How The Historic City Of London Was Built | Our History

right through the middle of London runs the Thames this Mighty tidal River was once the artery of the city but now all the bridges seem to sow the whole place together linking the north with the South powerful and functional graceful sleek and slender artistic and colorful we've got Innovative and modern Bridges beside the Grandeur of Gothic design and Victorian ingenuity [Music] progress can be measured by its very first Bridge London Bridge which has existed in four very different incarnations that date back to Medieval and even Roman times [Music] I've just come down Fifth Street Hill and this is lower 10th Street and underneath my feet are the remains of the Roman Bridge the very end of the Roman bridge on the North Bank of course we're now about 100 meters away from the river because in those days it was very much wider with sloping Muddy Banks [Music] Ali Taylor from the Thames Explorer trust helps school children discover London's history on the banks of the Thames Romans booked the first London Bridge yesterday and it's just Downstream here yeah um how did they choose where to build it well one of the reasons was this was the highest point that the tide reached in those days and so they got a free lift with the tide up the river right another reason they built it here was because it doesn't look like it now but this area was full of islands it was very shallow and so they could build a bridge across it was a good bridging Point good forwarding point is there any evidence of it here on the back of the river a couple of weeks ago we had a bit of a star find and these were the children because the children are wonderful you've got sharp eyes haven't they they have indeed now those are Roman floor tiles it's amazing that they haven't knocked off in all that time it's at least 1500 years old isn't it what happens is you see they're buried in the mud okay when they get protected this is a fantastic archaeological site because you've got the tide coming in and out so twice a day the River Thames kindly does the excavation work right so if we came down here next week we'd find something else gotcha that's why it's always really exciting to come down here because you never know what you're going to find no one knows quite what happened to the Roman London Bridge some historians think it fell into disrepair after the Romans left others believe its wooden construction was patched up and used right up until the building of London's very first stone bridge in 1176. [Music] sir Madness the Martyr martyr just through there is what used to be Bridge Street the approach to the old London Bridge come and have a look please these lumps of stone were actually part of the old London Bridge Bridge Street was here this was the end of the bridge and it went straight across the river there oh they seem to have built something in the way still I'm told there's a lovely model of the bridge inside the church [Music] and here it is just look at this what amazes me is all the buildings on the bridge there are three-story houses there are shops down below there's a chapel the Thomas the Beckett Chapel there's a gate house here there are pigs in the street and lots of chaps on Jose cows here as well here's a bit of naked bridge but mostly it's covered in buildings now in the old days before this they could put a single Arch over a stream but here this is 276 meters long and they had to have look 19 arches absolutely extraordinary Arch after Arch and they're incredibly narrow too just look at this one here hello you can see it be quite tough to get a boat through there it's so narrow and in fact if the tide was unfavorable there could be a six foot drop from your side Upstream to my side so that you'd shoot through a tremendous speed it was called shooting the bridge and the watermen loved it but it was dangerous a lot of them died and a proverb came which said the bridge was for wise men to cross over and for fools to go under one reason that they built all those houses and shops on London Bridge was that they always needed money the fact is the bridge was always in need of Maintenance and Repair [Music] now the bridge is falling down my fair lady the fair lady in the rhyme could well have been Eleanor of Provence Henry III's Queen She misspent funds meant for maintenance of the bridge in 1282 five arches collapsed and she quickly returned responsibility for the maintenance to her subjects amazingly the bridge was maintained for almost 200 years but after another fatal collapse in 1437 something more serious had to be done over the next 35 years Arch by Arch London Bridge was rebuilt but it still needed constant repair its collapse could have been a disaster for the capital as the nearest Crossing was 20 miles up River in Kingston fishmonger's Hall on London Bridge Approach is home to one of the city of London's guilds or Livery companies that were formed in early Medieval Times to protect and regulate specific trades here inside fishmongers war with its wonderfully Rich decoration they've got a whole mass of information about the history of London Bridge and I'm off to meet the curator Claire Crawford in the courtroom so Cloud this must be the old London Bridge with all the buildings on it yes it is um the buildings were taken off in 1757. they caused the sort of sort of lying it wouldn't be easy to drive anything over there would it and there were shops and all sorts of businesses it became apparent in 1820 that the camp the city were going to have to um look at building a new bridge they held an architectural competition in 1825 but decided after they'd picked a winner that they were going to ask John Rennie so anyway because he had designed Waterloo and Southern Bridges right and so John Rooney's design was put up this looks a bit of a mess this picture what's going on well it does look like rather an unusual topic for a painting doesn't it but it does actually show the demolition of the old London Bridge that started in 1832. ah so this is the remains of it that is yes that's right wow and you can see how the approach that bridge went past the doors of Magnus the master church this looks to our eyes I say an unusual topic but the the fact is that 5 000 people a day came to see the bridge being demolished yeah do they sell tickets they should have done it yes um but yeah I'm sure a few of them took the odd piece of stone home and put it in their pockets as a souvenir the demolition of the medieval London Bridge had sparked an awareness of its historical value and all sorts of little trinkets egg cups and snuff boxes were made out of fragments of the bridges Stone and timbers curiously the finest artifact of all from the old London Bridge Is this chair it's it's not terribly comfortable I have to say because I'm sitting on a piece of stone Claire tell me about it you allege that all these tempers came from Old London Bridge but they're not covered in Barnacles or seaweed these were very large old Timbers some of them driven into the riverbed they were taken out preserved dried out and then the inner parts of the woods were used to make the chair that you can see here we've got here the old London Bridge with its 19. oh she's there only a very small boat would fit through the middle there and then the second one down here is the second London Bridge that was designed by John Rennie further down you've got your cottages also designed by John Wayne so the old bridge that we're interested in is this one yeah of runnys on its completion in 1831 John Rennie was knighted and his magnificent London Bridge still stands to this day but as you can see this London Bridge here is definitely not Renee's five Arch design so where has it got to well it can be found in the unlikely home of Lake Havasu in the Arizona desert sold in the 1960s it's rumored that the purchases the McCullough Oil Company thought they were actually buying Tower Bridge bridging nothing except desert sand when it was first reconstructed Brick by Brick it now forms the centerpiece of this man-made fishing lake and is a major tourist attraction you don't have to go all the way to Arizona to see Rainier's London Bridge because this is one of the original arches the one on the south bank and also part of his structure are these steps taking you up onto the bridge they're now called Nancy's steps because in the Dickens novel Oliver Twist this is where Nancy gets murdered [Music] not much however of the old medieval London Bridge remains you can see turvitz alcoves preserved in Victoria Park and another a little closer to its original home here in the grounds of guys Hospital but my favorite piece of the medieval London Bridge is far more colorful and vibrant than these old stones and it's here just around the corner in newcomer Street this fabulous coat of arms you see at the top it says King's Arms 1890 that's when this Pub was rebuilt but underneath it says George III 1760. that was the year that George III came to the throne in fact that coat of arms was on the south gate of London Bridge in the time of his dad George II and it was in 1760 the whole lot was demolished all the houses the south gate and everything and sold and that's why it landed up on this Pub but when the bridge was there with the arch everyone who crossed the bridge must have walked under that Arch and indeed under that coat of arms and I think I ought to do it too just in remembrance there's no Bridge there but there might be a bar might not for hundreds of years the only bridged across the Thames in London itself was London Bridge if you wanted to cross anywhere else you would have to be ferried over by a waterman at the time this business was at least as important as the taxi business is today [Music] but there's one ferry that still crosses the tidal tens in the same places it has for hundreds of years right here in Twickenham right Francis can you take me across um do you get a lot of business here yes weekends mainly so it's tourists tourists and residents I would say right but not commuters with briefcases 10 in the morning so why don't they bother the bridges round is one and a quarter miles that way that way yes and Teddington lock to your right is one and three-quarter miles that's a Footbridge over the lot so that's the longest way along this wall it is it's more it's a rather uncomfortable Footbridge isn't it sort of steeper yes many years ago I believe all the residents of Richmond Hill that's not there yes they've got a covenant to say that the view from Richmond Hill to the source of the river mustn't be obscure so they said no Bridges no Bridges nothing and therefore there's still a ferry running yeah that of course was not to be the Fate for the rest of London's watermen [Music] for a ride a few miles Downstream [Music] foreign the expansion of the capital and the ever-growing congestion on London Bridge finally got work underway on London's first new bridge over the Thames in nearly 700 years the corporation of London held back the building of Westminster bridge for 70 years for Fears of the damage it would do to the trade in southwark and also because they were worried about impoverishing the ferrymen they even bribed the King Charles II to oppose the building plans the first Westminster bridge that opened in 1750 was dubbed the bridge of fools Corners were cut in its construction and its cheap shallow Foundation suffered from constant subsidence several of the piers had to be rebuilt before it was finally demolished in 1862 and completely rebuilt as the bridge that stands today [Music] the construction of that first Westminster Bridge despite all its faults meant that holding back the demand for more bridges across the Thames became impossible [Music] but the grandest and most famous bridge in the whole of London is a monstrous Victorian original built right next to the Tower of London it's Tower