The North: Full Steam Ahead How We Built Britain

I'm on a journey through Britain to find the buildings that have made us who we are.

This week I'm in the north of England -

the powerhouse of Queen Victoria's Britain.

The technology and wealth generated here made Britain the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.

The merchant princes of the north built grand warehouses,

imposing monuments

and pleasure palaces to mark their success.

But progress came at a price.

Some people felt that the north of England was in danger of spinning out of control because the people

who were creating that wealth, the miners, the mill workers,

the factory hands, were, according to reports at the time,

living like savages. Something had to be done.

For hundreds of years, rural Britain had changed very little.

But the nineteenth century was consumed by a passion for progress

that reached every corner of the country.

One invention captured the spirit of the age.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

Steam trains have a kind of golden glow of nostalgia about them for us now but you imagine,

when they first came in they must have been terrifying.

I mean they'd ripped apart the towns and the countryside

to make the railway line and then along came this great monster, belching smoke and steam,

whistle blowing, thundering along in a way that nobody understood

at two, three, soon four or five times the speed that anybody had ever travelled before.

It all began in the north of England.

Here, the engines were invented...

And the first passenger lines were built.

In no time at all Britain gave way to what was known as railway mania.

For the first time it was possible to cross the country in a day.

It meant Britain was becoming one nation.

-Can I have a go?

-Yes, it's your turn now. I want you to come over there,

put the seat down, lift this up and sit on the seat like a professional.

-Can I use this?

-Yes.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Have a look where you're going now.

I can't do anything about where we're going, we're on a railway!

The railway capital of the world was Newcastle Upon Tyne.

It was home of the pioneering father and son team, George and Robert Stevenson.

This handsome city still owes its appearance to those days.

The railway brought the wealth that funded great building projects.

It treated the city as its own, straddling the Tyne with iron bridges.

It soared across the streets on mighty viaducts.

It sliced through the historic castle.

And it arrived finally at one of the greatest of all stations.

Three acres roofed in glass.

There's a terrible temptation getting off a train

just to rush immediately through the ticket barrier.

Newcastle, you just have to stop and look around you, cos this is the most glorious building.

The magic of Newcastle is this lovely curve. Look.

Lovely place.

The station's builders adapted the style of ancient Rome to celebrate the modern age.

The roof is supported by classical columns but they're made

as no Roman column could be, from iron,

allowing for the vast roof span here.

Even the front of the station wouldn't have looked out of place in Ancient Rome.

What I like about the Victorians is this extraordinary self-confidence.

This is like a temple of a new age.

They're saying, you know, we're the cathedrals of the future and the railwayman is the priest.

The railway brought people together but also tore communities apart.

Villages emptied as people flocked to the towns

to find work in the new factories and the mills.

I'm on my way across Yorkshire.

On the way to a place which of itself tells the story of Britain's great industrial adventure.

In the 1780s, Manchester had a population of less than 50,000.

In 60 years it increased six fold, to over 300,000.

An ugly, sprawling city of mills and factories,

roads, railways and canals.

The main industry was cloth-making and Manchester became known as cotton-opolis.

It's a great mystery why Manchester became this huge industrial city.

I mean, there were some obvious reasons.

The climate's damp so it was good for cotton manufacture, which they'd been doing for many years.

There was coal nearby and when steam came in

the water was soft so the machines could work day and night without corroding.

But nevertheless, why Manchester?

And the curious thing is once the process had started, it was virtually unstoppable.

In the 1830s stories began to emerge of the true horror of Manchester's streets.

According to one report they were unpaved and without drains or mains sewers

and were so covered with refuse and excrement

as to be almost impassable.

In 1841 the average life expectancy here was 26.5 years,

the lowest in Britain since the plague in the Middle Ages.

Murray's Mill opened in 1801.

Like so many of Manchester's old buildings

it's being renovated and cleaned up, making it difficult to get a sense of what it was once like.

Nothing remains of what was here 200 years ago except the slight whiff of engine oil coming off the floor.

But then it would've been row after row after row of spinning machines,

a terrible din, clattering machines, the air like a snowstorm full of cotton dust.

1,300 men and women employed here, and children, running backwards and forwards at speed,

under the machines to retie the cotton or get rid of the rubbish.

George Murray, the owner, said, "I never knowingly employed any children under the age of nine."

