Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 6, Episode 9 - London's West End - full transcript
[OPENING THEME MUSIC]
For Victorian Britons, George Bradshaw
was a household name.
At a time when railways
were new...
Bradshaw's guidebook inspired
them to take to the tracks.
I'm using a Bradshaw's guide to understand
how trains transformed Britain.
Its landscape...
its industry, society...
and leisure time.
As I arias-cross the country a hundred
and fifty years later...
it helps me to discover
the Britain of today.
I'm now over halfway through a
London railway odyssey.
Discovering how, with industrialisation,
the capital became the world's first megalopolis.
Today, I'm bound for its very heart.
Sandwiched between the capital's
political and financial centres...
at Westminster and the old City of
London, is the West End.
Whose theatres, emporia, eating houses,
coffee shops and public houses...
were a magnet for Victorian
pleasure-seekers and players.
And they've lost none of their
pulling power today.
I'm using my usual guidebook - and extracts from
Bradshaw's 1862 Illustrated Handbook to London...
to make a series of journeys
in and around the capital.
This time I'm exploring the West End - from Covent
Garden via Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly...
to the bustling streets of Soho.
On today's journey I'll discover how 19th-century
engineering made for spectacular theatricals.
Ben Hur was produced there twice. They staged the
chariot race and the horses ran across the stage.
To make it more exciting, they actually
turned the treadmills around...
so that the horses were running
towards the audience.
Discover a Victorian luxury,
fit for a queen.
The other area that Queen Victoria
liked was rose.
And so, if I dab this behind my ears...
I can smell like Queen Victoria.
And come face to face with my
guiding spirit.
George Bradshaw,
1801 to 1853.
First stop is Covent Garden.
Once, it was home to London's fruit,
vegetable and flower markets.
Now, tourists flock here to visit the shops,
soak up the atmosphere or take in a show.
The first playhouses appeared
here in the 17th century...
but the West End's modern reputation, as the home
of British theatre, dates back to Victorian times.
The Strand is a fine street running
parallel with the river.
Formerly the favourite abode
of our ancient nobility.
Between their mansions and the river were
gardens, terraces and steps.
But by the time of my Bradshaw's Guide this was
"theatre-land", and here at the Adelphi Theatre...
for more than two hundred years, there's been the
smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd.
The first theatre on this site opened in 1806, marking
the beginning of a 19th-century theatre boom...
fuelled by industrial London's
pell-mell economic growth.
I'm treading the boards with theatre
historian Mark Fox.
Well, Mark... here we are
in the spotlight.
Why was it that, from Shakespearean times to
the beginning of the 19th century...
the centre of theatre in London moved,
I suppose, from the South Bank to the West End?
The whole of London was developing, particularly
along the riverside - roads being built...
tenement blocks being swept away.
Sites became...
available, and if an impresario
could actually find a site...
that they could actually build a theatre
very quickly, with enough seats...
and get the entertainment
that people Wanted to come...
and see, then they could make
money very quickly.
By the time of my guidebook
this area was in turmoiL...
thanks to the creation
of the Embankment.
Extraordinary feats of Victorian engineering
reclaimed land from the Thames...
and provided new sewers
and underground railways...
to serve the city's
mushrooming population.
The advent of the railways transformed the
landscape, and the reach, of theatre-land.
Before the railways - so before
about 1830 - how were...
the theatres here getting their audiences?
The theatres were built to attract
the people in the locality.
You didn't have any such thing as a long run,
they would do a play for, perhaps,
for just one day or two days...
and then they would change
the bill completely.
The railways, then, must
have had quite a big impact...
when people were able to
travel greater distances?
It did - it changed the profile of
the audience completely.
Because, suddenly, tourists
were coming in as well.
Somewhere here like The Strand - Charing Cross -
when that opened, that was the boat train...
so people could come
even from abroad. And that...
actually changed the nature
of the whole business.
It Wasn't the same rough audiences that had
actually been there all the time.
It became a bit more expensive, and
it actually became special.
Thanks to the railways, there was now
a market for long-running shows...
but to keep the crowds coming the
producers had to give them thrills.
Tell me about stagecraft during the
19th century. How good was it?
They didn't have the technology that
we have today, obviously...
but they did manage some
huge technological feats.
So at Drury Lane in 1894, Augustus Harris
bought in from Vienna...
enormous hydraulic lifts.
But that meant that he could actually
rock the stage from side to side...
so he could sink ships. He could do things
that people hadn't ever seen before.
Just to give you an idea of the real scale -
Ben Hur was produced there twice.
They staged the chariot race
both times.
The first time they had treadmills,
and the horses ran...
across the stage with a scene
that moved behind them...
so you could actually see the progression of
the race. But the second time they revived it...
they actually turned the treadmills round so
that the horses were running towards the audience.
Ah, people must have been
absolutely mesmerised!
By the turn of the 20th century, there were
forty-six theatres in the West End.
And still, today, the railways deliver to the
capital out-of-towners lured by the bright lights.
- Hello, ladies!
- Hello. Nice to meet you.
Nice to see you! Are you on
your Way to the theatre?
We are, yes.
So why do you choose the
theatre in London?
- It's my home town, originally.
- She's originally from London...
but she's lived in Liverpool
for fifty-odd years.
- Where've you come from, then, today?
- Peterborough.