Bridge it's also one of the newest completed in 1894 it was financed by the tolls and taxis levied on London Bridge and it cost more than a million pounds arguably the most ambitious civil engineering project at the time over 400 men were employed to build a structure and over 70 000 tons of concrete were used to build the bridges supporting Piers alone today thousands of tourists come here just to look at this fabulous structure but back in 1876 just the idea of building a bridge here wasn't at all popular now the city of London were desperate to ease the traffic flow around the city which is just the other side of the Tower of London but the Thames was a major shipping Lane and a bridge here might spell the end of the Upstream docks so how would the bigger ships reach the docks further Upstream many designs were put forward with various clever ideas for letting the ships through eventually it was Horace Jones's ingenious drawbridge design that was chosen it lifted the whole Road [Music] now look look they're opening the bridge it's up at nearly 45 degrees there's a boat coming down so they've shut off the traffic they've shut off the pedestrians and they're all gathered here in the old days Port of London was the busiest port in the world and I kept having to lift the bridge several times a day so the pedestrians were allowed to go up in lifts up the tires and walk across the high walkways at the top so they wouldn't be interrupted but in fact nobody bothered to go because it was such fun standing here watching the bridge go up they all just stayed here as Spectators more or less as they are today [Music] thank you [Music] the bridge lift these days involves simply pressing a sequence of buttons engaging the hydraulic pumps that power the bridge stopping the traffic and releasing the safety bolts that keep the bridge in place David who is in charge of opening the bridge was kind enough to let me have a go at the final stage of lifting so how are we doing what else has to happen it's now protected so now we're ready to do a lift really can I do it all we do is check and make sure the bridge is clear very bright and now you can go ahead you don't have to warn anybody you just do it we just do this yeah and hold it down you just pull back and hold it back if you watch this oh fantastic watch the screen the screen will actually go with it oh yes how are you moving oh wow hey this is something I always wanted to do open Tower Bridge 45 is a long way up it actually goes up to 87 degrees gosh oh the pigeons are getting all unhappy out there we're disturbing their resting places oh here comes the barge right so I then I just let go that's it [Music] thank you now this chap here was the chap who used to drive the bridge in Victorian times in fact I think he's been doing it ever since but he's not looking terribly well at the moment they didn't have green electric buttons in there so they said they had these vast levers the first two levers here are for the large and small engines it says large and small you could decide which engines you wanted to drive this is for the resting blocks the brake you have to operate each of these in turn and more break and finally the Paw and each one had to be over like that before you could begin to open the bridge and then when you shut it again you did that and when you're going to open the bridge you did it with this which is basically just to open the hydraulic valve down below and let in originally the water and today with the oil [Music] now I'm right down in the bowels of the building below water level and this is an accumulator the way the victorians did it was to generate using a steam engine at the end of the bridge high pressure water at 750 pounds per square inch which came in here in pipes but they couldn't make it fast enough to lift the bridge directly so they had to accumulate the energy and what they did was to pump that high pressure water into a cylinder in the middle of this and the water pushed the Piston up which lifted this cross head and lifted the hull of this vast weight and it went up the rails to see their guide rails of the walls up about 20 feet and then they had accumulated a massive energy and with six of these accumulators they had plenty of parts and left the whole Bridge despite switching to electricity in 1976 the basic Victorian engineering principles that Power Tower Bridge remain the same today as they were over a hundred years ago I was taken further into the depths of the bridge to see the bascule chamber that was built to accommodate the bridges counterweight as it opened it's moving it's moving are you sure it can't just break loose it cannot break loose no all systems fail he just locks up someone wherever it is now as much as the crew and I knew this was true there is still something decidedly uncomfortable about having hundreds of tons of lead and iron bearing down on you you can see the sky through that well almost yeah yeah that is one whole lot of Machinery isn't it which end of the bridge weighs 12 s but they're relatively easy to lift because the countryweight's coming toward me in the basketball chamber act in the same way as the kid at the other end of a seesaw I just hope he's right that it is going to stop quite soon it stopped all broken and broken I don't believe you could break this bridge laughs though only a short ride Downstream from its nearest rival London Bridge Tower Bridge stands as a reminder of London's seafaring Heritage of the not too distant past and marks our progress as we build yet bigger and Bolder Bridges even further towards the sea this is the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge it carries the traffic on the M25 from thurrock across to Dartford this was finished in 1991 and it's actually two miles long and the closest bridge to the Sea as American President Franklin Roosevelt once said there can be little doubt that in many ways the story of bridge building is the story of civilization but by it we can measure an important part of a people's progress and today the bridges tie together the whole of London linking the north of south marshlands of Roman and Medieval Times into what has become the modern world city that London is today yes [Music] London's past is size and shape of the city worth hundreds of years dictated by the threat of War War it's a terrible and destructive force but actually it's played an enormous part in shaping London as the city is today just below me to the south of London Bridge in is the spot where London was actually founded because in about 80 50 two Roman roads were diverted to meet at this point and those roadworks were the beginning of London when they'd finished the roadworks they built a bridge and a settlement sprang up on both sides of the river the Romans established good relations with local tribes and the new city began to prosper but they'd reckoned without a nasty revolt londinium's buildings were made of wattle and dorb there was no local Stone and few defenses had been built the city was fat and vulnerable like a Sitting Duck and the person who inflicted this destruction on the undefended was a woman series we used to call her when I was a lad she was Queen of the icinai a fierce tribe from East Anglia and when she came charging into London they were so terrified they ran for their lives leaving just the women and the children to be slaughtered fact when the archaeologists came to look the only thing they found from this period was a layer of red clay where the whole place had been burned to the ground and a whole lot of skulls in the walking River nevertheless in spite of the lack of stone London was soon built up again and this time they made sure there were fortifications [Music] now you may wonder why I'm going into an underground car park well it's not because of the Romans park there are chariots down here although actually they may have because in Roman times ground level was down here six meters below where it is today no I'm going because Behind These two doors is the remains of a massive Roman building project one that determined the shape of London for 1500 years just look at this this is part of the original Roman wall built all the way around the city of London but in fact this wasn't the first military building they did as they needed some house their soldiers and so they built a fort and this is one of the gate houses and the rest of the fort would have been in the back there somewhere and that's where the Romans would have been having their breakfast or whatever Roman soldiers do they built the Gatehouse around ad 120 and they started on the wall something like 80 years later and it's astonishing how good the condition of the masonry is just look at this here absolutely it could have been built last week well a few years ago anyway and if you listen very carefully you can almost hear those Roman cells out there polishing their weapons now perhaps it's just a traffic overhead [Music] um the wall stretched around londinium for two miles it was to form the band River City for more than 1500 years the area it encompassed is now the Heart of the City of London [Music] building this war was an absolutely Mammoth operation just look at it it's six meters high and it's something like three meters thick and the whole lot is built of these amazing Stones now there was no local Stone London is built on Clay so they had to import this stuff ragstone and they had to bring in something like a million of these how on Earth did they get here I went across the city to another section of the wall at Cooper's close to meet Jenny Hall the Roman curator at the Museum of London well Roman London didn't have any available building Stones so it had to be got from further afield and it comes from the Medway area of Kent they quarreled it from there that's a hundred miles away it came by boat and we know that there were boatloads bringing up this building Stone to Roman London because one of the boats actually sunk at the mouth of the fleet and we found some of its cargo of ragstone in it so when was the wall built well we think it was built about ad200 but it's a coin that was found in rubbish that had built up against the wall that helps us give a date to it right and that is a silver coin oh fabulous so that that's genuine silver yes and this coin dates to ad213-217. what's interesting about this coin found with it were some molds and someone has taken a fresh silver coin and pressed it into the clay to make molds so that we've got a forger at work how many did you find over 700 700 this is a serious industry gosh gorgeous at work yeah at a time when there was rampant inflation so they obviously sort of wanted a lot of extra coinage oh fantastic [Music] successive Generations built the wall up higher and higher to keep out all those aggressors and when they ran out of aggressors they started using the wall for other things now just look at this bit these are just platform sockets but look up there that was obviously an arrow slit you can still see the slit at the bottom and then above it recycle Roman tiles and then they brick the whole thing up presumably because the people living inside couldn't stand the drafts have a look around here now here you can see that the wall has actually been converted into a house look look there's a flight of stairs going up and then there there's a fireplace up in the bedroom lucky people I don't have a fireplace in my bedroom [Music] bits of the wall survive throughout the city of London discovered Maurice riskly right next to one of London's major tourist attractions [Music] it's on the south of londinium was the river but then about ad390 the Romans decided they needed something more solid and they built this in fact you can still see down here the orange tiles that they're so often built into their walls and this wall was to play an important role in the development of London's defenses