How the Victorians Built Britain

In the long reign of a single queen,

Britain changed the world and was itself utterly transformed.

Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.

By the time she died in 1901, we had built the modern world.

It was a time of outstanding engineering, remarkable innovation.

All of it driven by ambitious pioneers.

It shapes the country we live in today.

Efficient and fast -

new transport systems allowed people to move freely for the first time.

You get a real sense, in here, of Victorian engineering, don't you?

Oh, yeah. It's wonderful.

Giant feats of ingenuity saved lives.

The Victorians had ambition.

They thought big, and they got on with it.

Amazing inventions revolutionised our domestic lives.

What I'm holding in my hand changed our homes forever.

Automation transformed mass production.

Factories could now produce goods at a rate never imagined before.

The change is like a nuclear weapon going off.

This is the story of how the Victorians built Britain.

This time, I learned how a radical new transport system was carved

out of London.

They might have had a couple of cranes, but other

than that all of it was done by hand.

How engineers wrestle to run steam trains underground.

It must have been Dante's Inferno.

And how a clever idea transformed affordable transport.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the landscape

of Britain was being transformed.

London was the most prosperous city in the world, with a population

of around 2 million.

It was a very crowded place.

Most were living within two miles of the Thames.

Judith Flanders has spent years writing about Victorian Britain.

Judith, what would the streets of London have been like at the start

of the Victorian era?

They would have been noisier, and more confusing,

and more terrifying than this.

We've got traffic, we've got buses, we've got vans, we've got cars,

bicycles, what we don't have is them all going in all directions at once.

There were no rules of the road.

Everyone walked. Everyone rode.

Everyone drove all in the same space.

And in both directions.

The confusion was phenomenal.

And smelly?

Beyond smelly.

There would have been sheep driven in, donkeys pulling carts,

cattle being driven to market, because most markets slaughtered

the meat where you were.

So just imagine the produce of those animals,

and then they were slaughtered.

So the gutters would be running with blood and fat.

Blood and excrement - all those animals.

I read somewhere, I think, that a thousand tonnes of horse dung

a day ended up on London streets.

Does that sound about right?

It sounds a little low to me, actually.

They measured how many cart loads of dung that they picked

up between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus,

just along Regent Street.

And it was dozens of cart loads every 12 hours.

Most early Victorian transport relied on horsepower.

You only need to look at a list of pub names in London from 1851

to realise their importance.

21 pubs were named after Queen Victoria, but 54 were named

The White Horse.

And another 27, The Horse and Groom.

And the list goes on.

But most people couldn't afford the horse drawn transport

that was available.

How did people get around? On foot.

Basically, if you wanted to go anywhere you walked.

In the morning, you have what were called these black rivers of clerks,

shopkeepers all walking into work.

They would walk along, like we have our phones, they would walk

along reading newspapers.

A survey in the 1850s showed that, on average, 200,000 people

walked into the city each year.

The relative luxury of a horse and carriage was not for them.

But for the middle classes who didn't want to walk,

there was another option.

It's one that's far more familiar to us today.

The omnibus.

Omnibuses - the ancestor of the bus.

They were horse drawn.

They could take 12 people inside.

You had a coachman on the front.

You had a conductor, or a cad, stepping up on the back of cabs.

A cad? Hence the word for a rotter.

Yes, exactly. They had a slightly dubious reputation.

And actually they didn't, they had a completely dubious reputation.

You could have two people sitting up with the coachman,

and those were very favourite seats, and he would keep those for the men

who were regulars and who tipped well, because inside was horrible.

It was dark, it was damp, it was smelly.

To make matters worse for the passengers, conductors

would take their money and usher them on board before they'd had time

to realise there was barely enough room inside.

The drivers would, therefore, leap around other buses to try and get

ahead to get the next passenger.

And we see court case after court case of what was known

as furious driving.

As they raced each other to get to the next passenger.

So it was kind of the Wild West of busdom.

Fares started at a costly shilling, but soon dropped to sixpence.

Even then, it would have cost an office clerk more than two days

wages just to get the omnibus to work each day,

forcing them to remain living within walking distance of their jobs.

In just two decades, the population of London had grown by a further

half million people.

This was only set to rise.

And it was all down to one thing - a frenzy of railway construction

that had spread across Britain.

WHISTLE BLOWING

In just over a decade, they were transporting millions of people

across the country.

By 1852, more people could access the capital via major train stations

like Euston, Paddington, Waterloo, and King's Cross.

There was fierce competition to drive even more

lines into London.

A Royal Commission had ruled that no mainline stations could be built

within the city centre.

Anyone arriving into one of these stations had to continue

their journey by road.

The number of omnibuses doubled as a result.

And soon the streets of central London were overwhelmed

with traffic.

One man, Charles Pierce, decided something must be done.

Solicitor to the City of London, and something of a social reformer,

he felt the railways themselves held the answer.

Charles Pearson was a man on a mission.

He had this radical idea for solving the chaos on London's streets.

He put forward a proposal that was to lead to one

of the defining projects of the century.

His idea would transform London, and the way we get round the city,

to this day.

The London Underground.

But creating the first underground railway was a massive gamble,

and no-one had any idea if it would be a success.

During the early Victorian period, inner city travel

was limited to horsepower for those with money,

and if you didn't earn a decent wage, you walked everywhere.

Charles Pearson was keen to improve London and the chaos on its streets.

He put forward a radical idea for an underground railway.

For years his idea was ridiculed.

The Times described it as an insult

to common sense that people would prefer to be driven

through the foul subsoil of London.

Pearson wouldn't give up, and eventually his persistence paid off.

In 1853, the House of Commons approved a bill for the construction

of an underground railway.

The first to be built anywhere in the world.

A company was set up called the Metropolitan Railway.

Construction on the first stretch of line began in 1860.

It was named the Metropolitan Line, and it ran steam trains

through its underground tunnels.

This is North Weald station part of the Epping Ongar Heritage

Railway in Essex.

This centre houses a collection of historic trains and buses,

and is currently the home of a very special locomotive.

It's the last Metropolitan Underground Line steam locomotive

in the country that's still in working order.

Morning, Alan.

Morning, Michael. Nice to meet you. So, this is it?

This is it. 120 years old, nearly.

Welcome aboard.

OK.

That's lovely.

And you've got a wonderful vista along the front.

Oh, yeah.

Alan Coppen is one of the volunteers here at the centre.

And is one of the team responsible

for the Metropolitan steam loco.

Slide over. OK, if you want to screw that off, if you want to.

Here we go.

All the way off.

How's that? Marvellous.

If you want to play the hooter. Oh!

WHISTLE BLOWING

There you go! I've always wanted to do that. Simple stuff.

Clear my side, Al.

Clear my side. Here we go, then.

This locomotive, the Metropolitan 1, used to carry people

through the underground tunnels.

It was still running on open stretches of the underground,

west of London, to Chesham right up until 1961.

So what does it mean to you?

I've always loved railways, and particularly steam. Yeah.

To be on this one, particularly, I always find a great privilege.

Yeah. The early Victorian drivers would have their name in the cab.

Really? It wasn't unusual for them to come in on their days

off just to look after their loco. Really?

They were polished like, well, like your best silver service.

You get a real sense in here of Victorian engineering.

Oh, yeah, it's wonderful.

Can you just blow the whistle there, Michael, for the crossing? Yeah.

WHISTLE BLOWING

You can make them sing.

WHISTLE BLOWING