Peterborough!
Oh, that's not so far.
No, it isn't. It's just down the
road on the train.
Is there something special about the theatre
scene in London, do you think?
Oh, yeah - I think so.
It's the excitement.
It's different... you know?
It's not only going to the theatre - it's walking
around... people-Watching.
We used to go to the Wood Green Empire,
Finsbury Park Empire, you know?
- Marvellous.
- They were our haunts!
And What sort of things
were you seeing?
- Were they musicals?
- All the top stars, mostly.
Are you here for the
theatre today?
No, I'm up here to buy
railway books!
[LAUGHTER]
My guidebooks can now help me to discover how
teeming Victorian London fed its hungry masses.
Bradshaw's Guide to London, 1862, describes
the capital as "the modern Babylon"...
"in which there's a choice of 330 dining rooms, 883
coffee shops, 4,340 publicans, 802 beer-shop keepers."
"The capital apparently consumes 776,000 sheep,
270,000 pigs and 120,000 tonnes of fish."
I hope I haven't battered you
with statistics!
Victorian industrialisation and urbanisation helped
to spread the quintessential British takeaway.
Ahmet Ziyaeddin's family have been sewing
fish and chips for over thirty years.
- Hello, Ahmet!
- Michael, hello.
- Good to see you.
- Here I am, dressed in my finery, all ready for you!
Fantastic!
You look ready for the job.
How long has there been a shop
on these premises?
Since 1871. So that's just over a
hundred and forty years.
Although fried fish has been sold in
Britain since the 17th century...
it was first served to urban workers
with chips in the 1860s.
Why do you think fish and chips became so popular
in the Victorian time, when this shop opened?
It was a massive influx of the hard work
the Victorians had done.
We had modern transport, trains.
With the expansion of the fishing
fleet and mechanisation...
of the trawlers, they were able to catch more.
Thanks to steam trawlers and steam trains,
cheap fish flooded into Britain's cities.
And by the 1920s, there were 35,000
fish-and-chip shops.
What recipe do you work to?
Well we were very fortunate,
in that there were two elderly...
ladies that lived above the
shop when my father arrived.
They were the daughters of the
grandson of the original owner.
They put forward to my father that his fish and
chips Wasn't good enough for this shop...
and he said "Well, if you think you can do
better - show me"... and they did.
And we adopted their methods - which
date back to the origins of this shop.
And We've carried it on ever since. And you break
it open and you see that white flaky, fresh fish...
Simple enough to cook, but when it's done well
it's unparalleled. It's good, honest food.
- Makes you proud to be British.
- Absolutely!
At the time of my guidebook,
rapidly expanding...
London was battling against
congestion in its streets...
by experimenting with
underground railways.
In the first years of the 20th century, the
first deep-level Tubes opened.
I'm taking the Northern line to Charing Cross, to visit
a cultural beacon that had its roots in Bradshaw's day.
[TRAIN TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT]
This station is Charing Cross.
"The National Gallery - that singularly dull,
heavy-looking building"...
"that extends the whole north
side of Trafalgar Square."
"Although this gallery is inferior
to the great continental...
galleries, still it is a highly
valuable collection."
Bradshaw's understood the art
of faint praise!
In the mid-19th century Britain, the gallery's
Nee-Classical look had fallen out of fashion.
Today, up to six million visitors a year
pass through its portals.
The 46,000-square-meter building houses
a World-class collection...
of over 2,000 paintings.
But archivist Alan Cookham takes me
back to its modest beginnings.
Before the foundation of the National Gallery in
1824, What was the opportunity for the city clerk...
or the steam-engine operative
to see art?
Well, there weren't a great
many opportunities.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery had been founded a few
years earlier, but there were problems, of course...
in getting out there, because at that
time there weren't any railways.
So the opening of the Gallery really gave people
an opportunity to see great works of art...
right in the centre of London.
And how, then, did the collection
actually begin?
Well, it was purchased by the Government from
the estate of John Julius Angerstein...
a financier, in 1824, for the princely sum of
sixty thousand pounds.
Initially there were just thirty-eight paintings
displayed in Angerstein's house in Pall Mall.
Then, in the 1830s, work began
on this gallery...
part of an ambitious building programme in
which Trafalgar Square replaced streets of slums.
There was a whole area of Trafalgar Square
that was known as "Porridge Island".
It was called that because the inhabitants of this area
used to make a kind of gruel. And the gruel stank.
But that was all cleared for
the Trafalgar Square.
How did the public react, at first, to the
opportunity of spending the day in a gallery?
Some people, for example, came in and would
actually have a picnic here in the Gallery.
And would sit around, having their food
and drinking glasses of gin.
When they were told off for
doing this they would simply...
offer the gallery assistant
a glass of gin to join them.
By 1853 there were over four hundred
paintings in the collection...
which was boosted further when JMW Turner left
hundreds of works to the nation in his will.
Including this one, inspired by the
wonder of locomotion.
- What's the name of the picture?
- It's "Rain, Steam and Speed".
And, in fact, when this was first put on display,
William Thackeray, the author and, of course, critic...
came in to see it and he wrote an article
about it Where he said it was almost so vivid...
it's almost as if the train could
almost leap off the canvas...
and then go through the wall
and out, down Charing Cross...
- and disappear into the distance.
- A marvellous image!