because when the Normans came along the fact that the war was here and on a prominent position overlooking the Thames meant this was the perfect place for them to make their Mark and look they built to last after his victory at the Battle of Hastings William the Conqueror still had to face the wrath of a whole lot of angry Saxon londoners in fact it was so dangerous in the city that he had to go and live out in Essex and they hadn't even built the central line then in order to calm down his new subjects he had to intimidate them and he ordered his soldiers to build certain strongholds within the town against the fickleness of this vast and fierce populace and the biggest of those strongholds was this this colossal Tower it's 90 feet high it's 118 feet wide it was the biggest thing they'd ever seen in fact this hugely ambitious building was the second largest Norman tower in the world [Music] Jane Spooner is curator of historic buildings here at the tower Jane who built this wonderful Tower well we know that from 1077 onwards it was built by Gandalf the bishop of Rochester oh wonderful a bishop exactly yeah sounds unlikely doesn't it so what was it built for we've got two defensive functions going on here um in that it's it's seen by anybody coming up River and also it's seen by the citizens of London who were particularly rebellious and it must have been terrifying that sort of height absolutely it will it was terrifying for a number of reasons one is was that it was a very large Stone building which the Saxons wouldn't really have seen much of before and that immediately denoted power wealth Dominion it's it's a very effective Fortress and it was built from Stone um its entrance isn't on the ground it's high up so you have to make an effort to get to it and also some of the walls are at least four meters thick in Parts four meters absolutely so it's a very very strong Fortress building Williams Tire still dominates the site today but his descendants carried on strengthening the fortifications one of the biggest Builders was Richard the lionheart who spent only a few months of his reign in England but spent huge amounts on fortifying the tower in its outer walls one of the most interesting buildings that survives from Richard's day is this the bell tower this was incidentally where they locked up Sir Thomas Moore for the last 15 months of his life but in Richard's time what's interesting is this this extraordinary polygonal shape to the ceiling that's actually a very early example of Gothic and they use it extensively much later on to hold up a roofs of churches this Tower is actually the second oldest in the whole complex only the White Tower is older but the shape of the whole Tower of London wasn't settled until many years later Henry III was responsible for building a curtain wall which surrounds William's original tower Edward the first carried on the program of improvements and built a second curtain wall and the moat he created the concentric castle that you see today this wasn't a new idea but Edward the master builder developed it to the point of perfection anyone who wanted to attack the tower would have a pretty tough job first of all they've got to get in off the river okay that's not easy and then outside that wall there was a moat it might have been nine meters deep and full of raw sewage then there are chaps firing arrows from that wall to deter them and even if they can get over it they're then stuck in this space between the walls with chaps firing arrows from there and from here because there are trained archers with long bows shooting down take that you rougher ah got him and even if they can get over this wall then they've got to go and attack the tower 90 feet high I wouldn't fancy it even today the tower remains a very secure place after all the crown jewels are still kept here of course there is one weakness in the towers defenses Legend has it that if these Ravens leave the Tower of London it will crumble and the kingdom itself will fall apart [Music] this is the Royal Naval College at Greenwich which was originally built as a Siemens hospital by Christopher Wren and Britain's most famous sailor Horatio Lord Nelson lay in State under one of the domes while people came past to pay their respects the rise of the Navy really started under Henry VII who curiously had a Palestine here he was an aggressive Chap and he attacked France and was terrified that we'd be attacked in turn so he built up the Navy and he built an enormous chain of coastal defenses all the way from Hull all the way around to Milford Haven this fort at Tilbury was established by Henry to protect London from Attack by sea England's defenses relied on intercepting would-be Invaders before they landed the fort was massively enlarged by Charles II who feared attack by the Dutch Elizabeth the first built this fort up north Castle to protect her massive new Naval dockyards at Chatham in Kent it was overrun in 1667 when the Dutch sailed up the Midway and burnt the British Fleet in the docks humiliating Charles II the threat of invasion remained very real until Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. London entered an unprecedented period of prosperity and was safe from Attack by land or sea for nearly a hundred years the next threat was to come from the air before the war London was the greatest city in the world it was the Hub of a vast Empire and home to 8 million people but the blitz changed all that terrible bombing just look here here is a row of Victorian houses built around 1850 Along Comes a massive bomb and flattens 15 of them here we are all this lot was rebuilt after the war Churchill himself predicted that one week of bombing might produce 40 000 casualties he described London as the greatest Target in the world a tremendous fat valuable cow but in spite of all that the authorities didn't want to dig any deep shelters for the people they thought that everyone might be so happy to be done there they'd be too frightened to come up again into the open air [Music] foreign so what most londoners had was one of these this is an Anderson shelter named after the Home Secretary at the beginning of the war and basically it's a hole in the ground with a bit of well Earth over the top really you had to build it yourself Les I'm a bit young to remember Anderson shelters but you had one didn't you yes we had one and uh I also helped to put it out and build it with my father and my brother how old were you it's only eight years old at Guitar wow did you have to make it yourself yes we had to construct it ourselves they bought these shelter Parts on a lorry and just left them with you we then had to dig the hole out and then it was constructed to put it up bolted it together with the bolts in the top uh along the back there was a bar which onto which bolted the Escape hat because the centerpiece in the middle was so that you get out the back if that if you got blocked up at the front then you put the Earth over the top and that was it right how much Earth on top the more it's a bridge you didn't have any you could have got shrapnel falling down even maybe not from bombs but even from the guns and it could have possibly have gone through the shelter by buying the Earth on the top of course it stops any stuff getting in there the only thing you used to get in with water more than 2 million Anderson shelters were distributed to the public but they offered only limited protection from the destruction of the Blitz londoners who didn't have a garden had in theory only the option of the street-level shelters that the government had provided they too were extremely cramped and again didn't provide much protection from a direct hit within days others had found their own solution buy a penny ticket for the tube and sleep on the platforms thank you the people who ran the country didn't really have much more protection than the average Londoner there were plans to build deep underground shelters way outside London but then people might think they were being deserted so in the end they came here to what had been the office of works it was reckoned to be a strong building and of course it had a basement which was very handy it was close by number 10 Downing Street and also the houses of Parliament and so this became the central emergency headquarters now known as the cabinet War rooms this is the wall cabinet room it's quite exciting to be down here this was where the cabinet met for the first time on the 15th of October 1940 at least that was the first time Churchill came down here because the day before a bomb had actually damaged 10 Downing Street and he realized that the heads of government ought to be underground and a bit further away from the bonds sitting in the seat of the cabinet secretary this is Churchill's chair that would have been happy and there were the three Chiefs of Staff in the middle of the room but the war was really run from this room this was where Churchill worked incredibly long hours if necessary he even slept here and you'll see that all the walls are covered in maps and just in case anyone Dodger came around there were curtains that he could draw to cover the maps up and hide all his Secrets now the chap who really knows about these rooms and this one in particular is Neil cook here who was involved with the restoration of the whole building Neil why did they choose this building well some people suggested it was because of its proximity to Downing Street it's only sort of 20 yards or something isn't it exactly but I think possibly the real reason is that this was originally a windowless fireproof archive store for architectural drawings and uh the thought was that they could deliver materials here and work to fortify the place could actually go on unseen how did they fortify the building they brought in millions of bricks they brought in enough steel sheeting to probably cover a football pitch into that they cast concrete about five feet thick and the whole of that was supported on about over 900 steel beams and of course Churchill used to come along and watch the bricklaying as it uh he was a bricklayer wasn't it well he was a member of the bricklayers union and he built a lot of walls down at Chartwell and there's one story actually which John Colville his private secretary during the war recorded in his dire three which is that Churchill was wandering about on the steel beams as they were casting the slab and jumped off and landed in some wet concrete but it'd be kind of kind of funny to imagine this wonderful large up to his waist in concrete yes outside not only had hundreds of London's historic buildings been damaged or destroyed but by the end of the blitz vast tracks of the city had been wiped out the terrible damage caused by the war had changed the face of London forever [Music] London had to be rebuilt and some people saw this as a great opportunity to put up wonderful new structures like this the Barbican complex it was built because the corporation of London was worried about the decline in population of the square mile caused by the Blitz Flats were built around Gardens and water features creating a Haven in the middle of the city the Barbican is absolutely massive it includes that church over there that tower that Tower and this enormous concrete block with these miles and miles of walkways it makes it feel almost like a walled tone which is actually rather appropriate because the word barbica means a fortified Outpost now some people see it as a terrific Triumph because with these walkways the space for pedestrians is doubled and it's a sort of Oasis away from all the noise of the traffic underneath other people see it as an absolute nightmare because once you get inside you can never find your way around it's far too easy to get lost in there foreign opinion on the Barbican is sharply divided there was a recent poll among London to try and find the