Manchester became so crowded that many people were forced

to rent space in these cellars under the houses - windowless, airless

and they say number 33 has still got a cellar that's in the condition it was in those days.

I've come to see your cellar if I may.

By all means.

Which I'm told is in its original condition as it was in the 19th century.

-I believe so, yes, yes.

-Is it true? Great, can I have a look?

Of course you can. Come through. It's down here, young sir.

-That's not how they used to go down surely?

-No, but...

Well, I may go down here...

..and never come back up!

Cor blimey!

That's all right.

I can just do it I think, ah!

Be better if I lost a kilo or two. Oh, there we are.

It's thought that 16 families

lived in this space.

Just imagine it.

The only facility at all they had is this

brick oven here,

which probably filled the place with smoke and just think of the stench

and the noise

and the damp.

16 families.

In the 1830s they said that 50,000 people were living in conditions like this in Manchester.

While the workers lived in squalor their employers,

grown rich beyond their wildest dreams, were throwing money around.

They wanted to imitate the great trading cities of medieval Italy,

to suggest that they were the natural heirs

of the powerful and cultured Italian merchants.

By the end of the 19th century

some even saw Manchester as the Florence of the north.

This building belonged to James Watts,

owner of the largest wholesale drapery business in the city.

It cost nearly £900,000, an unheard of sum at the time.

The architecture is bold.

Every floor is in a different style -

Elizabethan,

Italianate,

French Renaissance.

These warehouses weren't just for storing goods, they were for displaying and selling them as well,

and this must rank as the most sumptuous of them all, it's so grand it's now a hotel.

When Charles Dickens came here he called it the merchant palace of Europe.

Each of the floors sold different goods.

Carpets and linens on the ground floor, dresses on the second,

shirts and underwear on the third and furs and lace on the fourth.

It was like an early department store on a huge scale.

Just imagine coming to shop here, I mean you'd be completely bowled over by it.

It's a knockout, which is what the designer meant it to be.

I mean these bridges, which looked rather like

bridges over the canals of Venice, are a kind of platform

from which you can see right down there,

right down there, acres and acres of silks and satins and furs...

Brilliant!

-This is a fine old place to keep clean.

-Hello, it certainly is.

-What do you think about this?

-I love it, me.

-Do you?

-Yeah. I like the old buildings.

-What do you like about it?

Just the staircase and the chandelier as you come in the entrance.

-It could do with a good...

-It could do with what?

-A good decorate but...

-A good decorate.

-What, just a touch up?

-Oh, more than a touch up.

-Really?

It's good looking down as well. Have you been up on the five?

-I tried.

-You tried?

-To look down.

-Can you not look down?

-Can't look down.

-Can't you? Why?

I...my hands go... I get pins and needles in my hands.

-Can you look?

-Do you want me to go up with you?

-Yeah.

-Can you look down?

-Yeah, course I can. Come on.

-I'm not walking.

-You're not walking?

So we're off on an adventure,

Bridget and me.

Come on.

Oh, no. You'll have to hold my hand.

-Come on then.

-Ah!

-There you go. That better?

-It's all right, isn't it? Oh, thank you very much!

-All right now?

-Well, I wouldn't like to do it without you.

Oh, thank you very much.

Manchester was improving, at least in the eyes of the powerful merchants,

but it still didn't have a building that really represented the power and wealth of the place.

So in 1864 the town council announced

that they would build a town hall the equal if not the superior of any similar building in the country.

And the result was this, one of the great buildings of the Victorian Age.

The new town hall gave Manchester an imposing air.

It had been an industrial powerhouse for barely 20 years

but seeing this building,

you'd think it was the most important city in Britain.

It's really strange coming into this building.

I mean, you know it was built in the 1870s

and yet it feels like the Middle Ages, 500 years earlier.

Isn't it extraordinary that people who were so proud of the modern, of everything they were achieving,

when it came to building their big public buildings built them to look out of date?

The great theme of the town hall is cotton.

It's displayed on the windows, carved on the walls and decorates the floor.

They wanted to make this wonderful old-fashioned look but they had a problem.

They were also very modern, the Victorians. How do you get the modern and the old to mingle?

They were ingenious. They wanted central heating for instance.

They couldn't obviously put it in this stone hall as it would look too

obvious so down here, if you look right to the bottom of the staircase

you'll find a cluster of radiators

and the heat came up and wafted up to the top.