Many of those responsible for the transformation
of 19th-century Britain...
are commemorated next door, in
the National Portrait Gallery.
Founded in the 1850s so that the public
could admire the likenesses of...
those who had risen by their efforts and
intellect, and those born to greatness.
I've come to the National Portrait Gallery
to see one portrait in particular.
George Bradshaw,
1801 to 1853.
Shown here with his famous
railway map of Britain.
This was painted in 1841 - he was probably
best known then as a cartographer.
And his portrait hangs besides that of
Robert Stephenson...
who was responsible for the railway line
from London to Birmingham.
And above...
Isambard Kingdom Brunei...
who built the railway line from London out to
the west - the Great Western Railway.
And I think something in George Bradshaw's
Quaker humility would baulk...
against being shown alongside two,
surely, of his greatest heroes.
And having paid homage to three heavyweights of the
Railway Age, I'm breaking my journey for the night.
I'm continuing my exploration of London
on the Bakerloo line...
which opened in 1906 as the Baker Street
and Waterloo Railway.
In Victorian times, every aspect of the world's
greatest city magnetised the visitor.
Having attended the theatres and galleries,
they could take advantage...
of the metropolis's enormous range of
high-quality merchandise.
Bradshaw's urges that "proceeding up Piccadilly,
the visitor should hot omit Bond Street"...
"to view this most fashionable
promenade."
"The shops here are extremely elegant,
and their articles most recherche."
"And here the ladies of
aristocracy and Wealth may be...
seen alighting from their
carriages, and splendid"...
"equipages, to make some purchases."
I'm at Piccadilly for the sweet smells
of Wealth and success.
A favourite purchase for the rich in
Victorian London was perfume.
And to sniff out its history I've come to Piccadilly
Circus, one of the busiest stops on the network.
Passengers make more than forty million
journeys through the station each year.
The attraction of the nearby shops hasn't
changed since Bradshaw's day.
Hello, guys! What are you hoping to do
While you're in the West End?
Hoping to see the Lion King tonight. Saw the Queen
today, in the opening of Parliament.
- You've seen the Queen?
- We did! Very exciting, massive moment.
You shopping today?
No. We've just come down from Canterbury
to have a wander round.
Now, will you do any shopping While
you're here?
A little.
What do you like to do when
you get here?
Well, we usually go out
for food.
- Or sometimes we come out...
- Yeah, just watch people, and things.
- Watch people?
- [LAUGHS] Yeah!
I'm looking at perfume in the West End.
Do you like to buy perfume at all?
Love perfume! We just bought
some perfume.
- Are you into perfume?
- Yes!
- What do you like to Wear?
- One Direction perfume.
- One Direction perfume?!
- Yeah!
[LAUGHTER].
What sort of perfume do you think
One Direction Wear?
- Um... probably just cologne or aftershave?
- Yeah.
While many of the shops familiar to Victorian
customers have long since gone...
this Jermyn Street perfumery has
survived almost unchanged.
Today it's run by
Edward Bodenham.
Edward, hello.
Hello, Michael. Welcome to the shop -
Welcome to Floris.
Thank you very much!
It's such an elegant shop.
I imagine it was flourishing in the mid-19th
century but, on the other hand, I suppose...
the origins must go back
much further?
They do, actually -
back to 1730...
when my great-great-great-great-great-great-
grandfather set up the business.
He actually came over from Menorca, which
was part of the British Empire at the time.
So this was another Spanish immigrant
who made his fortune in Britain?
Absolutely!
- And you have Spanish blood like me, then?
- Certainly do.
Your shop has a 19th-century look -
would that be right?
Yes, all the cabinets in here were actually
acquired from the Great Exhibition...
in 1851 - which was obviously the
largest trade fair of its day.
So, originally jewellery cabinets,
but a deal was done...
and we were able to acquire
the cabinets for our shop.
The Great Exhibition showcased the best of
British and international invention...
from silverwork, to the latest
steam engines.
Was there a connection between perfume
and the railways, once they came?
Yes, there was. We used to source a lot of our
essences from the south of France.
Before trains were introduced
the family, or Whoever...
was sourcing the oils, would have
to travel by horse and cart.
So it really did make things
a lot easier.
Perfume was worn partly to mask the unpleasant
smells of 19th-century London...
but it also conferred status.
Members of Britain's elite have been buying
their scent here for centuries.
Another beautiful room!
This is Where we actually keep
our account ledgers.
These ones actually date back
to the 1930s and '40s.
This is the roll call of the
Royal Family!
The King, the Princess Mary Louise,
Queen Mary.
Various other well-known names: Sir John Gielgud,
Laurence Olivier, Winston Churchill.
So, 28 Hyde Park Gate
crossed out.
10 Downing Street inserted.
10 Downing Street crossed out.
[MICHAEL LAUGHS]
Absolutely.
It's the history of the 19th and 20th
century just there, isn't it?
The shop received its first
Royal Warrant in 1800...
and when Queen Victoria ascended the throne
she continued the tradition of royal patronage.
Perfumier Sheila Foyle is talking me
through the regal fragrance.
We know that there were two particular areas
of fragrance that she enjoyed to wear.
One was the cologne notes.
And What are the highlights
of the recipe?
Bergamot oil.
We have new“.
What's that?
A steam distillation of the flowers
of the orange tree.
