awash with them,

bluebells, bird's-foot trefoil,

sea campion and just up there is a plant that reminds everyone

of my generation of the threepenny bit

because it was stamped on the back of it, sea pink, or thrift.

And the reason they thrive here

is that they're very good at growing on thin soils.

Why the soil is so thin is that not far below this is solid rock.

These rocks were formed about 280 million years ago, when France was pushed into Britain.

The pressure caused the Earth's crust to buckle and melt rising as a great granite block.

Where molten granite touched the rest of the rocks, though, extraordinary things happened...

and to find out what, I need to go down there.

As these rocks cooled, cracks formed which were then filled with a curious substance.

It's not just the sea that's turquoise blue here.

The rocks are too.

Now what does that remind you of? The dome on the town hall clock?

Ah, you see, that's the clue.

This colour comes from copper.

And there's tin, iron, silver and arsenic in these rocks too.

It's these minerals that transformed a quiet Cornwall into one of the world's

busiest mining centres, with some of the deepest mines in the world.

There was a problem. The shafts were deep and the tunnels stretched out

for a mile under the sea,

and that meant they were always filled with the drip of water.

It needed to be removed, and this necessity gave rise

to the world's first steam engine.

These romantic ruins housed the giant Cornish beam engines

used to drain the mines.

They're the remains of an industry that once gave half the world its tin.

But these pumps were fuelled by coal shipped at great cost from Swansea.

This that pushed engineers across the country to create a more efficient and economical beast.

It was a Cornishman, Richard Trevithick, who made the great leap forward

by using pressurised steam to power the engines.

In 1803 he created his first railway locomotive, well before Stephenson's rocket and this little beauty,

rather fittingly built by Coalbrookdale at the centre of industrial Britain.

OK!

Using steam under pressure allowed the engines to become smaller in size.

Put them on wheels and you've got the first locomotive.

MUSIC: "Coronation Scot" by Vivian Ellis

The railways that followed snaked their way right across the British Isles.

For the first time villages, towns, cities and industrial centres

were all linked together, and the British Isles was suddenly "access all areas".

The navvies who once dug the canals now laid tracks across the countryside.

They blasted tunnels through hills and towns,

and built bridges over rivers, roads and canals.

Now that engineers had conquered the landscape, they celebrated their triumph with great structures

like the Glenfinnan viaduct.

Soon, 30 million passengers were being carried every year.

There were a few hitchhikers too!

Introduced to gardens for its brilliant, magenta flowers,

a single rosebay willow herb plant can produce 80,000 seeds a year,

every one with a bespoke silk parachute.

And with the help of the train's movement along the line,

these featherweight seeds wafted far and wide.

The embankments burnt regularly when sparks from the fireboxes landed

in the tinder-dry undergrowth, and this provided a perfect place for the seedlings to grow.

Thriving on newly burnt ground and earning for itself the common name of fireweed,

rosebay soon spread across the country reaching the railways' furthest destinations.

It followed in the wake of a whole new breed of traveller - the tourist.

Scotland's countryside had been largely untouched by the effects of the Industrial Revolution,

but with easy access by train, that would soon change.

During the highland clearances, landowners had banished tenants from their property.

The resulting wild landscape attracted wealthy tourists looking

for a bit of sport and a contrast to their overcrowded city lives.

But the most prized animal was not a deer, or an eagle or a sheep.

It was something quite unexpected and was to become the most valuable in the British Isles.

The red grouse!

They're certainly entertaining to watch,

with their red eye shadow and comical call,

but to the Victorians, they provided another form of amusement.

The bird became so important

that even the Houses of Parliament were closed in time

for the start of the summer season, the glorious 12th.

At the height of its popularity, one man shot more than 1,000 birds in a day!

But how did the rich man's sport have such an impact on our land?

Well, to rear grouse wild, you've got to have heather moors.

They depend on the young shoots for food

and use the elder plants for shelter.

So, you need lots of heather moorland.

This need for both old and new heather

prompted gamekeepers to burn strips of heather every winter

to create the perfect, mixed habitat for the grouse.

So, much of the moorland which now covers over a third of Scotland

is preserved because of a sport that started almost 200 years ago.

But the English countryside had its own problems.

And strangely enough, the cause was the steam engine.

Its use in agriculture had increased production -

great for landowners, but not so good for farm workers.

As people left the countryside for the cities,

our urban population rose and our cities grew to such an extent

that even England's rich farmland couldn't support them.

We turned in desperation to a neighbour,

one that had remained devoted to agriculture -

Ireland.

Ireland's mild climate, limestone foundations and heavy rain

made it a perfect place for grazing cattle.

Huge quantities of beef and grain was sent over to England

But farmers in the south-west of Ireland faced a different situation.