It's not very warm but it was no doubt quite effective.

And they wanted gas lighting. How do you get the gas?

Well, under this banister rail is a pipe and that pipe

carried the gas right to the top of the building, look there it is, going up here to the lamp.

Until the Industrial Revolution, most people lived in the countryside.

The problems of city life were new.

But the Victorians were determined to grapple with them.

I travelled east from Manchester

to see one of the boldest attempts to change the world for the better.

There was a growing feeling in the 19th century that society really ought to do something about

people who had fallen through the net, the destitute, the very poor, but it was quite an uphill struggle.

When the young Queen Victoria said to her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne,

"Why don't we educate the poor?" He replied, "Why bother the poor? Leave them alone."

Victorian philanthropists thought differently.

This is the village of Saltair, really more like a town.

It was built by Bradford textile king and millionaire Titus Salt.

Salt was appalled by living conditions in Bradford

and decided to create a model community for his workers outside the city.

The factory opened in 1853, providing work for 3,000 people.

He built houses for his workers in grid formation,

with service alleys at the back for good hygiene.

He built a church.

He built a school.

He built a grand village hall.

And even retirement homes for the elderly.

Hello.

Salt believed buildings must do more than house people.

They had to inspire them.

There are four rather charming carved lions,

one here, one down the hill, two on the other side of the road.

And the story goes that these were entered for the competition for the lions in Trafalgar Square in London

but that competition was one by Edwin Landseer with those rather

grand, powerful lions, and these charming little cats ended up here.

Salt took more care over his workers environment than any other employer at the time.

And it worked. The mill closed only in 1987.

It's difficult to know what to make of Titus Salt.

On the one hand, of course, he was a great reformer.

The people who worked for him and lived in Saltair lived in conditions

undreamt of at the time and far more hygienic than anything that was available anywhere else.

On the other hand he was very demanding.

He was a bit of an autocrat. He wanted his own way.

For instance, there were no pubs allowed in Saltair cause he didn't want people getting drunk.

And then he had this funny obsession about washing.

He didn't want anybody to hang their washing out in the street

cos he thought it would spoil the look of Saltair,

and the people who lived here said that he built this tower at the top of this house

so he could look over the neighbourhood and check that nobody had put their washing out.

I can't believe that's true.

Oscar Wilde said that work was the curse of the drinking classes.

But I'm on my way to see a little town called Rawtenstall in Lancashire where I'm told

there's a reminder of what the Victorians believed,

which was that drink was the curse of the working classes.

And this is one of the ways they tried to put an end to the use of the demon drink.

As a nation we'd never consumed as much alcohol as we did in Victorian times.

Drunkenness, with all its dire social consequences, was rife.

The Temperance Movement was founded to counter the crisis.

Course, it was all well and good to try and stamp out drink but the problem was the great British pub,

which everybody went to because it was the centre of social life of the town and the village.

So they scratched their heads and they came up with an ingenious solution.

They would have pubs but without the alcohol.

At one time there were many temperance bars in Britain,

particularly in the north.

Fitzpatrick's, which opened in 1891, is the last one left.

Evening, hello.

-Well, can I have a drink?

-Course you can, what would you like?

Well, I'd normally ask for a whisky and soda or half a pint of bitter.

-Sarsaparilla maybe.

-Is sarsaparilla your favourite?

-It's my favourite, yeah.

-It's nice.

-Is it a good seller?

-Yeah.

-I'll try the sarsaparilla.

It's a fascinating idea this, a pub with no alcohol and it still goes.

-You still have people come in.

-It's been going, well...

Since when the Temperance Movement brought it in, as far as I can gather.

It's, er, 1890s, something like that.

They abolished the tax on alcohol and everybody sort of went bonkers

and made their own in the cellar and...

The gin was the main thing, as far as I know.

People were obviously being late for work and not turning up at all

till the Methodists and other groups decided to bring in something called the Temperance Movement.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

-You're allowed to say cheers, are you?

Yeah, you say cheers.

Um, that's sweet.

Ugh!

-It's like eating...

-That'll be the sarsaparilla.

It's like eating melted ice cream.

-Put a lining on your stomach that, David.

-I bet it would.

-It has been professed to be the liquid alternative to Viagra.