We also have myrtle.
Yes, I find that quite strong and quite heady,
I would say. What would you say of that?
For me, it's light - it's fresh...
quite crisp.
The other area that Queen Victoria
liked was rose...
so I've also created a
rose bouquet.
Mmm... very distinctly rose,
isn't it?
And, so, if I dab this behind my ears...
I can smell like Queen Victoria!
You certainly can.
I'm now swapping the heady scent of royalty
for the earthy smells of the Underground...
as I rejoin the Bakerloo line towards
Oxford Circus
and consider a grimmer side of
Victorian London life.
As the city's population had swelled...
little thought had been given to sanitation
for the masses.
And in over-crowded poorer neighbourhoods,
the consequences could be disastrous.
Today, London's Soho quarter buzzes with
restaurants, cafes and shops.
In Victorian times people lived here
cheek-by-jowl - ah average of eighteen to a house.
The 1862 Bradshaw's Guide to London
contains this comment:
"Upwards of 100 drinking fountains
now exist"...
"from which flows a continual
stream of water"...
"where three years since, not
a single one was known."
"And, although little artistic taste has been displayed
in their erection, they must be highly useful"...
"in a sanitary point of view."
Well, yes -
if the Water supply was clean.
But if it was contaminated,
it could be lethal.
In Bradshaw's day infectious disease was rife, and
perhaps the most feared was cholera.
Four deadly outbreaks swept through the capital
between 1832 and 1866, killing thousands.
The authorities' response was hampered by
ignorance of how the fatal illness was spread.
Peter Daniel from the Westminster Archives can
tell me how the answer came...
from a diligent Victorian who
analysed the evidence.
Why is Britain blighted by successive outbreaks of
cholera during the middle of the 19th century?
Well, the origins of cholera were in
the Ganges, in India.
But with the opening up of the
British Empire and different trade routes...
it can spread more easily,
more quickly...
through shipping, railways. The things
that had brought lots of benefits...
but were now going to bring this
deadly disease to the country.
And at the time of my Bradshaw's Guide, What
was the theory as to What lay behind cholera?
Well, the prevailing theory was "miasmatism" -
the idea that bad smells caused diseases.
Many influential people, those in government
that could make the decisions...
strongly believed in that.
Who makes the breakthrough towards understanding
that cholera is a water-borne disease?
It's a man called Dr John Snow.
Dr Snow was something of a Victorian celebrity,
having assisted at the birth of Queen Victoria's son.
He'd had long suspected that
contaminated water caused cholera.
And when, in August 1854, the disease tore
through his local neighbourhood in Soho...
he set out to prove it.
It was a matter of doing a lot of
walking and talking to people.
And he mapped out where of all the cases were occurring.
There were thirteen water pumps in the Soho area...
and he found a cluster of the cases around
one pump that was in Broadwick Street.
But just as revealing as who had succumbed
to the disease, was who had not.
What other proofs were there
for Snow?
Well, literally, just a few yards along
there was the Lion Brewery.
And when Snow was doing his
investigations here for his mapping...
he found that none of the workers
in the brewery had died.
That's because they only drunk beer.
[LAUGHTER]
What? And beer can't carry cholera?
Well, it's because the fermentation killed off
the bacteria - so it was safe to drink.
Snow's methodical research has earned
him a place in medical history...
as one of the founders of modern epidemiology,
the study of the spread of disease.
With the help of the parish vicar,
Henry Whitehead, he found the evidence...
needed to prove the miasmatists Wrong -
including the case of Susannah Eley.
She owned a cartridge company and made so much
money, she'd been able to move out to Hampstead.
The one thing is, she couldn't leave her
Working-class roots behind.
She loved the taste of Broad Street
pump water...
and she had it shipped to her every day to
her new residence out in Hampstead.
And she was the only person in
Hampstead to die of cholera.
And then it was easy for Snow then to say "Well, bad
smells just can't reach from Soho out to Hampstead".
Snow convinced the local parish authorities to
remove the handle of the offending pump.
But it Wasn't until after his
death, in 1858...
that his ideas became widely accepted and
proper sewers were built in the capital...
eradicating cholera in London.
So Show makes his breakthroughs
in, what, 1854? 1855?
And it comes, I'm afraid, just too late for
one man, who dies in 1853...
George Bradshaw - of cholera.
John Snow is a shining example of the Victorian
spirit of enquiry that transformed Britain.
Scientific advance and technological progress
would eventually bring relief...
even to the capital's seething masses,
living in their poverty and squalor.
Seeing the portraits of Isambard Kingdown Brunei
and Robert Stephenson...
reminds me yet again how much
we owe the great railway builders.
But, even when their work was done,
here in the West End of London...
amongst the finery of the shops and
the theatres, cholera raged.
The capital is indebted to the
diligent Dr John Snow...
and a new generation of civil engineers who
undertook the unglamorous work...
of building clean water pipes and
leak-proof sewers.
Next time, I'll be getting a fresh perspective
on a Victorian landmark.
Ohh! I mustn't look down!
I mustn't look down!
Learning how London's most famous flower market
had a darker side in Bradshaw's day.
Flower sellers would use it almost
as a cover for prostitution.
And discovering how the capital's 19th-century
railway is being equipped for the 21st.
The scale of this enterprise - the scale of
this vision - it is positively Victorian!