best and worst buildings in the city and the Barbican was voted the 12th best and the 11th worst the barbican's use of concrete Towers paved the way for dozens of other high-rise developments across London many though were built on the cheap in some areas there was only enough money for the most basic social housing post-war regeneration is still going on parts of the docklands have Lane abandoned for more than 50 years London still faces one major threat though but unlike the guns and bombs of foreign Invaders it's come from the very source of London's Prosperity the River Thames London has always been at risk of flooding but it took the Canvey island disaster of 1953 for a serious solution to take shape foreign this is it this is the world's largest movable flood barrier it stretches 520 meters right across the Thames and you can see there's a whole bunch of Piers there with a sort of silver Pagoda on top of each now between each pair appears there's a huge steel gate it's like well imagine a vast oil drum chopped in half down the middle line on its side on this on the bottom of the river and it can tilt up like that and actually lock off shut off the River from the sea and you'll see that number four actually is already up there repairing it or something so they can completely separate the Sea and the river it was built this 21 years ago and it's been raised only 80 times since then but it's happening more often now and with global warming and the rising sea level they're going to have to think of something better quite soon if not the city that has repelled so many Invaders could fall victim to something as simple as the rising tide from all over the world people come to visit London's great palaces and in this program I'll be looking at palaces built both for royalty and for working people behind me is one of London's great palaces this is Hampton Court Palace Hampton Court Palace was originally built for Henry VII though Sir Christopher Wren added some bits in the 17th century it's a magnificent building with stunning Gardens and it was Henry's showpiece here I am in Henry's Great Hall it's a hundred feet long 40 feet wide and 60 feet high most striking thing about this room is the hammer beam roof the hammer beams support the arch meaning the roof span can be much wider and it's ludicrously over the top decorated with endless bits of carving and gilding Henry really wanted to show off there's another rather intriguing thing about the roof on every Hammer beam there's a little chap leaning over and apparently looking down and listening to what's going on below to all the Scandal and the gossip among the courtiers now we don't know who those chaps are they may have been representations of courtiers themselves but the fact is because they're in the eaves they came to be called eavesdroppers [Music] Up on the Roof there's equally intricate decoration these beautifully crafted brick chimneys were the status symbols of their time although all 241 are Victorian copies of the Tudor Originals I love those Tudor chimneys and I couldn't help wondering how the victorians copied them so beautifully I mean here we've got a bit of Chimney well it's not real one you understand it's a sort of pretend chimney with those terrific Spirals and obviously what you need is a whole lot of bricks shaped like that now how on Earth do you shape a brick like that well fortunately there's a man who knows here Richard where do you start the first process is to make the brick flat and square I have to cut it a bit thinner obviously because this is thinner than that exactly how do you cut off the extra bit we use these wire saws so this is just wire it's just ordinary Twisted wire okay so you cut it down to the right shape yes but what I want to know is how you cut this amazing shape here this curve we've opened we've got the brick into this into this mold and we've got to hold it in place so that we can actually do the cutting process very high tech yeah great okay and we follow this profile all the way down through brush that off that's fabulous right and so there is the is the rounded bit like that to match that so all you have to do now is saw through the other half once we've done that we'll have one of these you'll have one of those well I think that's fabulous and how long do you reckon it will take you to make that maybe 20 minutes half an hour to get a rough shape well that's very impressive so that's the Victorian method now Gerard how did the Tudors do it with this what's this a brick ax I've never heard of such a thing what an amazing weapon okay so where do you start here's a Tudor brick and this is actually a genuine Tudor brick so first of all you've got to square that off yes down once that's done then the templates can be applied to it and what would happen then is we scribe it using this Rose head nail oh wonderful then we follow that round right scribing in to get the shape great all the way around like that right the brick act would very rapidly dull if we tried to cut out all of that shape from that brick in the first place right so we cut the angles out on the corners using this pad saw here and we take it down to form a series of fillets down to that line right we are then able to tip off using the brick ax and of course this is a tool that wasn't seen on a British site now for over a nearly 150 160 years let me have a go before you finished it you're going so quickly so then you just go so break your fillet off just give it a nice little smart tap oh that's it lovely right so suppose you finish that what about this code because that looks impossible that's it does but again it can be done exactly the same way again and you're just doing it by eye down to your scribe down to my subscribe like bringing that round getting it through like that so that is Spectacular Now how long do you reckon it would take you to make a finished brick I honestly believe that I would be able to do one of these between about every 10 minutes every 15 minutes ah so you might in fact go quicker than Richard you'd be surprised all right are you ready chaps it looks to me Richard thank you very much indeed that was great Gerald thanks thank you now I can make my own bricks thank you Buckingham Palace is arguably the best known Palace in the world it was built by George IV but the palace we see today is not how he or his architect John Nash envisaged it the original plan was that Nash had a U-shaped building this is the back size of the U and in the front The Marble Arch as the main entrance but when Queen Victoria moved in she started having children all over the place and the palace was just too small she added a new front and the arch had to go so in 1851 they moved it here and the trouble is they never got around to finishing it it was supposed to be wonderfully elaborate gorgeous carvings commemorating the Battle of Trafalgar all that stuff and here we have a very plain arch in the wrong place maybe maybe if I borrowed a chisel I could improve it a bit I don't think I can improve this one though London has actually voted Buckingham Palace they are fourth most loathed building so I think we better move swiftly on this other famous London Palace is much more impressive although it's the home of politics rather than of Kings this is the Palace of Westminster which used to be a royal residence from way back in the time of William the Conqueror all the way through to Henry VII all the kings lived here and then in 1512 it burnt down and Henry VII had to move out and the politicians took it over for the House of Commons and the House of Lords in 1834 another fire caused massive damage and very little of the old Palace remained standing in its place the victorians built this a wonderful Gothic building hello you must be Malcolm hello good to meet you hi gather you're going to take me around this fabulous building I am indeed so this is the old bit yes this is the medieval Hall Westminster Hall of the old Palace of Westminster so this survived all the fires this survived on the fires and of course the main fire in 1834 right and it goes back to the 1090s so it's almost a thousand years old indeed this is the central Lobby that the midpoint of the Palace of Westminster building we're standing in fact oh really on the midpoint here you're in the middle of um the the new Palace behind you you've got the corridor leading to the the House of Commons debating chamber right and then directly opposite at the end of this long Corridor you've got the the House of Lords in the spirit of the Victorian age the architect Sir Charles Barry had agreed to finish building the palace within six years he was perhaps a little ambitious it actually took 25 years did Barry do all these details as well well Barry was helped in much of the work on the palace by his good friend Augustus will be North more Puget so where can we see the best of Eugene's work I think in the Palace of Westminster undoubtedly in the house of Lord's debating chamber okay well let's go and have a look [Music] wow that is quite something isn't it just the ceiling it's fantastic and then that slab of gold at the other end and this is the most amazing Throne do you think they're about me so the I think not on this occasion well everywhere you look you can see the hand of of Puget right even on the uh the wood carving on the bench ends created such an Indie died prematurely but just look at his incredible achievement [Music] the most distinctive feature of the Palace of Westminster is Big Ben which is not actually the Tower or even the clock but the Bell the trouble is it's 334 steps to the top foreign Bell Big Ben well there are various theories nobody actually knows the answer one is that the commissioner of Works was Sir Benjamin Hall and at some point they had a debate to try and decide the name of the bell and he gave an incredibly long and boring speech and at the end of it when he sat down somebody said why don't you just call it Big Ben and have done with it but then there's a rival Theory there was a prize fighter called Benjamin cont who weighed 17 Stone and what's more he was always called Big Ben in the papers and so on and maybe it was called after him anyway I think it's about to go listen to this the quarter Bells first foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] curiously it doesn't sound as loud as the quarter Bell [Music] wow that's one of those experiences I've always wanted it is amazing to be right beside this vast Bell which you can hear from miles across London wonderful wonderful experience Century londoners saw magnificent Palace ordinary working people well down there is an example of what the public demand did palaces for the people there got it just over there that Spike on the horizon you remember the Crystal Palace built for the great exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 well when the exhibition was over they moved the entire Crystal Palace to Sydenham that's there Southeast London and of course the people up here in the north were crossed because they didn't have a palace for the people so they built this Alexandra Palace and actually this is done rather better because the Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936 and this is still open this was the place to come for theater concerts circuses Fairgrounds and too many sports to mention once blonde in the famous tightrope Walker walked across the South face of the palace while cooking an omelet I don't know whether he took the cooker with him but anyway cooked an omelet on The Wire this was a cornucopia of delights For the Working Man [Music] thank you but Alexandra Palace has always been dogged by bad luck some people say this was because of a gypsy curse which was laid on the palace when it was first built and a traveler was evicted anyway it was opened on the Queen's birthday in 1873 with tremendous excitement in fact in 16 days 124 000 