-Oh, really?

-Yeah. It was in a newspaper a few years ago was that.

-Really?

-Yeah.

Have you tried it out on that basis?

I've been told I don't need to. I don't know what that means but...

Or not to bother or something. It may be the other case, yeah.

At the heart of Yorkshire is Leeds.

Where Manchester seemed to have sprung up from nowhere, Leeds had a long history of cloth manufacturing.

For centuries the cloth merchants of Leeds had grown up with money and were comfortable with it.

Their buildings showed a playful self confidence,

with factory chimneys built like Tuscan bell towers

and mills like Moorish palaces

or Egyptian temples.

But the merchants of Leeds preferred not to live near their factories, but in the hills above the town.

They say and Englishman's home is his castle

and in this suburb of Headingly,

the rich built their own castles, dozens of them, each in it's own style.

The Victorians weren't afraid to experiment with their buildings.

They were willing to try anything.

A bit of Mock Tudor here,

a bit of Greek there

and plenty of Medieval Gothic.

This extravagant building was the home of the industrialist William Joy.

On either side of the front door, cast as Medieval heroes, are busts of himself and his wife.

Of course, not everybody was equally rich.

This house looks like a mansion but in fact it's divided into two.

It's a semi detached mansion.

One family took one side, had their own grand entrance, the other side had their own grand entrance

and both families could hold their heads up high and pretend they lived in this huge house.

If you keep your eyes open you see some extraordinary details.

Take this cottage for instance. Simple four bedroom stone cottage.

Walk down the garden path

and look what we have here.

The privy is a castle,

proving that if an Englishman's home is his castle, his toilet must be too.

Did you use this toilet?

Yes. Up to about eight years ago.

It's very grand going into a castle.

Isn't everybody can do that, is it?

No, from a cottage to a castle when you want to use the toilet.

That's right, yes.

Did it make you feel very grand?

No, it made you feel horrible cos everybody knew where you were going!

And in the night, or in the winter, must have been a bit difficult getting down there.

Well, you made certain you didn't want to go.

-How old are you then?

-99.

-99?

-In a fortnight.

Well, just as well you aren't still using it.

Listen, if I've nothing else it wouldn't stop me -

I'd get there somehow.

-Where there's a will there's a way, you know.

-Is that right?

Yes.

Back towards the centre of town

are the homes built for the less pretentious citizens of Leeds.

The Victorian terraced street is still at the heart of many of our cities.

The ideal of the Victorian home was that you shut the door on the outside world,

with all its noise and its smoke and its smells,

and you came into the home, which was a place of order, tranquillity

and to our eyes, of the most amazing amount of clutter.

My great aunt lived in a house not unlike this.

I remember it. I just remember it having these dark...

paint, this sort of brown paint streaked to look like wood.

In the centre of the city, Leeds traders tried to part the middle classes from their money.

Leeds has the finest array of Victorian shopping arcades anywhere in the country.

Large glass and iron palaces that provide a warm and pleasant place to pass the time.

It was the start of a new national hobby.

-I've never understood window shopping.

-It's a woman thing.

-Is it?

-Yeah.

-What do you do, just look and think.

-Yeah, think.

-And think oh, I might.

-Oh, I could.

-Oh, I could.

-Yeah.

Best of them all is the city markets.

Pick your own strawberries for a pound today.

Two bags for a pound, have a look, last few to clear out, all to go!

-What's your best line?

-Pork pies.

-Pork, just straight pork pies.

-Just straightforward pork pies, yeah.

-Can I have a straightforward pork pie, please?

-Yeah, if you like.

-What do you think of it?

-It's great, isn't it? There's nothing like it.

It's like giant Meccano set, isn't it?

-I haven't thought of it like that.

-Yeah.

It's, it's also like the interior of a theatre.

-With the gallery round?

-Yeah, the Leeds crest is up there.

-I like the dragons.

-Yeah, they're marvellous, aren't they?

Not enough people look up when they walk around.

-It's true.

-They don't look up enough.

It's your fault because you put pork pies all the way along the front and they look at your pork pies.

No, people just don't look up.

After a hard day's shopping, Leeds had other attractions to offer.

There were, of course, pubs galore you could go to the opera,

go to the theatre, but perhaps the best fun would be had here,

Thornton's new musical and fashionable lounge.

