In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making a series of journeys across the length and breadth of the country
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
Ripped By mstoll
Using my 19th-century Bradshaw's Guide,
I'm now headed for the Northeast, the cradle of the railways,
where much of their early technology was developed.
Some of the first lines were built here by George Stephenson,
and I'll be following them south
to see how they spread throughout the country transforming Britain.
Each step of the way,
I'll be consulting my "Bradshaw's Guide" on what to look out for.
With its remarkable descriptions of Victorian towns and cities,
it's helping me to grasp the ideas and inventions
that shaped what we enjoy today.
On this journey, I'll be visiting the birthplace of the railways...
Is this really the shrine of British railway engineering?
I suppose it is really.
This is the first purpose-built locomotive factory in the world.
...finding out about the first lifeboat...
This isn't just about technology.
This is really a way of thinking about human life.
...and witnessing some traditional miners' sword dancing.
Who's lost a hand?
Starting in Newcastle, this route takes me south
along some of the very first railway lines,
through Darlington and Whitby... to York.
Then I'll cross the Pennines
and pass through Sheffield and rural Leicestershire,
before ending up at the town of Melton Mowbray.
Today, I'll cover the first 37 miles
as I follow the Tyne to South Shields,
then travel south as far as Chester-le-Street.
Arriving into Newcastle, there are reminders everywhere
of the city's pioneering role in railway history.
As we cross the River Tyne,
Bradshaw refers to the High Level Bridge over there
which was built by the late R Stephenson.
A 1,400-foot span, 112 and a half feet above the river.
When it opened in 1849,
the High Level Bridge was one of the earliest wrought-iron railway bridges,
and the first to carry three tracks along its length.
Its engineer, Robert Stephenson, worked with the architect John Dobson
to build Newcastle Central Station in 1850.
Newcastle Station is itself a wonder of railway archaeology and architecture.
Stephenson used three beautiful arched iron and glass canopies
to create the station, and they curve along the platform.
And this became the model for places all along the Northeast Railway.
This impressive station provided a fitting gateway to a city
which in Bradshaw's day had recently been substantially improved.
He writes, "The new town is handsome and well laid out. "
"The Exchange and other buildings are built of solid, durable granite
at a cost of nearly £2 million. "
Designed by architect Richard Grainger, and completed around 1841,
these streets are at the heart of one of England's first conservation areas.
We're on the corner of Grainger Street and Grey Street.
- What do you think of these streets? - Grey Street is a really lovely street.
The buildings down there are just wonderful.
If you walk down and just look up...
A lot of people never ever look up. They just look straight ahead.
But if you look up, it's a wonderful place, it really is.
You're awfully young, but do you have any memories of Newcastle?
I'm actually a grandma, but that's nice of you to say so.
But do you have any memories of Newcastle-Gateshead in the old days?
Before the regeneration, it was quite depressing.
But now it's beautiful down there. It's really nice.
These days, Newcastle's classical buildings
are offset by some striking modern architecture,
including the award-winning Millennium Bridge.
George Bradshaw, as a tremendous admirer of technology,
would love the Millennium Bridge,
which tips up like a winking eye to allow shipping to pass underneath it.
It takes just four and a half minutes to open,
and is the world's first and only tilting bridge.
The keys of the Tyne are now home to a thriving arts and culture scene,
but in Bradshaw's time,
one industry above all others helped the city to grow.
Bradshaw's says, "Newcastle's situation on the banks of a navigable river
and in the greatest coal district in the world
are the chief causes which have tended to raise it to wealth and importance."
In the 1860s, Tyneside dominated Britain's coal mining industry,
supplying almost a third of London's fuel.
The wealth generated by the collieries financed pioneering engineers
working on what became the century's most important technology, the railways.
In 1824, Robert Stephenson and his father George
set up their locomotive works in central Newcastle.
I'm meeting Dr Michael Bailey to see what's left of their empire.
- Good to meet you. - Wonderful to see you.
I can't believe this place.
Is this really the shrine of British railway engineering?
Well, I suppose it is really.
This is the first purpose-built locomotive factory in the world.
The railways were developed in this country
and we then exported our locomotives to Europe, to North America,
and the whole railway revolution developed from that moment on.
It must have become a very big works indeed.
Give me an idea of its size.
When it was completely developed later on in the 19th century,
it occupied something like six acres.
Two and a half hectares, if you like, in modern speak.