Here the land was SO wet and boggy that only one crop would thrive -

the potato.

But even the humble potato needs some drainage if it's to grow well.

Unlike the straightforward digging that I do for my potatoes at home,

the Irish families who worked here made wide mounds

which they fertilised with seaweed and lime.

They used a spade,

but not a spade as we know it.

Their spade had a narrow blade.

It was a "spad", which became the common name for potato -

spud.

Visitors called these ridges "lazy beds"

because they only involved digging trenches

rather than the whole field.

Spuds grew well in these ridges, though,

and a modest one-acre plot could provide nine tonnes of potatoes -

enough to feed a large family for a year.

It was a farming system that worked well for many years,

but a freak introduction from abroad

was to change the fate of millions.

In September, 1845, disaster struck.

Potato blight transformed healthy green plants into a blackened mush

in a matter of weeks,

and the harvested potatoes succumbed to the same fate.

Its attack was devastating.

People had favoured one particular variety called the lumper,

and when this was hit, millions starved to death.

This area here was once a village called Lisaroo.

200 people worked and played here.

15 of them would have lived in this room.

Now it's just a pile of mossy stones.

Unable to pay rent, many thousands of these cottiers were evicted and their homes destroyed.

There was little support for the famine victims other than work houses

and the building of relief roads like these.

Soon even this support ran out, and this particular road came to a dead end.

So did the people.

The only alternative to starvation was emigration.

Nearly two million Irishmen and women abandoned their homeland

to start a new life across the water.

Such a loss had great repercussions on the landscape.

Just like the clearances in Scotland,

it left the land to nature.

Many crossed the Irish Sea in search of work in English cities,

swelling their numbers even more.

This vast urban population was to have a shattering effect

on even the wildest parts of our mainland.

This is the Ogwen Valley in Snowdonia -

ruggedly beautiful and isolated.

But this isolation was soon to be overwhelmed by industry.

And the reason was because of this!

Slate. It was formed around 600 million years ago in the deep sea.

Layer upon layer of mud was buried, squashed and baked hard

to create this finely textured, layered rock.

Why was this rock so vital to city growth?

It can be split easily into layers that are thin, light,

waterproof and perfect for keeping rain out of your house.

So popular did slate become as a roofing material

that the demand created this!

The Welsh slate industry took off dramatically.

In the early 1800s, 12 shiploads a month

were delivering slates for roofing, for tombstones and for paving.

Penrhyn once employed 4,000 men

and boasted that with the help of their labour force,

they roofed the world!

Working here was a perilous business,

but despite the difficulties, Penrhyn at one time produced

110,000 tonnes of finished slate a year.

Several of Snowdonia's slate quarries

are still being worked today,

but that hasn't stopped wildlife from making a home here.

The sides of the quarry are now an inland cliff -

a perfect new habitat for coastal birds to colonise,

like the pigeons and seagulls

that nest in its fissures and on its ledges.

But for me the most exciting story

is that another bird has taken up residence here.

The champion of the air, one of our most elegant birds of prey

and the fastest creature on earth -

the peregrine falcon.

Slate quarries provide good hunting and nesting grounds,

so from the peregrine's point of view

it's worth protecting them from other raptors, like this buzzard.

At twice the peregrine's size,

a sparring partner like this would daunt a less feisty bird.

Once the skies are clear, it's time to hunt.

With vision that's eight times more effective than ours,

it can spot its target from a great height.

It drops into a stoop and reaches speeds of over 100mph.

It flushes the panicked pigeons

up the quarry wall and into its fatal embrace.

Peregrines have the growth of our towns and cities

to thank for this habitat

and the holes left by the tonnes of slate moved out across the country

to roof our homes.

If you've ever wondered why you see so many pigeons around town,

it's because all the slate-top buildings

are perfect man-made cliffs.

Home from home!

By the early 1800s, cities were booming.

Industry in the north created our six largest including Glasgow,

Newcastle, Manchester and Leeds,

but to the south was the biggest of them all.

London had become one of the world's busiest building sites.

Its success was celebrated

in the grand architecture of the new Houses of Parliament.

Britain now governed not just a country but an empire,

leading the world when it came to technology and ingenuity.

Even today, 19th century architecture and design

has influenced some of our most modern structures.

But there was a downside to all this success.

I'm 60 metres above the streets of London on a clear spring day

and the view is absolutely wonderful.

In the early 1800s, this was the largest city in the world,

with one and a half million people

crammed into a few square kilometres.

It caused congestion and pollution problems

on a scale never seen before.

If I'd been standing up here all those years ago,

the view would have been very different.

Almost every home now had coal fires,

and the millions of chimneys

belched out enough smoke to block out the sun.

This extreme air pollution caused other problems.

It was blamed not only for killing off trees in the city,

but also for causing a new disease - cholera.

To keep a vestige of green in their city,

the Victorians turned to a tree

that could cope with the polluted conditions

and perhaps even improve them.

What they used would become the lungs of London.

Despite its name, the London Plane tree isn't a true Cockney.

In fact, it's a hybrid between a European and an American,

and like lots of Americans and Europeans,

they are found all over London.

Plane trees became popular in Victorian times

thanks to their hardy nature,

and they changed the tree-scape of British cities for ever.

It's thought that they might survive for 500 years,

so one day they'll also be some of the largest trees in England.

But what's so special about this tree?

Well, if you look around on the ground

you can find lots of pieces of bark that have flaked off.

And if you look closely at this bark, it's covered in tiny pores.

Now, just like our skin, those pores can get clogged by dirt.

So by shedding some bits of bark regularly,

the tree gets rid of the dirt

and always has some clean pores to breathe through.

A bit like a facepack, really!

More recently, it's been discovered

that when the leaf buds grow in April

the leaves are covered with minute hairs to protect them from the sun.

But these hairs also trap tiny particles of soot.

The hairs then drop to the ground in the summer to expose clean leaves,

cleansing the air in the process.

And the glossy, mature leaves are easily washed clean of dirt by rain.

If you put all this together,

London plane trees in city parks

can help remove 85% of the grime from the surrounding air.

But although these trees could thrive in such terrible pollution,

people weren't so lucky.

The smog in the air was so thick and cut out so much sunlight

that 15% of London's children got rickets

due to a lack of vitamin D.

And that was just one of the problems.

It was cholera that was the major killer in London.

In one year, 14,000 Londoners died of the disease.

The average life expectancy of a man was reduced to just 29 years.

In the early 1800s,

57% of children died before their fifth birthday.

Family gravestones like this one reveal the shocking reality.

Elizabeth and Hannah were three years old,

Phoebe was 19 months and Thomas and David were just two months old.

Out of seven children, only two made it into adulthood.

In this tiny plot alone, 123,000 bodies were buried.

London's graveyards

were quite literally overflowing with putrefaction.

Something had to be done.

Eventually, Parliament passed a bill in 1832

encouraging the establishment of seven private cemeteries

around outer London.

In an era before the existence of large urban parks,

garden cemeteries became popular places

for a carriage ride or a stroll.

Left undisturbed for years,

they have now become some of our best urban oases for wildlife.

These cemeteries included Kensal Green, Highgate and Brompton.

Here at Brompton, the 40-acre site now holds 200,000 graves.

These burial grounds solved the problem of body disposal,

but what about the cause of death, cholera?

Was it due to the bad air?

There were many people that escaped an early death

because of one thing - they drank beer.

Back in the 1850s, this stuff could quite literally save your life.

This is the John Snow pub in Soho,

named after a Victorian gent who became suspicious

when 500 people died of cholera

in this immediate vicinity in just ten days,

and he suspected the local water pump.

What he did was diabolically simple.

He took the handle off the water pump and observed what happened.

The outbreak of cholera died away

and he proved once and for all

that the disease was carried in polluted water.

The consequences of Dr Snow's discovery were huge.

Huge enough to change the face of London's natural landscape.

This is the York Water Gate,

built in 1626 for the Duke of Buckingham

so that he could alight from his barge

and access his riverside mansion in style.

Well, it was all right for him

but it's a bit more difficult for me today in my canoe,

and the reason for that

is that the river's not here any more!

All that's left is this shallow pond

to remind us where Old Father Thames used to be.

So where's the water gone? Well, it's 100 yards over there.

Because the path of the Thames was altered.

Its banks were walled up to contain the waters

and to relieve London of its foul stench and its cholera epidemics.

The ground has now been reclaimed

and in this case it's the Victoria Embankment Gardens.

The course of the Thames was altered for ever

by these elegant embankments

which walled up its sides and hid a vast new sewage system -

a system that finally released cholera's grip on London.

We'd reached a point where we could control the problems

that arose from industrial success,

and could alter the landscape to suit our needs and even our whims.

But this increasing power

eventually made us take a step back and look at what might be lost.

Trees that had been nurtured and harvested for thousands of years

were now threatened with destruction.

But some survivors hung on, like here in Epping Forest.

And what's more, they were safe.

The Corporation of London preserved them

in what was probably the first conservation programme

designed to set aside land for all of us to enjoy.

In 1878, all this was protected for future generations.

After an era of ferocious industrial expansion

and economic growth,

when we thought little about poisoning ourselves

and the environment,

it gradually began to dawn that we had a responsibility to the land

and the things that lived on it.

The history of our landscape

was about to enter a new and more enlightened phase

and it's the events that have occurred in our lifetime,

both man-made and natural,

that have shaped the Britain we live in today.