[END THEME]
For Victorian Britons, George Bradshaw
was a household name.
At a time when railways
were new...
Bradshaw's guidebook inspired
them to take to the tracks.
I'm using a Bradshaw's guide to understand
how trains transformed Britain.
Its landscape...
its industry, society...
and leisure time.
As I arias-cross the country a hundred
and fifty years later...
it helps me to discover
the Britain of today.
I'm now over halfway through a
London railway odyssey.
Discovering how, with industrialisation,
the capital became the world's first megalopolis.
Today, I'm bound for its very heart.
Sandwiched between the capital's
political and financial centres...
at Westminster and the old City of
London, is the West End.
Whose theatres, emporia, eating houses,
coffee shops and public houses...
were a magnet for Victorian
pleasure-seekers and players.
And they've lost none of their
pulling power today.
I'm using my usual guidebook - and extracts from
Bradshaw's 1862 Illustrated Handbook to London...
to make a series of journeys
in and around the capital.
This time I'm exploring the West End - from Covent
Garden via Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly...
to the bustling streets of Soho.
On today's journey I'll discover how 19th-century
engineering made for spectacular theatricals.
Ben Hur was produced there twice. They staged the
chariot race and the horses ran across the stage.
To make it more exciting, they actually
turned the treadmills around...
so that the horses were running
towards the audience.
Discover a Victorian luxury,
fit for a queen.
The other area that Queen Victoria
liked was rose.
And so, if I dab this behind my ears...
I can smell like Queen Victoria.
And come face to face with my
guiding spirit.
George Bradshaw,
1801 to 1853.
First stop is Covent Garden.
Once, it was home to London's fruit,
vegetable and flower markets.
Now, tourists flock here to visit the shops,
soak up the atmosphere or take in a show.
The first playhouses appeared
here in the 17th century...
but the West End's modern reputation, as the home
of British theatre, dates back to Victorian times.
The Strand is a fine street running
parallel with the river.
Formerly the favourite abode
of our ancient nobility.
Between their mansions and the river were
gardens, terraces and steps.
But by the time of my Bradshaw's Guide this was
"theatre-land", and here at the Adelphi Theatre...
for more than two hundred years, there's been the
smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd.
The first theatre on this site opened in 1806, marking
the beginning of a 19th-century theatre boom...
fuelled by industrial London's
pell-mell economic growth.
I'm treading the boards with theatre
historian Mark Fox.
Well, Mark... here we are
in the spotlight.
Why was it that, from Shakespearean times to
the beginning of the 19th century...
the centre of theatre in London moved,
I suppose, from the South Bank to the West End?
The whole of London was developing, particularly
along the riverside - roads being built...
tenement blocks being swept away.
Sites became...
available, and if an impresario
could actually find a site...
that they could actually build a theatre
very quickly, with enough seats...
and get the entertainment
that people Wanted to come...
and see, then they could make
money very quickly.
By the time of my guidebook
this area was in turmoiL...
thanks to the creation
of the Embankment.
Extraordinary feats of Victorian engineering
reclaimed land from the Thames...
and provided new sewers
and underground railways...
to serve the city's
mushrooming population.
The advent of the railways transformed the
landscape, and the reach, of theatre-land.
Before the railways - so before
about 1830 - how were...
the theatres here getting their audiences?
The theatres were built to attract
the people in the locality.
You didn't have any such thing as a long run,
they would do a play for, perhaps,
for just one day or two days...
and then they would change
the bill completely.
The railways, then, must
have had quite a big impact...
when people were able to
travel greater distances?
It did - it changed the profile of
the audience completely.
Because, suddenly, tourists
were coming in as well.
Somewhere here like The Strand - Charing Cross -
when that opened, that was the boat train...
so people could come
even from abroad. And that...
actually changed the nature
of the whole business.
It Wasn't the same rough audiences that had
actually been there all the time.
It became a bit more expensive, and
it actually became special.
Thanks to the railways, there was now
a market for long-running shows...
but to keep the crowds coming the
producers had to give them thrills.
Tell me about stagecraft during the
19th century. How good was it?
They didn't have the technology that
we have today, obviously...
but they did manage some
huge technological feats.
So at Drury Lane in 1894, Augustus Harris
bought in from Vienna...
enormous hydraulic lifts.
But that meant that he could actually
rock the stage from side to side...
so he could sink ships. He could do things
that people hadn't ever seen before.
Just to give you an idea of the real scale -
Ben Hur was produced there twice.
They staged the chariot race
both times.
The first time they had treadmills,
and the horses ran...
across the stage with a scene
that moved behind them...
so you could actually see the progression of
the race. But the second time they revived it...
they actually turned the treadmills round so
that the horses were running towards the audience.
Ah, people must have been
absolutely mesmerised!
By the turn of the 20th century, there were
forty-six theatres in the West End.
And still, today, the railways deliver to the
capital out-of-towners lured by the bright lights.
- Hello, ladies!
- Hello. Nice to meet you.
Nice to see you! Are you on
your Way to the theatre?
We are, yes.
So why do you choose the
theatre in London?
- It's my home town, originally.
- She's originally from London...
but she's lived in Liverpool
for fifty-odd years.
- Where've you come from, then, today?
- Peterborough.
Peterborough!
Oh, that's not so far.
No, it isn't. It's just down the
road on the train.
Is there something special about the theatre
scene in London, do you think?
Oh, yeah - I think so.
It's the excitement.
It's different... you know?
It's not only going to the theatre - it's walking
around... people-Watching.
We used to go to the Wood Green Empire,
Finsbury Park Empire, you know?
- Marvellous.
- They were our haunts!
And What sort of things
were you seeing?
- Were they musicals?
- All the top stars, mostly.
Are you here for the
theatre today?
No, I'm up here to buy
railway books!
[LAUGHTER]
My guidebooks can now help me to discover how
teeming Victorian London fed its hungry masses.
Bradshaw's Guide to London, 1862, describes
the capital as "the modern Babylon"...
"in which there's a choice of 330 dining rooms, 883
coffee shops, 4,340 publicans, 802 beer-shop keepers."
"The capital apparently consumes 776,000 sheep,
270,000 pigs and 120,000 tonnes of fish."
I hope I haven't battered you
with statistics!
Victorian industrialisation and urbanisation helped
to spread the quintessential British takeaway.
Ahmet Ziyaeddin's family have been sewing
fish and chips for over thirty years.
- Hello, Ahmet!
- Michael, hello.
- Good to see you.
- Here I am, dressed in my finery, all ready for you!
Fantastic!
You look ready for the job.
How long has there been a shop
on these premises?
Since 1871. So that's just over a
hundred and forty years.
Although fried fish has been sold in
Britain since the 17th century...
it was first served to urban workers
with chips in the 1860s.
Why do you think fish and chips became so popular
in the Victorian time, when this shop opened?
It was a massive influx of the hard work
the Victorians had done.
We had modern transport, trains.
With the expansion of the fishing
fleet and mechanisation...
of the trawlers, they were able to catch more.
Thanks to steam trawlers and steam trains,
cheap fish flooded into Britain's cities.
And by the 1920s, there were 35,000
fish-and-chip shops.
What recipe do you work to?
Well we were very fortunate,
in that there were two elderly...
ladies that lived above the
shop when my father arrived.
They were the daughters of the
grandson of the original owner.
They put forward to my father that his fish and
chips Wasn't good enough for this shop...
and he said "Well, if you think you can do
better - show me"... and they did.
And we adopted their methods - which
date back to the origins of this shop.
And We've carried it on ever since. And you break
it open and you see that white flaky, fresh fish...
Simple enough to cook, but when it's done well
it's unparalleled. It's good, honest food.
- Makes you proud to be British.
- Absolutely!
At the time of my guidebook,
rapidly expanding...
London was battling against
congestion in its streets...
by experimenting with
underground railways.
In the first years of the 20th century, the
first deep-level Tubes opened.
I'm taking the Northern line to Charing Cross, to visit
a cultural beacon that had its roots in Bradshaw's day.
[TRAIN TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT]
This station is Charing Cross.
"The National Gallery - that singularly dull,
heavy-looking building"...
"that extends the whole north
side of Trafalgar Square."
"Although this gallery is inferior
to the great continental...
galleries, still it is a highly
valuable collection."
Bradshaw's understood the art
of faint praise!
In the mid-19th century Britain, the gallery's
Nee-Classical look had fallen out of fashion.
Today, up to six million visitors a year
pass through its portals.
The 46,000-square-meter building houses
a World-class collection...
of over 2,000 paintings.
But archivist Alan Cookham takes me
back to its modest beginnings.
Before the foundation of the National Gallery in
1824, What was the opportunity for the city clerk...
or the steam-engine operative
to see art?
Well, there weren't a great
many opportunities.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery had been founded a few
years earlier, but there were problems, of course...
in getting out there, because at that
time there weren't any railways.
So the opening of the Gallery really gave people
an opportunity to see great works of art...
right in the centre of London.
And how, then, did the collection
actually begin?
Well, it was purchased by the Government from
the estate of John Julius Angerstein...
a financier, in 1824, for the princely sum of
sixty thousand pounds.
Initially there were just thirty-eight paintings
displayed in Angerstein's house in Pall Mall.
Then, in the 1830s, work began
on this gallery...
part of an ambitious building programme in
which Trafalgar Square replaced streets of slums.
There was a whole area of Trafalgar Square
that was known as "Porridge Island".
It was called that because the inhabitants of this area
used to make a kind of gruel. And the gruel stank.
But that was all cleared for
the Trafalgar Square.
How did the public react, at first, to the
opportunity of spending the day in a gallery?
Some people, for example, came in and would
actually have a picnic here in the Gallery.
And would sit around, having their food
and drinking glasses of gin.
When they were told off for
doing this they would simply...
offer the gallery assistant
a glass of gin to join them.
By 1853 there were over four hundred
paintings in the collection...
which was boosted further when JMW Turner left
hundreds of works to the nation in his will.
Including this one, inspired by the
wonder of locomotion.
- What's the name of the picture?
- It's "Rain, Steam and Speed".
And, in fact, when this was first put on display,
William Thackeray, the author and, of course, critic...
came in to see it and he wrote an article
about it Where he said it was almost so vivid...
it's almost as if the train could
almost leap off the canvas...
and then go through the wall
and out, down Charing Cross...
- and disappear into the distance.
- A marvellous image!
Many of those responsible for the transformation
of 19th-century Britain...
are commemorated next door, in
the National Portrait Gallery.
Founded in the 1850s so that the public
could admire the likenesses of...
those who had risen by their efforts and
intellect, and those born to greatness.
I've come to the National Portrait Gallery
to see one portrait in particular.
George Bradshaw,
1801 to 1853.
Shown here with his famous
railway map of Britain.
This was painted in 1841 - he was probably
best known then as a cartographer.
And his portrait hangs besides that of
Robert Stephenson...
who was responsible for the railway line
from London to Birmingham.
And above...
Isambard Kingdom Brunei...
who built the railway line from London out to
the west - the Great Western Railway.
And I think something in George Bradshaw's
Quaker humility would baulk...
against being shown alongside two,
surely, of his greatest heroes.
And having paid homage to three heavyweights of the
Railway Age, I'm breaking my journey for the night.
I'm continuing my exploration of London
on the Bakerloo line...
which opened in 1906 as the Baker Street
and Waterloo Railway.
In Victorian times, every aspect of the world's
greatest city magnetised the visitor.
Having attended the theatres and galleries,
they could take advantage...
of the metropolis's enormous range of
high-quality merchandise.
Bradshaw's urges that "proceeding up Piccadilly,
the visitor should hot omit Bond Street"...
"to view this most fashionable
promenade."
"The shops here are extremely elegant,
and their articles most recherche."
"And here the ladies of
aristocracy and Wealth may be...
seen alighting from their
carriages, and splendid"...
"equipages, to make some purchases."
I'm at Piccadilly for the sweet smells
of Wealth and success.
A favourite purchase for the rich in
Victorian London was perfume.
And to sniff out its history I've come to Piccadilly
Circus, one of the busiest stops on the network.
Passengers make more than forty million
journeys through the station each year.
The attraction of the nearby shops hasn't
changed since Bradshaw's day.
Hello, guys! What are you hoping to do
While you're in the West End?
Hoping to see the Lion King tonight. Saw the Queen
today, in the opening of Parliament.
- You've seen the Queen?
- We did! Very exciting, massive moment.
You shopping today?
No. We've just come down from Canterbury
to have a wander round.
Now, will you do any shopping While
you're here?
A little.
What do you like to do when
you get here?
Well, we usually go out
for food.
- Or sometimes we come out...
- Yeah, just watch people, and things.
- Watch people?
- [LAUGHS] Yeah!
I'm looking at perfume in the West End.
Do you like to buy perfume at all?
Love perfume! We just bought
some perfume.
- Are you into perfume?
- Yes!
- What do you like to Wear?
- One Direction perfume.
- One Direction perfume?!
- Yeah!
[LAUGHTER].
What sort of perfume do you think
One Direction Wear?
- Um... probably just cologne or aftershave?
- Yeah.
While many of the shops familiar to Victorian
customers have long since gone...
this Jermyn Street perfumery has
survived almost unchanged.
Today it's run by
Edward Bodenham.
Edward, hello.
Hello, Michael. Welcome to the shop -
Welcome to Floris.
Thank you very much!
It's such an elegant shop.
I imagine it was flourishing in the mid-19th
century but, on the other hand, I suppose...
the origins must go back
much further?
They do, actually -
back to 1730...
when my great-great-great-great-great-great-
grandfather set up the business.
He actually came over from Menorca, which
was part of the British Empire at the time.
So this was another Spanish immigrant
who made his fortune in Britain?
Absolutely!
- And you have Spanish blood like me, then?
- Certainly do.
Your shop has a 19th-century look -
would that be right?
Yes, all the cabinets in here were actually
acquired from the Great Exhibition...
in 1851 - which was obviously the
largest trade fair of its day.
So, originally jewellery cabinets,
but a deal was done...
and we were able to acquire
the cabinets for our shop.
The Great Exhibition showcased the best of
British and international invention...
from silverwork, to the latest
steam engines.
Was there a connection between perfume
and the railways, once they came?
Yes, there was. We used to source a lot of our
essences from the south of France.
Before trains were introduced
the family, or Whoever...
was sourcing the oils, would have
to travel by horse and cart.
So it really did make things
a lot easier.
Perfume was worn partly to mask the unpleasant
smells of 19th-century London...
but it also conferred status.
Members of Britain's elite have been buying
their scent here for centuries.
Another beautiful room!
This is Where we actually keep
our account ledgers.
These ones actually date back
to the 1930s and '40s.
This is the roll call of the
Royal Family!
The King, the Princess Mary Louise,
Queen Mary.
Various other well-known names: Sir John Gielgud,
Laurence Olivier, Winston Churchill.
So, 28 Hyde Park Gate
crossed out.
10 Downing Street inserted.
10 Downing Street crossed out.
[MICHAEL LAUGHS]
Absolutely.
It's the history of the 19th and 20th
century just there, isn't it?
The shop received its first
Royal Warrant in 1800...
and when Queen Victoria ascended the throne
she continued the tradition of royal patronage.
Perfumier Sheila Foyle is talking me
through the regal fragrance.
We know that there were two particular areas
of fragrance that she enjoyed to wear.
One was the cologne notes.
And What are the highlights
of the recipe?
Bergamot oil.
We have new“.
What's that?
A steam distillation of the flowers
of the orange tree.
We also have myrtle.
Yes, I find that quite strong and quite heady,
I would say. What would you say of that?
For me, it's light - it's fresh...
quite crisp.
The other area that Queen Victoria
liked was rose...
so I've also created a
rose bouquet.
Mmm... very distinctly rose,
isn't it?
And, so, if I dab this behind my ears...
I can smell like Queen Victoria!
You certainly can.
I'm now swapping the heady scent of royalty
for the earthy smells of the Underground...
as I rejoin the Bakerloo line towards
Oxford Circus
and consider a grimmer side of
Victorian London life.
As the city's population had swelled...
little thought had been given to sanitation
for the masses.
And in over-crowded poorer neighbourhoods,
the consequences could be disastrous.
Today, London's Soho quarter buzzes with
restaurants, cafes and shops.
In Victorian times people lived here
cheek-by-jowl - ah average of eighteen to a house.
The 1862 Bradshaw's Guide to London
contains this comment:
"Upwards of 100 drinking fountains
now exist"...
"from which flows a continual
stream of water"...
"where three years since, not
a single one was known."
"And, although little artistic taste has been displayed
in their erection, they must be highly useful"...
"in a sanitary point of view."
Well, yes -
if the Water supply was clean.
But if it was contaminated,
it could be lethal.
In Bradshaw's day infectious disease was rife, and
perhaps the most feared was cholera.
Four deadly outbreaks swept through the capital
between 1832 and 1866, killing thousands.
The authorities' response was hampered by
ignorance of how the fatal illness was spread.
Peter Daniel from the Westminster Archives can
tell me how the answer came...
from a diligent Victorian who
analysed the evidence.
Why is Britain blighted by successive outbreaks of
cholera during the middle of the 19th century?
Well, the origins of cholera were in
the Ganges, in India.
But with the opening up of the
British Empire and different trade routes...
it can spread more easily,
more quickly...
through shipping, railways. The things
that had brought lots of benefits...
but were now going to bring this
deadly disease to the country.
And at the time of my Bradshaw's Guide, What
was the theory as to What lay behind cholera?
Well, the prevailing theory was "miasmatism" -
the idea that bad smells caused diseases.
Many influential people, those in government
that could make the decisions...
strongly believed in that.
Who makes the breakthrough towards understanding
that cholera is a water-borne disease?
It's a man called Dr John Snow.
Dr Snow was something of a Victorian celebrity,
having assisted at the birth of Queen Victoria's son.
He'd had long suspected that
contaminated water caused cholera.
And when, in August 1854, the disease tore
through his local neighbourhood in Soho...
he set out to prove it.
It was a matter of doing a lot of
walking and talking to people.
And he mapped out where of all the cases were occurring.
There were thirteen water pumps in the Soho area...
and he found a cluster of the cases around
one pump that was in Broadwick Street.
But just as revealing as who had succumbed
to the disease, was who had not.
What other proofs were there
for Snow?
Well, literally, just a few yards along
there was the Lion Brewery.
And when Snow was doing his
investigations here for his mapping...
he found that none of the workers
in the brewery had died.
That's because they only drunk beer.
[LAUGHTER]
What? And beer can't carry cholera?
Well, it's because the fermentation killed off
the bacteria - so it was safe to drink.
Snow's methodical research has earned
him a place in medical history...
as one of the founders of modern epidemiology,
the study of the spread of disease.
With the help of the parish vicar,
Henry Whitehead, he found the evidence...
needed to prove the miasmatists Wrong -
including the case of Susannah Eley.
She owned a cartridge company and made so much
money, she'd been able to move out to Hampstead.
The one thing is, she couldn't leave her
Working-class roots behind.
She loved the taste of Broad Street
pump water...
and she had it shipped to her every day to
her new residence out in Hampstead.
And she was the only person in
Hampstead to die of cholera.
And then it was easy for Snow then to say "Well, bad
smells just can't reach from Soho out to Hampstead".
Snow convinced the local parish authorities to
remove the handle of the offending pump.
But it Wasn't until after his
death, in 1858...
that his ideas became widely accepted and
proper sewers were built in the capital...
eradicating cholera in London.
So Show makes his breakthroughs
in, what, 1854? 1855?
And it comes, I'm afraid, just too late for
one man, who dies in 1853...
George Bradshaw - of cholera.
John Snow is a shining example of the Victorian
spirit of enquiry that transformed Britain.
Scientific advance and technological progress
would eventually bring relief...
even to the capital's seething masses,
living in their poverty and squalor.
Seeing the portraits of Isambard Kingdown Brunei
and Robert Stephenson...
reminds me yet again how much
we owe the great railway builders.
But, even when their work was done,
here in the West End of London...
amongst the finery of the shops and
the theatres, cholera raged.
The capital is indebted to the
diligent Dr John Snow...
and a new generation of civil engineers who
undertook the unglamorous work...
of building clean water pipes and
leak-proof sewers.
Next time, I'll be getting a fresh perspective
on a Victorian landmark.
Ohh! I mustn't look down!
I mustn't look down!
Learning how London's most famous flower market
had a darker side in Bradshaw's day.
Flower sellers would use it almost
as a cover for prostitution.
And discovering how the capital's 19th-century
railway is being equipped for the 21st.
The scale of this enterprise - the scale of
this vision - it is positively Victorian!
[END THEME]