And there were about 1,200 employees.
So that was a very large site.
Looking at this building, there's very little trace
of what it must have been like, and yet it's very moving.
For anyone who's interested in railways, this is the cradle of it all.
- The place where it all begins. - Yes, it is.
And I think the people of Newcastle are extremely proud
of the fact that they have here right on their doorstep
the very beginnings of the railway era.
At this site, the Stephensons designed
some of the first successful locomotives.
They developed all the elements of a modern railway,
including setting the distance between the parallel rails
which became the world standard gauge.
Why does this birth of railway technology
happen in Newcastle of all places?
It comes back to the coal, of course.
The coal industry was so dominant in the 18th and then early 19th century
that the competition between the different coal owners
demanded better and better ways of moving the coal
from the colliery sites to the shipping points
for shipment to southern England or export to Europe.
And therefore, to enable you... to allow you to be competitive,
you needed better railway technology to move the coal.
Father and son George and Robert Stephenson
both started out as engineers in the coal industry,
and by Bradshaw's day, they had become household names.
One of the striking things about George Stephenson
is he's a man of very humble origins, little education.
Was he a man with rough edges?
Yes, he did have rough edges.
He always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder,
or some would say a forest on his shoulder,
because he didn't have an education.
But he was self-taught.
He taught himself to read and write, and that's obviously very commendable.
But Robert did have an education.
George Stephenson ensured his son Robert
would have all the education that he did not have.
When he left school, he could really have taken a position in any profession,
but he chose to perpetuate his interest in engineering.
By 1850, he had been responsible
for something like a third of all the railways built in this country.
These two men hopping between mechanical engineering
and civil engineering, building bridges, planning railway lines,
this is the stuff of genius, isn't it?
Well, I think it is. To be the engineers
right at the beginning of the railway revolution.
Yes, it is. It's the stuff of genius.
In 1859, when Robert Stephenson died,
the railway works were one of the largest employers on Tyneside.
But they owed their development to the region's mineral wealth,
its so-called black gold.
Bradshaw's notes that,
"Coal, the true riches of Newcastle, was first worked here in the year 1260."
"But the produce was scanty till steam power was used in 1714."
He notes the vastness of the coalfields and their enormous depth,
and then he says, "All geologists agree that it will take some hundreds,
if not thousands of years to exhaust the coal."
Well, I'm going to see now how that prediction stacks up today.
I'm heading out to the old coalfields around South Shields on the Metro,
Tyneside's underground.
It's one of four in Britain, alongside those in London, Glasgow and Liverpool.
Of course, I'm used to the London Underground.
Coming down the escalators, it felt like London Underground
except the escalators are shorter than at most London stations.
And I think the trains are shorter, too.
But still, this railway has 60 stations.
So it may not be London, but it's a very substantial size.
The Metro was Britain's first modern light rail system
when it opened in 1980.
Designed to move people quickly around the region,
its vehicles are lighter than mainline trains.
Its 47 and a half miles of track carry passengers far into the suburbs.
Unless, that is, you happen to pick a day
when they're doing engineering works.
Well, unfortunately, that's the end of my journey by train
because this being a Sunday, from here it's a replacement bus service.
The rail replacement bus service can be regarded as a modern curse,
and I don't suppose it would have happened much in Bradshaw's day.
But the origin is mid-19th century, because by Act of Parliament,
rail services were made statutory, compulsory.
And if there isn't a train,
the rail company still has to provide a service.
It demonstrates how quickly people came to rely on the railways
as the main form of transport.
I don't have anything against buses,
but let's face it, they're not the same as trains, are they?
I'm on my way to one of the many coal mines
that were sunk into the earth around Newcastle in Bradshaw's day,
linked by a growing network of railway tracks.
My guidebook writes, "Within a circle of eight to ten miles,
more than 50 important collieries are open,
employing 10 to 15,000 hands. "
One of these productive pits was Whitburn Colliery which opened in 1879.
Its workers had their own village, built alongside the pit.
But although my "Bradshaw's Guide"
predicted a long future for Northumbrian coal,
arriving today, there's no sign of life.
It's difficult to believe that this green expanse at the cliff"s edge
Marsden.
And now of its nine streets, its school, its miners' institute,
hardly a trace remains.
It's all been swept away.
To find out what became of this once-thriving community,
I'm meeting a lifelong resident, Larry Robertson, who worked here in the 1960s.
So, these gates were once the entrance to the colliery.