# One that Oliver Cromwell knocked about a bit

# In the gay old days oh there used to be some doings

# No wonder that the poor old abbey went to ruins... #

Built in 1865, Thornton's is the finest surviving music hall in Britain.

Here people could escape their regimented working lives and enter a world of dreams.

Charlie Chaplain and the escapologist Harry Houdini both trod the boards here.

# The boy I love is looking down at me

# Oh, there he is, can't you see?

# Waving of his handkerchief

# As merry as a robin that sings on a tree! #

Bravo!

What do you think the appeal of music hall really was?

I think the audience could get very much involved with the artiste

and also the words of the songs would mirror everyday life so they became very involved.

And they were good tunes and they could clap and they could sing along,

which is the magic of the music hall.

They were a very important part, the audience.

And the theatre is actually designed for music hall, isn't it?

Yes, yes, it's the intimacy - getting people close to the performers.

That's why in some of these very modern theatres there's that awful gap, you know, it doesn't...

These theatres have hearts and the people are sort of part of you.

I think, David, that you should stand up here and see what it's like looking out at this theatre up here.

-That's a very, very bad idea!

-It's a very good idea.

-So you know the feeling that we get up here. Feel that.

-It's lovely.

And then what we do is I put my arm in there and then we go.

# My old man said follow the band

# And don't dilly dally on the way

# Off went the van with me home packed in it

# I followed on with me old linnet

# I dillied, I dallied

# I dallied and I dillied

# Lost me way and don't know where to roam

# Listen here Oh, you can't trust the specials

# Like the old time copper When you can't find your way home! #

Thank you very much, ladies and gentleman.

The Victorians had a wonderful way of celebrating.

In the centre of their cities it was all excitement, gaiety, success.

The more sombre side of life

they tended to keep to the outskirts.

The Lawnswood Cemetery was opened in 1875 just outside Leeds.

In the past people were usually buried in the graveyard of their

parish church but the population boom of the 19th century meant there was often no space left.

Commercial cemeteries provided an alternative.

For the first time these public cemeteries weren't in the hands of the church.

They were privately run by a cemetery board and the result was

that the Victorians who buried their families here were no longer bound by the constraints of the church

in terms of the design and the look of the memorials.

They could actually let rip, do exactly what they liked

and the result was these wonderfully extravagant, flamboyant memorials to their families.

In fact, at times you almost get the feeling that they're competing,

one family against another, for the grandest and best tombstone they can provide.

If you want to understand the Victorian attitude to death you don't just look at a cemetery.

You have to read it.

Take this for example, the Firth family of Leeds.

One, two, three, four, five children on this left hand side, all died before the age of 40.

One, one year old,

20, 18, 29, 34.

So no wonder they wanted

to remember them and put up a proper memorial to them

because the Victorians, in a way that we really aren't, were surrounded by death.

It happened at every age.

There was no way of treating all sorts of illnesses so that this kind of catalogue of families,

big families, with only one or two left alive, was quite normal.

-Hello.

-Good morning.

-Keeping it in good nick.

-Trying to.

-Who's your helper?

-My son, Richard.

-It's a family business?

-Yes.

It's a rather grisly business to be in.

All your life in a cemetery.

No, it's quite peaceful at times actually.

Yeah. Especially on a day like this.

Do you like the way they look? Do you think they're better than ours?

Yeah. Ours are more uniformed, they're all one size and certain shapes.

-Are they?

-These are all... Yes, I mean, we can't now go above four feet in height,

-six inch in thickness, three foot wide.

-Who says?

It's all to do with regulations with the council.

Do you mean you can't make an angel on top of a...

like these, or an urn with a clock, you can't do that any more?

No, no. Nothing above four feet in height.

-Pathetic. Health and safety.

-A lot of money and all.

I would imagine there's a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford such as this now.

What would you like to have if you could spend as much as you wanted on your own grave?

To be quite honest it's something I've never thought of. I'll leave that to me son.

What would you like to have written on it?

"I told you I was poorly."

From sewers to workhouses, from churches to prisons, the Victorians believed that

for every new problem there was a building that could solve it.

If you look over there,

you see that line of towers.

It looks like a sort of fairytale town.

It is a town but no fairytale.

It's a town for the insane.

In 1850, there were 12,000 people in Britain's lunatic asylums.

By 1900 that number had grown to 100,000.