people visited and then disaster Struck it caught fire and burnt to the ground in an hour and a half three members of staff were killed a brand new Palace was opened only two years later in 1875 and again it was a great success in six months nearly 1.3 million people came here but the success didn't really last because there were endless problems about maintenance people went bankrupt and the whole place had to close down from time to time and then in 1980 disaster struck again and the whole of this Wing behind me burnt to the ground but it has lasting Fame because it's on such high ground this became the home to a brand new technology in 1936 television the BBC transmitted the first real television pictures from here in 1936 and went on transmitting television for 47 years in fact for many years it was a major production center with a studio and all the other technical gubbins there's also a television transmitter at the site of Ali Palace former Southern rival but of course the original Crystal Palace was located at Hyde Park for the great exhibition of 1851. here it was open for only half a year but an astounding six and a half million people went to see it [Music] the great exhibition was a tremendous success and made a profit of 186 000 pounds with which they bought 87 Acres of South Kensington on the land they're built the science museum the Victorian Albert Museum and this the grandest of all the Natural History Museum Alfred Waterhouse was the architect responsible for this amazing building a palace of nature this is Rosemary Hill who's an expert on Victorian architecture I gather it was even more elaborate in the original design is that right it was going to be much bigger Waterhouse is given a budget of half a million to start with which was then drastically passed he only got the front and not not the back of his eyes as he would have liked to have done did the work go smoothly once it had started what he was working with was a very Victorian technique which they like to call constructional polycromy which meant that instead of applying the color to the surface of the building was the Georgians had done you actually built it in as you can see here but was it very complicated is therefore no one had used terracotta on this scale and of course that turned into a nightmare for vicent actors who in the end went through because they couldn't provide enough for us tonight that's right and presumably when the public arrived for the first time they came in through this great sort of cave entrance it's great Arch like a great opening in a cliff face preparing you for what's inside right well let's go and see what is inside after you this is the most extraordinary building isn't it it's a wonderful combination address great public spaces so you've got these great staircases which have borrowed really I think from Italian palazzos and the detail I mean apart from the huge space I love all these bricks and the little patterns in the brick and these monkeys the victorians love narrative theirs was the age that produced all the great novelists George Eliot Dickens and their buildings are full of stories that tell you what the building is as you move around it laughs now these figures are obviously gorgeous who designed them well Waterhouse themselves designed them these are waterhouses drawings for the little animals and figures they're extraordinarily delicate Waterhouse actually wanted when he was little to be an artist and his parents thought it would be more respectable right more secure and became an architect and on the whole his buildings he built some of the great big bruising buildings of the 19th century like Manchester Town Hall when you see those buildings it's extraordinary to see the delicacy of his joy and here I think in this building he actually managed to bring the two things together so these are the monkeys and you can see that he's drawn several different versions and presumably these were then copied directly were they they were copied directly into models yes right um it must have been a nightmare of a job to turn two Dimensions into three although I think it's a very architectural light that he's thinking in almost two and a half Dimensions there's a story you can see that tail coming off yes yes and the lion the line is wonderful doesn't he he is I love the four ports I could greatly put a cat the four poison a row that well there's a massive terracotta about it and I wonder how the stuff is made John suppose we want to make a column or pillar like this this is terracotta yes right yes how do we do it well first of all these we make a plaster model um so that's bigger than this this is bigger this is made about eight eight percent larger uh like in order to like accommodate a place ring because actually during drying and firing once we've made the plaster model yeah we then make reverse plus the mold okay oh I see so we need to put some clay in should we take these off do you think before we start messing with the clay it's heavier stuff what do we need to do what you've got to do is to roll it out on the bench roll it out so that you get all the air out of the clan right do you hear it oh I guess if you have air bubbles then that'll spoil the finished thing won't it that's right yeah what we need to do then is to Throw the Clay inside the mold what we do is right put the clay in there that's brutal it is doesn't it ruin your knuckles wow that means you'll build that up to like about a thickness of about an inch and a half I'm a bit nervous about this because I value my knuckles and it and you really do it all by hand like that everything is like it'll take about an hour to press a block like this do you think we could peel away that little bit and see if it's worked if you don't trust my wallet you could probably oh hey look at that you can stop oh yes let's start to see it that's fabulous and this is the very piece that I was trying to make isn't it fantastic now once it's been fired terracotta can't be cut it can't be shaved to fit every piece has to be made exactly the right size and shape so they all go together to make an enormous three-dimensional jigsaw and just look at the resulting picture [Music] this is for the working people wasn't just a Victorian thing the origins of the old Wembley Stadium also lie in a grand exhibition the Empire exhibition opened in 1924 to show off the best of the British Empire with a worldwide appeal of football Wembley Stadium's two squat Towers became as iconic as Big Ben no wonder there are hulls of outrage when the old stadium was knocked down in 2002 but a new Wembley is on its way it's Grand Central Arch will hold up most of the roof Mike Richardson the man in charge of the project told me more now the most obvious thing is the arch can you give me an idea how big it is up to its apex is 133 meters high which is four times the size of the old twin towers and we could roll the London Eye underneath it you could roll the London Eye under it now that would be a good demo could we try it yeah how wide is this it's seven meters diameter we could put a tube train down the middle of it it's an enormous thing what's it made of it's basically made of tubular steel welded together in elements and how did you get it out there well they lifted the arch from the horizontal and it was pulled in five degree increments and we kept doing that over a period of a month a month and we went without a hitch for a month and it went from horizontal to where it is now at 112 degrees how you can maintain the arch it's maintenance is either by abseiling or we've got a little trolley that runs right up the center of the arch and over the top if you'd like to give it a try no no that's not a job I would very much like to have what about capacity we've got 90 000 here all seated no columns in the way unrestricted viewing so everyone's got a fantastic view well I wouldn't I'd get stuck behind the column I always get stuck no you won't find one I'm afraid [Music] just look at that this brand new Palace for the people is soon going to become a London icon like Buckingham Palace or Big Ben's Tower people will remember the Wembley Arch not just across London but all the way around the world [Music] some of London's newest landmarks are skyscrapers and there are going to be more of them just look at all those cranes more and more Office Buildings reaching up into the sky it must have been very different 100 years ago then the city was dominated by buildings of state and churches it was a city of spiers [Music] oh 600 years ago London was dominated by the Magnificent Old Saint Paul's Cathedral it's 425-foot Spire was the tallest ever built foreign but disaster struck with the Great Fire of 1666 The Blaze raged for four days and nights and destroyed Old Saint Paul's and what arose From the Ashes was this the wonderful new Saint Paul's an iconic building known all over the world and at 365 feet high it was until the 1950s the tallest building in London it's 510 feet long 280 feet wide and the architect was Sir Christopher Wren London has often been described as wren's City and a total of 51 churches were built by him but his greatest feat is Saint Paul's what must it have been like as a building site a massive activity because they were knocking down the old building while they were building the new one in fact it took 20 years to demolish Olsen Halls the stone they they got from that building they used for the construction so you mean the church with pickaxe is there putting the stone in barrows rushing it up and Masons there that's right um using it for the basic wall structure of the crypt so an army of people an absolute ant hill yes who actually oversaw it you know ran it on site over all these people Ren himself who ran into the site every Saturday and was said to have been carried up in a basket to look at the work as it was going on oh now all of this end is nice and sort of bright and clean the stone but all of that end is black dark why is that well it looks dark from here um its Mosaic work put in in the late 19th early 20th century the victorians were very unhappy about the internal decoration of Saint Paul's they felt the bill had never been properly finished Ren had wanted it white in fact all these walls were originally painted right um but the victorians felt that the choir in particular should be more colorful the inside of Saint Paul's is truly spectacular but it's what lies behind the scenes that's even more impressive now Gordon I don't understand where we are we've come up hundreds of steps spiral staircases out there is obviously a dome yes but in here there's a great lot of brickwork and not only is it brick which we don't see from inside but it goes straight up it's not curved yes well this is the brick cone that supports the stone Lantern right at the top of the dome right when you look at the Dome of Saint Paul's from a distance it looks as if the lantern is resting on the Dome the outer Dome so why can't it rest on that later done well this outer Dome is just a cladding of lead on wood you mean this isn't strong enough to have an antenna no it's not doing any supporting work at all right at the top of some pools and I don't believe that in this program there'll be a grander building than this I'm standing exactly on that brick cone this is called the Golden gallery and there is the great heaviest Stone Lantern and a rather curious feature of the lantern is that in one of Ren's early designs it looked very much like the gherkin there he was 300 years ahead of his time it took 36 years to complete this building and it was the first English cathedral that was completed within the life of the architect and when he finally died they put an inscription in the Crypt that says see monumentum requiris circumspicky if you're looking for my Memorial look around you [Music] wren's classical Masterpiece dominates the city but Journey further west at the Thames and you'll see an example of classical architecture made Modern a from a distance Battersea power station looks big but from here it's absolutely enormous a temple of power it was originally planned in the 1920s to help cope with London's rapidly Rising demand for electricity and when the first station they're actually two back to back when battle Ca opened in 1933 there were wonderful comets in the Press somebody even wrote it bids fair to make some Paul's Cathedral share a proud place as London's architectural landmark they used to bring the colon by river and the coal was hauled out by cranes there was two of them still there amazingly just imagine the scene the barges jostling for position the cranes heaving the coal onto the side the enormous noise it must have been quite a sight for sore eyes [Music] his turbine Hall a the original one built about 1930 and it's absolutely massive what's more it's beautiful just look up there do you see these columns fluted columns going all the way up and yet a huge great industrial crane across the top it's halfway between sort of Art Deco Museum an industrial building site and the size the size is truly extraordinary if you take the whole building the footprint is the same size as Trafalgar Square and they tell me you could fit some pools Cathedral inside without touching the walls [Music] we'll just turn this up a bit here and just look at this control panel hundreds and hundreds of dials and levers and switches and knobs and such a grand room the control room there was a beautiful parquet floor underneath this hardboard the control desks all covered in Walnut veneer and the ceiling amazing art deco ceiling now I reckon that's quite enough of that whoops [Music] the chimneys here are 337 feet high and when station a was opened they were the highest Chimneys in London the architect desperately wanted to make them Square because he thought it would be more in keeping with the size and Grandeur of the building but unfortunately he was overruled and so they're round well wish me luck um how often do these things fall down that's once just once thanks a lot thank you oh I have to say I hate heights and I'm very glad that we're only 250 feet up and not not right at the top of those chimneys it's now being regenerated as a commercial and Leisure complex and they're going to revive another thing that used to happen way back then they used to take water from the river warm it up and then pump the warm water to that huge biscuit colored complex of flats over there that's Churchill Gardens which was part of a massive post-war rebuilding program that went on all over London foreign bombing in World War II had destroyed almost half a million homes so rebuilding was an absolute necessity but it was also an opportunity to move families out of slums and into new modern housing Jerry you know all about this sort of thing I guess the houses they built after the war were a huge Improvement for working-class people yes it's it's difficult to exaggerate the scale of the housing Problem in London in the 1940s something like 60 of all londoners lacked access to a bath even a shared one many working-class families lacked hot water now this had to be dealt with immediately after the war had finished but London couldn't expand outwards because it was locked into the green belt and kept in place by planning policies Central land values Central London land values were very high and so the only solution was to build upwards so what sort of buildings did they build they built towers and government was encouraging local authorities to build thousands of houses per year and so they gave extra subsidy for each dwelling which was built above a certain height oh really more money for the top ones more money for the high ones foreign by Uno Goldfinger Ian Fleming famously pinched his name oh really it took six years to build and was opened in 1974. it's uh 31 stories high 328 feet I think right so what's the separate bit up the side is that the lift shaft it is a lift shaft with walkways onto the main block at the very top is a fantastic viewing tower for the residents to look all over West London they must be able to See For Miles right across London itself and out to the other side terrific in its early years it worked very well it was very popular among its tenants when people objected about tire blocks to the newspapers people from trellitara wrote and said come and see us we're very happy but it went down as so many of these things did in the 1980s but in the 90s it's really picked up I understand that you know a few of the flats have been sold off but people are proud and happy to live here it's got protected entrance for the concierge it works well as housing now now I gather it's a listed building is that right that's right it was recently listed as as one of the key examples of what's called brutalism in modern architecture as a building form it's a magnificent statement I think even if you know you find it hard to to feel that it's lovely but yeah it is a magnificent building be honest do you like it no I don't think I do either but it wasn't just for housing that they started building tower blocks once they started doing it for offices the London Skyline was changed forever just after the second world war there was a limit to how high anyone could build in central London it seems amazing now but no one was allowed to go above 100 feet this of course was very unpopular with a young enthusiastic Architects who'd seen the skyline in New York so when they relaxed the Restriction in 1954 there was an absolute explosion of tour buildings mostly office blocks within 15 years or a hundred buildings more than 100 feet high and 16 more than 300 feet including this one Center Point [Music] when it was finished Center Point was the highest building in London 384 feet 36 stories it's a very ingenious building because it's built out of pre-cast concrete slabs they're h-shaped and if you look at the windows you'll see that up the middle the vertical bits are the cross pieces of the H's and all the H's are stacked on top of one another it's very high it absolutely dominates the streets around here and it makes it very windy down at ground level and for those reasons some people absolutely hated it but it's now a grade 2 listed I have to say I still don't like it very much however the problem with building big in London oddly enough is the ground itself unlike the rock of New York London is actually floating on a bed of soft clay so Engineers had to come up with ingenious ways to stop tall buildings literally sinking into the ground and here I am in the basement of the BT tower now 174 feet down below ground level is hard chalk and in principle for the foundations they could have sunk piles all the way down into the chalk but it's a very long way would have cost an awful lot of money so what were they going to do well an Italian firm came to the rescue and they made a raft and the raft is down there if you look that black pit down there is actually the top surface of the raft the raft is 90 feet square and three feet thick and reinforced with six layers of Steel cables sitting on top of the raft is this great reinforced concrete pyramid here you can see it's 23 feet high and the top is just their flat top and sitting on that Flat Top is a reinforced concrete cylinder that goes all the way to the top of the tower so the entire Tower is resting on this pyramid on that raft floating on the clay wonderful foreign [Music] I'm now on my way up to the 34th floor this is one of the fastest lifts in Europe it does an extraordinary 25 feet a second and it should take us only about 20 seconds to get up to the top there we are 34. very impressive oh wow it will take so long to get people down from here they decided to evacuate if they needed to by lift in fact it's the only building in the country which is allowed to be evacuated by Lyft it needed special parliamentary legislation [Music] when it opened in 1966 the BT tar at an in 20 feet high easily took the mantle of tallest building in London that's as high as 25 double-decker buses stacked end to end amazingly until quite recently this Tower didn't exist you wouldn't find it on any map and it was classed as an official secret so if you talked about it or took a photograph you were technically breaking the official Secrets act and then in 1993 MP Kate Hui took parliamentary privilege and admitted its existence in the House of Commons and she said it was at 60 Cleveland Street so now it's officially here and the view from up here is truly amazing just look the whole of London spread out it actually had to be very high because they wanted to beam signals right over the Chilton Hills there on the Northern rim of the London Basin there's some really powerful Aerials up there and I'm told if I stand in exactly the right place I may block out EastEnders and everyone will have to switch to ITV an intriguing thing about tour buildings is the effect a bit of wind has on them they actually start to wobble about I went to meet Professor Chris Wise to find out how Engineers deal with this problem now Chris they tell me that the BT Tower sways 20 centimeters in the wind how does that happen well you'd expect it to move a bit it's a bit like a gigantic tree and you see when the wind blows on a tree it sways around everything has a sort of natural oscillation so if I push sideways as if I'm the wind I can just push it over right and the more whippy this thing is the further it goes and the more uncomfortable you feel when you're at the top so what we tend to do is join those together right so this is more conventional tall building structure a bit like a ladder and you can see if I push if I try and push this sideways it still moves around but it's much more yeah of course if you then start putting people in as soon as you push it sideways when the wind blows the weight then adds to the tendency of the building to try and fall over right when you get to 50 stories and above you have to be a bit cleverer and so something like the gherkin you can see it's got these diagonal lines now going through it if I push that sideways each of those squares is turning itself into a diamond yes if I try and push triangles sideways triangles which is a much stronger structure so if I push that around you can see it's very very rigid oh yes it you can see it has got a natural frequency it's a very high frequency when I push it it doesn't move anything like as far now no playing with wire is all good fun but what about the real thing the gherkin arrived on the London Skyline in 2004. I arranged to meet Chris the following day to go and have a look so Chris these great chunks here does this correspond to that crisscross structure this is this inside here it sounds Hollow but inside there are the huge bits of structural steel work and they form a big skeleton made of these diagonals and these black horizontals right and the whole thing carries the weight of the building and at the same time acts as a big rigid frame which stops the thing blowing over when the wind blows okay they seem to have missed out a bit of floor here is that just a mistake no this is a really important part of the whole architectural and environmental design of the building the actors giant ventilation shots which which take all the hot air that's generated in the building and all the hot air that comes from the from the Sun yeah take it up to the top there at which point it's extracted away and what that means is that the whole of the inside of the building stays cooler which means you can use much less energy to cool it all down right so all together this building operates on 60 of the energy that's needed for a traditional skyscraper really wow the gherkin is an extraordinary building both structurally and visually but at less than 600 feet high it's not the tallest building in London to see that I need to take a trip on a boat of the 10 highest buildings in London no fewer than seven are on Canary Wharf there and the highest run of all is the one with a pyramid on top number one Canada Square it's not just the highest in London it's the highest in the whole of Britain one Canada Square stands at 800 feet and was completed in 1991 and who better to tell us about this towering structure than John Pagano who is in charge of construction John why doesn't this building sink into the ground well we've got very strong foundations there are 222 1.5 meter diameter piles that are driven into the ground almost 18 meters below the surface of the of the ground level and on top of that we installed a three meter thick concrete rough over the whole area of the building and on that we stand the steel structure that supports the building I mean we built this building in three years which is in three years and literally what ended up happening is the trades chased each other up the building so the steel structure was racing up ahead of three floors every every two weeks and right behind it the concrete contractor the cladding the stainless steel panels that you see were only a couple of floors behind and they literally chased each other up the building fantastic one Canada square is crowned by a distinctive pyramid and because it's so tall it's topped by an aircraft warning light it flashes 40 times a minute here we are in the pyramid at the very top is it true that no phone crew has ever been up here before you are the person fantastic fantastic it's it's wonderful it's quite noisy what's going on well we have all the cooling the queen towers that are used okay [Music] [Music] people dump it dump it my uh my specs are misting up here so that this is very damp warm air coming up here and just just damp isn't it yes yeah do terrible things to your hair up here they'll never be the same again the view from up here is amazing I'm told that when it's clear you can see for 30 miles but one of the things that really appeals to me about this place is that there are birds listen listen just under here come and have a look at this these boxes here are for Swifts although there aren't real ones in here yet they're trying to attract them in you see there's a CD player playing swift squeakings all the time trying to bring the Swifts in which just shows that although we've learned to build up into the sky we know who the sky really belongs to foreign London Skyline has changed beyond recognition since the 50s and it's set to go on surprisingness there's about to be another explosion of new tall buildings likely London Bridge Tower already nicknamed The Shard of glass it'll be the tallest building in Europe at a staggering 1016 feet high [Music] skyscrapers are all about seeing differently quite literally one of the things I love about these great Towers is they're links with the past Christopher Wren when he built some Paws used mathematics he designed it with mathematical principles and today's Architects and Engineers use computers computer-ready design and computer modeling and the next big one The Shard of glass is going to be a little bit like the spiers of Ren's churches reaching ever further for the sky [Music] Railways are part of the fabric of London and love them or hate them without them the city couldn't function and it certainly wouldn't have grown to the size it is today London's sometimes troubled relationship with the train began more than 150 years ago [Music] I've come to the cup Bridge Steam Museum to find out how the railways came to London [Music] this lovely little Loco was originally built to shift slate around a quarry in Wales but she's just like all the locomotives that took coal from barges on the Thames up to boiler houses in land and basically she's the younger sister of the big scene locomotives that brought trains into London from north south east and west smashing down slums and causing new suburbs to be built now Phil how's she going not so bad thank you very much good will she ride with me on board oh yeah I think we can go on let's go right the world's first ever steam locomotive was built by the brilliant Cornish mining engineer Richard trevitic in South Wales this was 1804 and it pulled 10 tons of pig iron from the panaderan Ironworks down to the Bay at abercunan now tell me how trevithik brought the Steam logo to London well it obviously with 1804 and the pendarian Tramway worked so well he decided that he had drawn his Horizons and came up to London with his roundabout are they called Catch Me If You Can Railway so this was a sort of sort of Fairground ride background I charged a penny but unfortunately one financially successful previtic's circular Railway at Houston Square ran for only two months it had one major problem the weight of the eight ton engine kept cracking the rail terrific broke all the rails yes heavy weight to the engine they were using wood and iron rails engine was breaking the rails on the joints trevitics rails were made of brittle cast iron and it wasn't until George Stevenson came up with a wrought iron alternative that the railway age really arrived well thanks very much indeed great ride the first Railway built especially for passengers ran from Liverpool to Manchester and opened in 1830 the line was surveyed and built by George Stevenson and the locomotive Rockets brilliant Leading Edge technology was built by his son Robert now the first Railway didn't come to London for another six years after that and when it did come it had to come in by a rather unusual route [Music] now building a railway line from the country into London obviously wasn't going to be easy particularly when they had come through built up areas like this the first Railway line to be built came from Greenwich and was finished in 1836 and they avoided the problem of having to plow through all these houses and businesses by leapfrogging the roads and doing the whole thing at roof level look at this on a fire duct no fewer than 878 arches now there were some advantages to this it meant they had to buy less land than if they'd done it at ground level but there was a problem too because the hundreds of navies who built this thing used so many bricks every day that they caused the Nationwide brick shortage isn't that wonderful The Venture was financially risky and the company was obviously worried about losing money because they hedged their bets in every way they could think of as well as the railway out there they also built a footpath and they charged pedestrians for the privilege of walking along beside the tracks They even tried to sell off the Arches themselves for housing but it never did catch on I guess it might have been a tad noisy living actually underneath a railway line nearly 170 years later the viaduct is still in use trains run all the way to Dover now even though it was expensive the train service itself still proved popular surprisingly though the idea of commuter lines didn't immediately take off all the next Railways into London were not intended for commuters at all but for Freight and they were more often than not promoted by businessmen from other parts of the country who wanted to get their goods to markets in London during the 1820s and 30s Birmingham businessmen were sending a thousand tons of goods to London every week by canal and they thought probably they ought to have a railway so they consulted the great George Stevenson and he said I suggest you employ my son Robert to build it so they did and he built the Birmingham London Railway it was a colossal job he employed 20 000 men and it took them almost five years and one of the biggest engineering Feats on the whole line was this cutting here this is chalk farm and it may not look very deep it's maybe 15 20 feet but the fact is this goes for 30 miles all the way to tring now they had to do it just with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows there were no bulldozers or anything it was pure manual labor by the Navies and it said that it took as much manual labor to dig this cutting as to build one of the Great Pyramids of Egypt amazing the Terminus of the new Railway line was at Houston the victorians built elaborate and imposing stations in order to reassure their passengers that rail travel were safe this neoclassical Arch stood until the 1960s when developers leveled it when they redesigned the station on what they thought were more practical lines these gate houses are all remain rumor has it that the arch itself is at the bottom of the Lee River not all Victorian Railway stations were destroyed some still survive like this gem Saint Pancras the victorians love building huge great Railway sessions with massive engine sheds and this is Saint Pancras from the great Victorian building at the end to this huge Arch here they really liked showing off and now it's a building site because Eurostar is going to come here and the eurocell trains are 400 meters long so they've had to extend it all the way to there double the length of the engine sheds it's going to be fantastic and you'll be able to go direct from here to Paris in two and a quarter hours all I need is a ticket to find out how this vast building site works I've come to meet the contract manager Haley McAdam Haley how many chaps have you got working here uh about 850 at the moment wow who built this building in the first place William Barlow he was the designer and he also supervised the construction tremendous achievement on its time this was the largest single Arch building in the world now Charlotte the roofs have always been black corrugated iron hasn't it no what you see there is a temporary cover so what was that before ridgen Furrow which is like like glass glass and we're returning it back to its former glory so to speak you're putting in glass again that's right we have lights streaming down into the shed making this whole building feel completely different than it does at the moment well I think that's absolutely fantastic can we go and have a look downstairs let's go right so now we're down underneath the platforms right the trains are coming up there that's right and this is underground yes and this is still Victorian yeah this is this is what we call the undercraft which was created because when when Barlow was looking at building some pancreas station he decided to come in over the canal rather than under the canals our next door station King's cross comes under the canal and the platforms there are ground level right because he came in over the canal he had to elevate the platforms at the first floor creating this huge void underneath is a massive basement yes which he actually used it as beer storage yeah yeah one of the big reasons for for creating some pancreas was the Midlands Midlands at the time when booming coal and beer and he wanted to be the main Outlet to whole of London areas this would be full of barrels then full of barrels and interesting fact is that the distance between these columns is exactly three beer barrel lengths that was one of his design specifications wonderful so these are original Victorian columns they are they're cast iron columns have been here for 150 years now look I don't want to worry in any way but there does seem to be a hole here is that deliberate or have you made a mistake yeah part of our design is to cut a hole in the old train deck slab and what that will do when light will stream down from the new roof that we're putting on right so that's all going to be glass that's all going to be glass string down through the glass into this area here and we're reusing this area to house passengers for the international departures arrivals passport control Customs immigration we're reusing this vast space let's go and have a look upstairs this is part of one of the archers holding up the roof yes I was very keen on he wanted to make a big Mark