Yes, it's hard to believe. We had a full colliery here.
Full steam engines for the winders, and the office block just behind us.
Workshops, everything. Full industrial huge complex.
More surprising, not just the colliery has gone
but the whole village has gone.
Yeah, there was a full community.
Most of the workers for the colliery lived just along the road,
about 400 metres. All disappeared.
Larry grew up in Marsden and remembers what once stood here.
Describe the village that you knew as a kid.
Oh, a very friendly little village.
We had North Street here. The dairy was just here.
I used to get the school bus there.
You could walk it, but we used to get the bus.
Erm... about 150, 170 houses and families.
Everybody worked at the colliery. Everybody knew each other.
In its heyday, Whitburn Colliery produced
1,500 tons of coal a day which travelled by train to Newcastle.
And that was the railway line running there.
That's the embankment.
Used to run all the way to South Shields parallel to the road.
We used to nickname it the Marsden Rattler.
It used to bring the miners in from South Shields
because obviously then transport wasn't that good.
So each shift, four times a day, would go backwards and forwards.
Well, eight times, taking all the people home.
The miners worked on seams that extended for miles under the sea.
But by Larry's day, it was becoming too costly to extract the coal.
In 1968, the mine closed,
and shortly after, Marsden Village was pulled down.
I don't really understand why the village was demolished.
I think it was going to cost too much to upgrade it. It was...
Basically, we still had the outside toilets, little back yards and...
It was the same when they knocked it down as it was when they built it.
I suppose at the end it was expense, which was a shame.
- A shame. - Yeah.
It was just incredible that this area supported so much life.
For me as a kid, it was a wonderful life. I really enjoyed it.
You paint a fantastic picture.
The second half of the 20th century saw the closure of the region's mines,
and by the 1990s, all the collieries were gone.
But now it could be time to revisit
Bradshaw's optimistic forecast for the coal industry.
I'm staying on the Whitburn Colliery site
to meet mining expert Professor Paul Younger.
My Bradshaw's Guide says that many geologists
have considered how long the coal supply may last,
and they've agreed that it's hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Were those geologists right?
Basically they were. If you look at this part of the world,
we've been mining coal at industrial scale longer here
than on any other part of the planet.
So more than 400 years of large-scale coal mining,
and yet still 75 percent of the coal is in the sub-surface waiting for us.
- Three quarters left underground? - Yeah.
With so much coal under the North Sea, Paul is hoping to employ
a new technique for extracting its energy called gasification.
Instead of sending human beings underground
to go through tunnels and so on,
it's all done with modern steered drilling technologies from the surface.
So you have a drilling rig, you send the drilling bit down,
you steer it, it moves through the coal seam.
You inject steam and oxygen, and then out of another borehole, out pops gas
which has got 80 percent of the energy of the original solid coal.
Miners wouldn't need to go underground
and it's hoped that this could provide a greener source of energy.
We see the coal here as our way
of bridging our way to a renewable-energy future,
because everybody's going to immediately say,
"Are you crazy, proposing burning more coal
when we've got the problems with climate change?"
But the beauty of the technology we're talking about
is that the voids we're creating in the deep sub-surface,
if they're below depths of 650, 700 metres,
we can inject the carbon dioxide straight back into them.
And so we have a way of getting the energy out of the coal
without further damaging the atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions.
Although some fear that the environmental benefits are unproven,
Paul is upbeat about the future.
- And so far promising? - Very promising, yes.
The studies we've done show that this can be done economically,
it can be done safely,
and with the huge dividend that we then get the energy out of the coal
without further damaging the climate.
Who knows?
Perhaps this coast will support a new community of energy workers.
One building survived the demolition of Marsden Village.
The spectacular Souter Lighthouse built in the 19th century.
Before I continue my journey, I want to take a look.
76 steps to the top
of the Souter Lighthouse, I'm told.
But the view is magnificent.
This was built in 1871
and George Bradshaw would have been thrilled by the technology.
The first lighthouse built for an electric light
with the power of 800,000 candles.
And the reason was clear; these were very treacherous rocks.
In 1860 alone, about the time that my guidebook was published,
20 ships were wrecked here.
And this lighthouse brought greater safety for seaman.
The profusion of lighthouses along this shore
underlines just how treacherous it's always been.
A tiny reference in my guidebook hints at the perils of these waters.
And my next train is taking me to South Shields to follow it up.