The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum

provided 800 beds when it opened towards the end of the century.

Inside the asylum feels like a museum or a school.

Until you come across reminders of its real function...

with the restraining cells.

It was even equipped with its own mortuary.

This is the big surprise of the asylum.

A full scale ballroom

with a stage for theatre there, orchestras or bands.

Now why would they put this here?

And the reason is really quite simple.

The people who lived here, lived here virtually forever

and they didn't want to just leave them in their wards so every Friday there'd be a dance.

From one side of the asylum the men would come,

from the other side the women would come and sweep round the floor,

have an hour or two of happiness.

Looking at photographs of asylum patients can be a harrowing experience.

But the evidence is that these vast asylums

attempted to look after patients better than ever before.

However cruel it may seem to us today, the intention was benign.

West Riding Asylum was used until 2003.

'Today only the caretaker remains.'

How many people would there be in this bit?

A dormitory like this would probably accommodate about 30 people, possibly

in some other wards a dormitory of this size would house as many as 40.

And do you remember it when it was full?

-Yes.

-How many people were here altogether?

In its prime in 1945

-it's quite well recorded there were about 2,420 plus patients here.

-Really?

How long have you been here?

35 years this month.

Do you feel affection for the buildings?

Oh, you've got to do, if it's a structure like this that you've actually been associated with

in a maintenance tasks for like 35 years yeah, of course you do.

And you look at the main building, you know. It's just pure

sort of magic, innit?

And what's its future?

The future is to be a redevelopment site where there's 500 plus apartments and houses created.

-And are you going to remain an inmate?

-Who knows?

-Would you like to?

-Yeah, why not?

Why not? Nowhere else to go, have I?

If the insane worried the authorities,

so did the growing number of people who turned their backs on religion.

As families moved from villages to the cities, church attendance plummeted.

It began to look as though the industrial revolution had killed off God.

One man determined to reverse the trend and save the soul of Victorian England was the architect WN Pugin.

One of his finest buildings is in the village of Cheadle in Staffordshire.

Pugin was passionate about his buildings.

He believed that the materialism of the industrial age was creating

an uglier world and it was his mission to offer an alternative.

Pugin designed over 100 churches but he considered St Giles to be his best.

It was, he said, "A perfect revival of an English parish church of the time of Edward I,

"600 years earlier."

The interior of St Giles is unlike anything else in Britain.

Every surface explodes with colour.

Pugin wanted to bring excitement and delight back into religion.

If you want to know why a building like this was put up in the middle of the 19th century,

I think you have to cast your mind back to what it must have been like to live at that time.

To have seen the England that you know virtually wiped out with these

huge new cities belching smoke, people working in factories, not for themselves any longer.

And these people saying, well let's revive the spirit of old England.

Let's look back to what it was like then because they, after all, were the good old days.

But clocks cannot so easily be turned back.

Britain's ways were changing.

Coming towards the end of this journey I'm travelling west to the seaside.

There's an old tradition up here of wakes weeks, when the whole town closed down, all the factories,

all the suppliers and everybody locked up their houses

and traipsed off for a fortnight by the sea.

Blackpool was the most popular destination.

By the end of the 19th century 2.5 million people a year

were visiting Britain's most famous resort.

The oldest ride on Blackpool's Pleasure Beach is the flying machine.

Designed by the aviator Sir Hiram Maxim to provide the illusion of flight.

Britain was on the eve of yet another era of change, led by technology.

Machines which had enslaved one generation were setting the next generation free.

Underneath Blackpool Tower is a more staid attraction, the elaborate ballroom built in 1895.

In a palace embellished with gold

and illuminated by the new fangled electric light,

people could spin away the hours.

The Blackpool Tower was built in 1894, a copy of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and it was a unique building

for Britain because it was saying life can be fun, this building is fun, it has no other purpose.

The north of England may be hard graft but it can also be a place for pleasure.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901 and people looked back over the many, many years of her reign,

they must have noticed the most astonishing change.

You think at the beginning, the north country in particular,

all industrial sprawl, slums, no proper sanitation.

By the end of it, this.

Well, it may not be perfection but it's a whole lot better.

In the next programme, on the final leg of my journey,

I'll be in the south to see how the architects and visionaries of the 20th century

planned a brave new world,

only to discover that we didn't always want it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd