The West: Putting on the Style How We Built Britain

I'm on a journey to discover how a thousand years of history have shaped the way we built Britain.

I'm heading west through a landscape that looks like the best of rural England, but which,

in the 18th century, became home to the most fashionable buildings of the day.

Here, elegant cities flourished.

There was Bath - playground of the elite.

And Dublin, after London, the grandest city in the kingdom.

And here too the seeds of the industrial revolution were being sown.

This is an age when Britain discovered a new sense of pride.

There's an optimism about the towns and cities we built,

about the great houses and gardens, about the machines we invented, and the west embraced this revolution,

turning itself from a country backwater into a leader of style and sophistication.

The mysterious spires of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

Blenheim was built by Queen Anne

to celebrate the deeds of her most famous general, the Duke of Marlborough.

The palace took its name from the battle of Blenheim in 1704.

It marked Marlborough's resounding defeat of the French,

a victory which ended their hopes of dominating Europe.

This building was meant to leave no-one in doubt how glorious that victory was.

It's built on a stupendous scale.

Blenheim shows Britain with a new self-confidence, a bit of a swagger,

a celebration in stone, shouting to the world, "We're top dog now and we plan to stay that way."

The style of Blenheim was already fashionable in Europe, but relatively new to Britain.

It echoes the great civilisations of the past.

This classical look was based on the buildings of ancient Greece and Rome,

a reminder of a world of strength and order.

The entrance to the palace is another striking example

of this passionate love affair with the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome.

This huge portico, these high columns and, at the top,

a vast triangular stone roof, and then the doorway here, high, narrow,

the kind of doorway that even a conquering hero would feel humble to go through.

When you get inside, you really realise this isn't a cosy little home, even for the grandest family.

This is a glorious monument,

this great hall with its triumphal arch dedicated to Queen Anne and Marlborough himself.

And in the ceiling, this vast painting of the duke of Marlborough

with the battle plan for Blenheim, laying it before Britannia.

These 18th century Britons are painted to look like

the classical gods and goddesses, reliving heroic myths of the past.

I don't suppose he'd read even half these books, but it's the look of the library that matters.

It's a temple of learning,

fit for an age that believed that, in place of chaos, their world could be ordered, improved...and measured.

Blenheim boasts 18 intricate and valuable clocks dating back to the 1700s.

-How do you know which clock this is?

-Well, this is from the green drawing room so...

Green left, green right, green centre.

-Green left.

-Right.

-Green right.

-That's it...

-It isn't really.

-Shall I try?

-Yes, try that.

Two more keys!

I think we've found it.

-OK, let's try this.

-That's it.

You're obviously very interested in time. Are you very a precise person?

Absolutely, oh, yes, indeed. Yes, absolutely, yes, in every way.

If I'm going to meet somebody at 7.15, it's exactly 7.15, and that's it.

And I get a bit irritated if people don't turn up at the right time.

-You must be a nightmare to live with.

-Must be!

What's it like working in a place like this?

-Marvellous.

-Is it?

-Oh, it's just wonderful.

In this particular room, I've very often worked on a winter afternoon,

you get the impression that the people in these portraits are watching.

-It's very, very atmospheric.

-Would you like to live here?

Wouldn't like to pay the heating bill.

But you'd have to be a duke, would you like to be a duke?

Ah, well, yes, that wouldn't be too bad.

-I think everybody should be a duke, myself.

-That would be wonderful.

-Live in a house like this.

-Yes.

Blenheim is a bold statement in a grand, new style.

We'd go on building in this new classical manner for over 100 years,

right through the Georgian age, named after the kings that ruled Britain in the 18th century.

Over time, the look would become refined and simplified.

And it was seen not just in country houses but in towns and cities, and even in gardens.

I drove south from Blenheim, into Wiltshire, to see how they did it.

What could be more natural than to go for a tranquil row

on a lake in the middle of the English countryside?

And yet there's nothing natural at all about where I am.

This is a man-made landscape.

This is designed to be beautiful

and created by man, not by nature.

The gardens of Stourhead were laid out in the 1740s by a wealthy banker called Henry Hoare.

This is a vision of paradise brought to life.

A scene of natural beauty, improved by man to make it perfect.

There's a path all the way round the lake.

And at various points on it, there are classical temples, temples based on Greek and Roman myths.

But the clever thing is you can be walking along the path like this,

just the lake and the ducks, and then suddenly round a corner and a temple bursts into view.

So the temple makes the countryside more exciting, more vivid,

punctuates the scenery for you,

making the landscape dramatic.

Epic tales of Greek gods and Roman heroes fascinated the Georgians.

Rich young men flocked to Italy, on what they called the grand tour,

to steep themselves in the culture that they so admired.

And on their return, they created, in their own corner of England, a version of what they'd seen abroad.

Inside his copy of the Pantheon in ancient Rome,

Henry Hoare placed his collection of statues of the gods and goddesses of myth.

This great statue is at the heart of the temple -

marble figure of Hercules, doing the first of his 12 labours, which was killing the lion.

And the sculptor took the dimensions of it from an ancient classical statue but, to get the detail right,

he got a famous prize fighter, Jack Broughton, to model the biceps.

Georgian land owners like Henry Hoare believed that they could perfect nature,

and in so doing, they created some of our finest landscapes.

If the classical dream of perfection could be realised in a country house or in a garden,

so it could in a city.

25 miles from the peace of Stourhead lies the grandest Georgian city of all, Bath.

At the beginning of the 18th century,

Bath was still a small old-fashioned rural town, contained within its medieval walls.

Water ran through open sewers down unlit streets.

The hot spa water had attracted people to Bath since before Roman times,

and when royal visits made the city fashionable, the elite started flocking here to take the waters.

The daily social round started with a dip at the baths.

People have been swimming in these...

warm spa waters for hundreds of years.

In the 18th century, men would swim in britches and white cotton smocks and tied by a rope to the side

so that if they got engaged in a saucy conversation, they wouldn't float away in the middle of it.

But the thing the 18th century introduced was actually to drink the spa water.

And it's meant to be very good for all sorts of ailments.

It smells slightly sulphurous, a little bad...bad egg smell.

It does taste like tepid bath water, to tell the truth.

I'm fully restored.

Anyone who was anyone came to Bath.

In 1728, a start was made on creating a glittering new Georgian city - orderly and refined.

It became Georgian England's most glamorous resort,

called the Valley of Pleasure, complete with meeting rooms, coffee shops, costumiers and coiffeurs.

The whole secret of Bath was that it should be elegant.

They even advertised that the city had pavements to walk on

so you didn't get splashed by mud, and you could walk along here, talking and seeing and being seen.

But the key to elegance was to provide housing for people,

so that they could live in style.

It was a great British invention, the terrace house, that allowed this to happen.

It was a simple idea.

A row of houses joined together in a uniform line, each with its own front door.

Terraces could be copied and repeated, bringing the discipline of regularity and structure and order.

The architecture of Bath was the vision of an ambitious developer,

John Wood, who modelled it on ancient Rome.

He wanted to catch the mood of the glories of the past and make them the wonder of modern Britain.

This must be one of the grandest set of terraces in Bath, the Circus, built almost like a wedding cake -

tiers of columns one on top of the other, and a great balustrade with acorns running round.

It's actually three big terraces that swirl round to make this circus.

And as you walk round, you kind of go dizzy with excitement looking at it.

Britain's first circular street of houses was so striking, its curved tiers of columns so imposing

that some visitors compared it to the great amphitheatre of the Colosseum in Rome.

But the uniformity of these crescents was only skin deep.

A view round the back tells a different story.

Compared with the smooth front of the Circus, the back of these houses is a bit of a jumble.

Very grand, but still a jumble,

some curved, some angular.

And the reason for that is that Wood did the whole design of the circus,

rented all the land but then gave individual builders the right to build as they chose.

So every builder built a different house behind what looks like a uniform facade.

The elegant designs begun at the Circus were developed on a much grander scale.

Bath's Royal Crescent.

Here, the splendour of life in ancient Rome had finally come to town.

Dominating the hilltop with a bold, simple sweep of stone was something people had never seen before.

When we want to cram a lot of people into a small space, we build vertically.

The Georgians did it differently - they squeezed them in horizontally.

And the result is this magnificent crescent - 30 different homes with 114 pillars dividing them.

And what a perfect place to live.

You look out over this great sweep of open countryside.

And just a short walk away down there, all the pleasures of the city.

Absolute magic.

The fashionable way to get about town was by the Georgian equivalent of the taxi, the sedan chair.

It's actually very comfortable.

There was a highly organised system.

They had number plates, taxi ranks and set fees, and they caused traffic jams.

The King's daughter Princess Amelia once insisted on travelling to Bath, from London, by sedan chair.

Having been pampered and paraded around the city,

you headed for the Assembly Rooms, and the evening's entertainment.

There is no modern equivalent of the Bath Assembly Rooms.

This was a place where everybody doing the season in Bath would come.

As long as you paid your money, you could come in here and be treated as an equal.

You'd come and play cards, sip tea, talk.

And then if you felt like it, come through into this magnificent room,

the ballroom.

Just imagine it,

the rustling of silk, sparkling jewels, the chandeliers gleaming,

a thousand or more people,

dancing and music, people gossiping and flirting.

There must have been, every night here during the season, a real buzz

a real sense of excitement and thrill to be here.

-This is a gargantuan job.

-It takes a day if I was to do it on my own.

You need a dishwasher.

I'll wash and you dry.

These actually cost £100 each when they were first...

-No! Each chandelier?

-Yeah.

-What are they worth now?

£500,000 each.

Have you ever known any accidents happen?

Um, I think in the last 15 years, a judge threw a Savoy cabbage into the air and broke one.

A judge threw a Savoy cabbage at...?

Yeah, it must have been an ornamental one on the table and maybe he wasn't as sober as a judge.

-You can never trust a judge.

-No, who can you trust?

Drunk as a lord, drunk as a judge.

Do you want to wash this one?

The building boom led by Bath was only one aspect of Georgian enterprise.

Away from the sophisticated cities, another Britain was being built.

The quiet landscape of the West Country was being transformed by the energy of a Georgian revolution.

Across fields, valleys and hills, a new transport network was being carved.

The canals.

The Kennet and Avon Canal was dug to connect Bath and Bristol in the west to London.

It cut out weeks of inconvenient travel by land or sea.

It was now possible, for the first time, to move raw materials

and manufactured goods from city to city by horse-drawn barge.

That's good. This is Bonnie, she's 20 years old.

She spends the whole summer going up and down the canal taking passengers

and then winter time she goes out in the field and has a rest.

And she's a very, very good horse.

And it's quite a skill, cos it's a heavy barge, and she mustn't slip and she mustn't fall into the canal.

How long would it take you to get from, say, the docks at Bristol, how far up would you go?

There was a big trading base built up, a little bit further on, to and from Devizes.

A lot of the cargoes came in from Bristol,

about a 4-day journey with a horse, or 2 horses when they were full.

-One horse if the barge was empty.

-Two horses?

-Two horses with a fully laden barge.

-And one horse when it was empty?

-That's right.

-What did they do with the other horse?

They would put the horse on the deck, or they'd walk it alongside the barge, but it wouldn't be working.

Did they go day and night?

They went day and night and they kept going.

And would they have been a husband and wife team?

-Not on these barges, no.

-And where would she go?

-They were doing what was relatively short...

-Poor wife!

I'd be at home in my cottage in Honey Street.

Georgian canal builders were determined to take control of nature.

If they met a hill, they either tunnelled through it,

or took the canal over the top, with a flight of locks.

One of the most spectacular flights ever built is at Caen Hill near Devizes.

A staircase of water.

29 locks in all were needed to lift shipping out of the Avon valley

up onto the hills north of Salisbury Plain.

The canal had to climb so far above sea level that there was no natural source of water.

To pump water where it was needed, the engineers had an ingenious solution.

Steam.

Steam power was the greatest technological leap forward of the Georgian age.

And the most important building on the whole canal

was this small structure, Crofton pumping station, built in 1807.

Its crucial job was to pump water into the canal

so that boats could float up the flight of locks and over the hill.

The building had to be strong enough to support the weight

of all the machinery inside

and, at the top, the gigantic beam weighing six tons.

That massive machinery,

that brilliant harnessing of power, is all designed

just to bring water up this pipe, cast iron, also 200 years old.

And it pushes the water up,

five tons fill this pipe and a ton at a time are pushed off, out of the top.

Ah! Ah! Like that.

And to see where it all comes from, I've got to go down here.

And this is where the water came from, if I can squeeze past here.

From the very bottom of the well down there,

and it rose 12 metres, that's 40 feet, to the top.

Now 40 feet may not seem very much to us.

But it was the ability to move water that 40 feet

that allowed London to be connected to the West Country by canal.

As a result of which, industry grew, people prospered.

In the west, the waterways led to one of Britain's richest cities, Bristol.

Where Bath was about pleasure, Bristol, only a dozen miles away, was about making money.

At the heart of the city was a busy trading port.

It was this harbour and the docks and the canals that fed into it

that were at the heart of Bristol's commercial success.

In the 1700s, there were said to be 3,000 boats registered to the port of Bristol.

Boats would have been filling this space, the masts towering above the houses.

And the boats themselves had to be very carefully moored

so they didn't bang into each other in this tiny space.

Shipshape and Bristol fashion, it was called.

Fortunes were made from global trade and Bristol's merchants grew rich.

Streets of new homes sprang up above the harbour.

This house belonged to John Pinney, who owned plantations in the West Indies.

It's one of many houses built by a new generation of middle-class Georgians

who wanted comfort and the latest conveniences.

This is what John Pinney built.

Like every successful businessman, even today, he wanted to show his success.

In the corner, the key for a businessman, this mahogany door opens,

and inside...this heavy...

..iron door,

a strong room,

for keeping his ill-gotten gains.

The dining room, or eating room, as he called it.

And the table laid out for cheese and dessert, when the servants would have withdrawn.

And this magnificent cheese container,

a box, which rolls on castors, so you can pass it down the table.

Lift the lid off, and it's metal lined,

with little holes for the cheese to breathe.

There were two ways of calling the servants, there's the...

simple ringing the bell.

# Dang, dang, dang, dang! #

Or a speaking tube, you blow down, and it makes a whistle sound in the kitchen, and then you say,

"Cook, could you send up more gravy for the mutton, Cook?

"Hello, is anyone down there?"

And Mrs Bridges or whoever would get the extra gravy, take it in here.

A lift, the dumb waiter, pull the handle, up it will go, to be served upstairs.

And she'd be saying, "Oh, them upstairs never stop asking for things."

These days, every multimillionaire wants to have a swimming pool in the basement, the ultimate luxury.

Well, Pinney had the Georgian equivalent.

In the basement he built this stone plunge pool,

filled it with cold water, and says he used to swim every morning, and it kept him healthy.

Brr! Rather him than me.

The population of Bristol tripled in the boom years of the 18th century.

Nearby villages, like Clifton, were transformed into fine suburbs.

But for all their respectable looks, many of the Georgian houses of Bristol, John Pinney's among them,

were built on a very unrespectable trade.

By 1730, the city had become the biggest slave trading port in the country.

A third of all British slaving ships used it as their home port.

They shipped goods from Britain to Africa, to exchange for slaves

who were shipped to America and the West Indies to work the plantations.

The ships sailed home to Bristol laden with cotton, tobacco and sugar.

Slave traders and plantation owners lined their pockets and furnished their homes

on the toil of men and women, many of whom laboured to their deaths.

But not everyone accepted the slave trade as normal.

Some felt it was shameful.

Hidden among the department stores of Bristol is a place that was built

by one of the most ardent anti-slavery campaigners.

This is the first Methodist chapel built in Britain,

designed by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley,

as a place to bring in the people who wouldn't come to the established church,

people who wanted to hear his passionate words about religion and God

and who'd listen to him in the open air, in their thousands,4

and had here a home they could come to, to listen to him preach.

In true Georgian style, Wesley's "new room", as he called it, was simple and understated.

Six plain stone columns supported the ceiling.

And light flooded in from a plain lantern window above.

Wesley's outspoken preaching often sparked uproar

from the congregation, and he had to be kept at arms length from them, for his own safety.

So there were two pulpits - the upper one for preaching, the lower one for reading -

and neither could be reached from the pews on the ground floor.

Whenever Wesley spoke, he attracted controversy.

They didn't put windows round the bottom of this chapel for fear the mob would break them

and, instead, they had this great lantern with light flooding down into the chapel from high up,

which had one other odd advantage. There's a little window there, leading into the rooms there,

where Wesley could stand and keep an eye on whoever was preaching here in the pulpit.

Wesley was a passionate opponent of the evils of slavery.

When he was in his 80s, he came to this chapel in Bristol

and announced he was going to speak about the wickedness and call for its abolition.

A huge congregation came, some of them people in favour of abolition,

some of them, of course, this being Bristol, in favour of keeping slavery.

And he used the vehement language he'd always used,

"What's the justice of murdering thousands of people in their own land?

"What's the justice of putting thousands of people on ships, casting them like dung into the sea,

"and tens of thousands into cruel slavery, to which they're so unjustly reduced?"

And he described how everybody listened, enraptured.

And suddenly, in the middle of the sermon, there was a violent explosion,

and everybody started fighting each other here.

And the benches were broken and there was noise and confusion,

and he said it was like lightning struck the place.

And then after six minutes it suddenly stopped,

and he went on with his sermon.

Wesley fought for the abolition of slavery until the very end.

He wrote one final campaign letter from his death bed.

16 years later, in 1807, when abolition became law, his prayers were finally answered.

Beyond Bristol, other profound changes were under way.

I headed deep into the West Country, crossing the empty sweep of Dartmoor,

toward the very tip of England, to see the first stirrings

of an industrial revolution which would radically change the way we lived and the way we worked.

This coastline is one of the richest in the world.

Almost every mineral can be found just along this stretch.

And for hundreds of years, the Cornish have mined here, looking mainly for tin and copper,

cutting into the rock face of the cliff, down, following the seams right out under the sea.

And the only problem they had was the further they went,

the deeper they cut, the bigger the shaft, the greater the problem of flooding.

And all the water had to be taken out, pumped out by hand,

until these buildings came to the rescue.

Clinging to the rocks at Botallack on the north Cornish coast

are these engine houses, now ruined, known as the Crowns.

They were built to contain the newly-designed steam-driven engines which pumped out the water.

Miners could now dig deeper than they'd ever been before.

Families moved to Cornwall from all over Britain, in search of work in the tin and copper mines.

But what they found when they got there was often hot, damp and dangerous.

It was a tough life being a miner -

it wasn't just the narrowness of these walls.

They had very little light, just a candle on the helmet here, and very little air too.

And sometimes when they were under the sea, it was said if they got the shaft very close to the sea bed,

they could actually hear the boulders in a storm, rocking against each other up above.

And then sea water would seep through,

bringing chemicals from the rocks, which could burn your skin.

And then, of course, there was always the danger of a rock fall and a sudden death.

Ah, this is what they were after.

Here, gleaming gold and blue - the ore,

with all the precious minerals in it, running like the filling in a sandwich from right up there,

800 feet away down below me.

And this is what was left when they'd mined all the ore, this huge cavern

reaching up and right down behind me there.

And these tree trunks were put in to hold the two apart, the roof and the floor.

Like pillars in a temple.

And when sometimes the earth moved, or there was a small earthquake,

they could come back down and find these tree trunks had been crushed,

as though they were just matchsticks.

Is this how they used to mine?

-Yes.

-What's the technique?

Well, basically, you've got a small steel, with a sharpened chisel point.

You place it against the face, you beat the end, and each time you hit it, you turn it slightly.

It was quite hazardous, especially working by candlelight,

and it's not uncommon for fathers and sons to work together in a team.

And there have been documented cases where the father's missed the end of the drill steel with a sledgehammer

-and hit his son in the head and killed him.

-No!

-It has happened.

Oh, horrible. in the dark...?

Well, at the moment we've got lights, they were working by candlelight.

They had to buy their candles from the mine.

So, because they had to pay for them, they only used the absolute minimum candlelight they could get away with.

What a horrible story.

There was a boom in mining - coal was needed for heating homes,

for driving the furnaces to produce steam, iron was in demand for building bridges.

Copper, to turn into brass, to make the things people wanted to buy -

doorknobs and bedsteads.

It was in a way the beginning of a kind of consumer society.

New ports like Charlestown, near St Austell, were built to carry on the trade.

Manufactured good were now being shipped all over the country.

It was the beginning of a new age of comfort - carpets and curtains and wall papers.

Houses were being decorated with the first mass-produced furnishings.

Saltram House, near Plymouth, was redesigned in the 1740s

for the local squire, John Parker.

The outside reveals the trends in Georgian house building.

Symmetrical, in true classical style, but plainer and simpler.

The contrast with the interior is breathtaking.

Just look at this room, this is the great drawing room, or the saloon.

The first thing you notice, this huge, very fine plaster ceiling,

and below it

a vast carpet that seems almost to mirror the ceiling.

The carpet was made just up the road, Axminster,

cost £126, worth thousands and thousands now.

The Parkers wanted the latest thing in interior design

and they employed the most famous designer of the day to make sure they got it.

Robert Adam took charge of the look of the house and chose everything,

from its plaster covings to its gilded furniture.

In the hallway, he used exotic touches of mahogany.

And up above, another highly-prized feature -

a delicate plaster ceiling, in the newly fashionable colour, off-white.

At the top of the stairs was a succession of finely furnished bedrooms.

There was a great passion for wallpaper, and this paper was actually imported from China.

And it shows another of their passions, or fashions - the fashion for drinking tea.

Here's the tea being put out and dried under a roof there, ready to be transported.

This is, um, three, four workmen actually making tea chests.

Up here, they're actually filling the boxes,

it looks like people standing in coffins, but they're treading the tea down into the boxes.

Now where are they tasting it?

Somewhere they'll be tasting it.

I can't quite see how...

Yes, there they're tasting it,

the little teapot, two cups, he's just trying it out.

It was a great industry.

This tea was grown, it had to be harvested first of all.

From there they go over the mountains, it would take six weeks' journey, down to the sea port.

There the European tea traders would look at the tea,

choose the best tea, and start shipping it to England.

The whole process took over a year before the Georgians here

could sit down to the latest fashion - a nice cup of tea.

That's very delicate.

We dust it with a brush because the dust will sit in around...

any little edges, and because it's gilded, it's fine gilded,

the dust will just rub the gold off.

It must be worth a fortune, this.

I believe so, but I don't know.

I'd rather not know!

Why would you rather not know?

Well, it make you a little bit more nervous of touching the pieces.

-Yes.

-So you have to approach it with a bit of confidence and not be afraid to move it around.

-Ever broken anything?

-Yes.

-Have you?

-I've broken the slop bowl to this set.

-No!

-Yes.

-What did they say?

Nothing yet. Accidents will happen.

In 15 years, I've broken two pieces.

Very pale.

Cream?

And they would also have had sugar.

Well, I don't drink my tea like this. I don't drink green tea.

-And brown sugar!

-Brown sugar.

I have to use these.

Easier said than done. There we are.

It's looking like soup now.

It is.

And you would have stirred your tea without clanking your spoon.

-Oh, right. Not kind of...

-Exactly.

Now, I bet we don't say cheers.

-We will.

-If you're playing the host, the lady of the house,

I don't think you'd say cheers in 1780 or wherever we are.

We can say it anyway. Ah!

That's better.

There was another revolution taking place in Britain during the Georgian age.

It wasn't as dramatic as the use of steam power

or the building of canals, but its impact was just as profound.

It was road building.

For the final part of my journey, I'm heading north-west into Wales, and on to Ireland,

at that time united with Britain, to see how the Georgians transformed the way we travelled.

Up till then, Britain's road system hadn't been much more than a collection of muddy tracks.

But beginning in the 1730s, a new network of toll roads was built.

Money was collected from passing travellers and went to maintaining and expanding the new roads.

Every few miles, tiny pepper-pot-shaped toll houses were built.

Each had a gate or turnpike so that fees could be collected.

The prices were written up outside.

A horse was a penny, a coach or carriage was four pence,

and most expensive, at ten pence, was a score of cattle.

Hello.

-Can I come in?

-You can. You're very welcome.

Oh, it is very cosy, isn't it?

It is, surprisingly, yes.

How big is it? About eight feet across?

I've no idea.

I know it's easy to decorate - I used to decorate.

You can reach the ceiling. So, what was the idea?

You have a window all the way round?

Well, he could watch the people, the travellers coming.

But aren't you a bit disturbed by all the cars?

In the 30 years I've been here,

-I've had ten cars and wagons through the wall.

-I wouldn't dare sit here at night with lorries thundering past.

My cousin was staying with me one year, and it was the day for going home.

She was sitting here. She said, "What's it like when a car hits?"

Two minutes later, a car hit.

She was white, so was I.

She said, "Oh, I'll go home tomorrow."

The road I'm driving along was built for a special purpose -

to speed up the journey from London to Dublin, and it went right across

the most perilous bit of the mountains of Snowdonia, this beautiful countryside in Wales.

They needed to travel backwards and forwards with letters

and people and they just couldn't do it unless a proper road was built.

When the government of Ireland was united with Great Britain's in 1801,

a new long-distance road to Ireland became essential.

The man chosen to built this ambitious road was one of Britain's most famous engineers -

Thomas Telford.

One feature of Telford's grand new road

became his most celebrated achievement - the Menai suspension bridge.

100 feet above the dangerous waters of the Menai Straits,

graceful stone arches bear chains of cast iron,

which carry the roadway across to Anglesey and on to the ferry port at Holyhead.

It was a fantastic achievement, really exciting,

and they celebrated every stage of the building within one year -

when they first put a chain across,

vicars came out and gave their blessing, and three workmen actually walked across on a chain.

When the final chains were in place, they lowered a band and played the national anthem.

When the first footpath across was created, they fired a 21-gun salute.

And then, when the whole bridge was complete, 5,000 people came on foot,

to watch the bridge opening and horse-drawn carriages going across for the first time.

There were so many people, Telford said they mustn't go across cos it might risk the bridge.

After centuries of treacherous ferry crossings,

there was now a safe route to Anglesey and, from there, onwards to Ireland.

Dublin. In the 18th century, a city to rival London.

Even today, it's dominated by landmarks from the Georgian age.

The Custom House, with its monumental facades.

The imposing domed drum shape of the legal building, the Four Courts.

And the Bank of Ireland with its imposing columns,

the grand entrance to what was once the Irish houses of parliament.

Dublin was transformed in the 1750s, when new quarters of the city

were developed with wide terraced streets and elegant squares.

The houses were built with a typical Georgian care for regularity and uniformity.

Exterior decoration was kept to a minimum, except for one feature.

The only little luxury they allowed themselves,

the only extravagant gesture, was in the doorway to the house itself.

And this wonderful fanlight, of which there were hundreds and hundreds in Dublin,

all made of cast iron like that.

They were needed of course to let light in, but look how beautifully decorated they are.

But a shadow was to fall on this elegant world.

The city had been built up as a rival to London, the seat of Irish government.

When that moved to London, with the union, the elite moved with it.

And their grand homes went into decline.

The fine houses of Henrietta Street would never be the same.

This is a fascinating house.

It's one of the oldest and grandest houses in Henrietta Street, built in 1743.

It was lived in, first of all by a peer of the realm, then by a succession of bishops.

And then it fell on hard times.

As the better-off abandoned their fine houses, the poor moved in.

Henrietta Street turned from a wealthy architectural showpiece into something quite different.

Like so many of these grand houses, this one fell into terrible decline.

First of all, just not looked after properly,

and then, finally, subdivided into scores of little residences.

It's worked out that in this street there were up to 100 people living in every house.

And you can see how they divided it up.

There's an old partition mark there.

And then, where the green paint stops and the purple starts,

there was a ceiling right the way across here.

There's another partition mark down the side there.

So that bit is one house.

They removed the staircase entirely and put separate floors in so they could cram in more people.

So, over 100 people living in a house designed for, what, ten?

The Georgians had created an elegant sophisticated world for themselves -

at least for the elite - one in which order prevailed over chaos.

But the very fascination that they'd taken in science,

the discoveries they'd made, meant that the Industrial Revolution was starting to gather pace.

And as it did, the facade of the Georgian world,

like these terrace houses, began to crumble.

By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, industrial revolution

was speeding up and social revolution was on the way.

In the next programme, I'll be travelling

to the north of England - the power house of Victorian Britain -

to see how the new industrial age brought riches to some,

misery to others and dramatic change to all.