a big statement the main line coming into London and this is their building so he was very keen to make it higher than King's cross they did like mid nuts and bolts didn't they yeah right so this ties into the cross time okay okay so they're sitting on the columns in the earth that's right so tell me about what you actually sit on top of the pillars okay so this is the top of one of those cast iron columns yes underneath here right and this is a bearing put on top of that just this piece so the whole of the deck is going to sit on these sparings and then it will be able to move sideways oh hey I can move it that's right so the trains will move it inches I would say it was centimeters in your in your world that's right so the concrete deck can move independently from the from the castle that's really cunning anyway you've only got another week or two on here I'm sure well good luck thanks very much indeed thanks there's also some Redevelopment work going on around the front of the station where the victorians built that vital part of any Railway development a Grand Hotel in 1868 the Midland Railway built their new station at Saint Pancras but the building most of us recognizes Saint Pancras isn't actually the station at all yeah in 1873 Saint Pancras Station was joined by the Midland Grand Hotel next door built by George Gilbert Scott now the chap who knows about it is Angus bow hello Angus who's managing director now I gather that Scott had built only churches and workhouses before this well that's right and he entered the competition for the Midland Hotel and he decided that what he was going to do that this was his last chance to build a grand Gothic Revival building so he poured every last piece of opulence into this building and very nearly busted that's the Midland Railway in doing it wonderful and it is ludicrously over the top isn't it what are these columns these are solid marble and then you see some gold paint above and you can see the effort that went into the decoration at the high level of these walls right now what were the problems that stopped it being you know the grandest hotel in London for the next Century well it was the grandest hotel in London when it opened but it had certain issues right there were only eight bathrooms eight bathrooms 240 bedrooms but I mean you'd have a queue for an hour well you have a bath brought to your room by your servants and this was the other problem is that the social change meant that people didn't travel with their surprise now what's the grandest thing in the whole building well the grandest thing in building is the grand stair and I think we should go and have it okay after you the grand staircase has more than 800 steps and the best bits at the top so what were some of the other problems there were no lifts no running water in the rooms no Central Heating and no electricity yes I guess that would be slightly difficult not all the hotels guests were well behaved the Australian cricket team of 1930 were particularly Troublesome but they've stayed on the fifth floor apparently and used it for neck practice but they did do a tremendous amount of damage and were sent to bill for the repairs afterwards good good just like rockstars [Music] so this is the top of the grand staircase and I'm I'm very carefully not looking down it's quite high enough to terrify me the painting here is quite spectacular isn't it well that's right this is Chastity here and Temperance over there I thought the Australians stayed up here well they I obviously didn't read the signs wonderful and the whole roof covered with stars that's right and this this really is a magnificent piece of painting and this has been restored fairly recently as a matter of fact you're going to turn this back into a hotel yeah that's right it was a fantastic five-star hotel but because of the problems that I mentioned earlier it closed in 1935 and really apart from being used very briefly as officers for British Rail the building's been empty ever since so after 70 years we're going to bring it back as a five-star hotel probably the best five-star Railway Hotel in Europe wonderful the Midland Railway company really spent money on this building to make it such an opulent place and I can't help wondering why well one chap who knows is Royden stock now this is a very elegant rum isn't it fabulous ceiling yeah it's a wonderful room built as the ballroom for the Midland Railway it overlooks their nearest rival the Great Northern and I like to imagine the general manager James Joseph Walpole standing up here with a big cats pole trying to smash the windows yes but it's funny because that's a really boring building isn't it there's no doubt about it but functional yeah whereas this building is beautiful but dysfunctional yes a bit of a white elephant in its day and as Scott said himself almost too good for its own use now you said they'd be taking out the windows with a catapult was there really a lot of rivalry between different companies yes there was after the great exhibition of 1851 the Middletown I realized I needed to build their own line into London so they really wanted to make an impression here as well as building a station they wanted to show off and they wanted to bring in things from the Midlands this was to be a showcase for the Midlands as well and the bricks on the outside are from the Loughborough Nottingham the stone workers Ancaster ketton the tiles on the roof were from leicestershire mainly it's all from the mountain not all of London stations are quite as grandest and Pancras but the remarkable thing is that the city has so many Mainline stations 12 in all landowners in Parliament tried to keep the railways out of the center of the city and so we have an arc of stations in North London from east to west and the big three in the South only Charing Cross and Victoria are really in the center but all this led to terrible congestion on the roads between all these stations a solution was desperately needed I'm sitting here with Christian Wilmer who has just written the definitive book about the London Underground Kristen why did London need an underground well if you imagine London in the mid Victorian age it was a very crowded place the roads were complete chaos there were carts there were horses carriages probably something like Calcutta is today and so they really had to kind of think what can we do about this how do they actually build the line well the earlier underground Railways we're built by cut and cover they basically dug up the streets put a railway inside and covered it over again and that was kind of pretty crude way of doing it but it was very effective cut and cover was a messy business every time a new line was dug whole neighborhoods were thrown into disarray underneath the roads was a mass of cables pipes sewers and all sorts of stuff which they kept digging up and then they left piles of dirt and tools all over the roads and eventually people started to complain and the Metropolitan did make some attempt to compensate them but only in rich areas poor people who were thrown out of slums got nothing when the slums were pulled down here in Posh Bayswater where they extended the Metropolitan line they made an attempt to cover up the mess and if Iraq here there's a very elegant row of houses but if you come along this side suddenly look all the windows are fake they've been painted over and if you look at the front door here there's no handle there's no letterbox ah it's concrete messenger boys and Postman Young new postmen are being sent here ever since to play jokes on them because there's no house here it's just a front and behind it there's nothing but a railway line come and have a look here we are here's the back of that same but ah look a tube line right underneath there's no house in the old days you see they had to leave a hole to allow all the smoke and steam to come out now they don't need the hole but there's just a gap between the houses held up by those great girders it is wonderful Advent of electric trains and new tunneling techniques meant that deep level tube lines were able to be built this led to a massive expansion of the underground Network in the late 19th and early 20th centuries what influence did the underground have on the way that London was built wherever it went if there were Green Fields there when it was built within a few years most of the Green Fields would be gone because basically it stimulated the growth of housing so in a way the transport system was built before the houses were there it created a London as it were Railways changed the face of London forever not only were new suburbs built but old areas were locked down and populations were uprooted here at the Acton Depot I'm surrounded by ancient trains of every color and vintage but I wonder what effect the railways had on the people when they were first built the head curator at the London transport museum is Oliver green Oliver what were the cons equences of the building of the railways for the people who lived there well it would depend who you are really um the railways were both destroyers and creators in many ways because they came to London just not through great neighborhoods in London usually the poorer neighborhoods and obviously there's people there it meant they'd lost their homes they had to move somewhere else there was no compensation for them but at the same time once they're always established they were actually they were creating jobs that are bringing more opportunities to London they were bringing Goods to London passengers to London and in that sense they were quite a creative impact on London our working-class people able to take advantage of the railways it was the cheap trains act which tried to force the railway companies to offer cheap transport to working class people who'd been displaced when the railways came into London and the Hope was that these people would be able to move out to Edmonton Enfield somewhere like that and commute into work because in practice it was never the same people probably never they couldn't afford to move out even at the cheap rates and again there is a sort of division between East and West here because the Great Eastern Railway who had extended into Liverpool Street from their original Terminus at Bishop's gate part of the price of doing that was they had to offer cheap oh I see okay right and they actually set about that with quite some some relish and and that's from Maine to this day that if you go Liverpool Street is still one of the busiest stations a huge number of trains coming in at rapid intervals coming in from the northeastern suburbs which from that day onwards and still to this day are much more in the way of working-class suburbs of London and of course the whole of East London is to some extent it's probably no exaggeration to say that the railways have done more to shape London than anything else it's something everybody uses and there's no other city that has that kind of um linking whether I mean Railways are the complete lifeblood of the city they were in the 19th century and they are today Railways may seem endlessly frustrating to the modern commuter but slowly improvements are being made to the Aging infrastructure of the original railway city with the world's first overground and underground rail networks Railways have always into the City and because there are always extensions in the pipeline that's going to go on into the future and that means that londoners can move away from the center and still remain within easy reach of their workstations [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Our History

Views: 332,853

Keywords: our history, documentary, world history documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, history, historical, history documentary

Id: T4LNgMQKX3Q

Length: 111min 7sec (6667 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2023