I'm taking the Metro because my Bradshaw's tells me
that, "At South Shields may be seen in the church
a model of Greathead's first lifeboat, invented and used in 1790."
Now presumably Victorians understood that reference,
but it means nothing to me, and I'm intrigued to know
what could have been so special about that lifeboat.
I'm heading straight from the station
to the church mentioned in my "Bradshaw's Guide".
I'm hoping historian lan Whitehead
could help me find the model that it describes.
Hi, I'm Ian. Pleased to meet you, Michael.
Very nice to see you. I am looking for Greathead's lifeboat
because it's mentioned in my Bradshaw's Guide.
Is it... is it kind of readily visible?
- It is readily visible. - Oh!
Wow. I didn't expect it to be there. That's absolutely fantastic.
We can get the boat down if you'd like. Tom.
I thought you just pressed a button.
No, unfortunately not.
The model that hangs from the ceiling
represents what's claimed to be the first ever lifeboat,
designed in response to the hazardous conditions of the North Sea.
The original boat was made because of loss of life, really,
and a particular incident in 1789 where a ship ran aground,
and, er... over a period of 24 hours,
everyone watched from the shore as the boat failed to get off the Herd Sand
and then finally broke up and half the crew died.
The disaster was so shocking
that a group of locals launched a competition to design a rescue craft.
So who was Greathead, the man that Bradshaw attributes this boat to?
Greathead was the man who claimed to be the inventor of the lifeboat.
In the competition, there were two people who put in entries.
One was from Greathead.
The other entry was from William Wouldhave,
who was in fact the parish clerk of this church.
The committee didn't actually like either of the designs.
With no clear winner, Greathead was asked to build a lifeboat
that combined the best ideas from both men.
It was double ended so that it could be rowed in either direction,
with a cork lining for buoyancy.
This isn't just about technology.
This is really also about a way of thinking about human life, isn't it?
There is a commitment to save life,
which was perhaps a little bit of a novelty at the end of the 18th century.
It is. I think if you've got no way of saving life,
then you have to be fatalistic
and you have to say "Well, we couldn't have saved them anyway."
But the development of the coal-mining industry
meant that people had money from the coal trade
to think about building a boat like this.
And so it was a world first for the Northeast of England
to have a lifeboat.
So the Northeast can claim first in locomotives and in lifeboats.
Indeed.
To reach my final destination on this leg of the journey,
I need to pick up the main line,
so I'm travelling back to Newcastle on the Metro along the banks of the Tyne.
"Bradshaw's" tells me that this stretch is home to some remarkable Roman ruins.
Arbeia Fort, built nearly 2,000 years ago to guard the entrance to the Tyne,
is now a major tourist attraction.
But ancient sites like these were often plundered.
"Bradshaw's" says, "It's probable that much of the Priory at Tynemouth
was built with stone from the Roman station at South Shields. "
Thankfully, parts of Hadrian's Wall have survived,
and its vestiges are apparent among the housing estates of Newcastle.
Now back on the main line,
I'm leaving Tyne and Wear to head south into County Durham.
My next stop is the ex-mining town of Chester-le-Street.
- That's a nice tight one, isn't it? - It is very tight.
Bye.
I'm here because it's an unusual station.
Welcome to Chester-le-Street.
- Thank you. You're Alex? - Alex Nelson.
There's something pretty special about Chester-le-Street Station.
This is one of the few independent stations in the country,
and the only one on a major main line.
This is the East Coast main line to London.
I took over this station 11 years ago as a private venture to reinvigorate it.
How on earth did it occur to you to buy a railway station?
Well, I didn't strictly buy it. I rent it.
But I was travelling on a train one afternoon from Durham to Newcastle
and the train pulled up here about 2:50 in the afternoon.
Boarded-up, derelict, with a to-let sign.
Alex renovated the station
and turned it into a successful private business
selling train tickets to anywhere in the country.
This was an unstaffed station, unloved and in a bad way.
And we have five staff who work here.
We provide information on trains all over the country by phone.
That's about 100 miles an hour.
You have six seconds to get off the track if you're there.
It's just as well we're behind the yellow line.
Today, Chester-le-Street
has just one main line passing through Alex's station.
In Bradshaw's day, it was at the centre of a spider's web of colliery railways
bringing coal to the town for export along the River Wear.
Coal mining has always been dangerous work,
and 19th-century miners had to trust each other with their lives.
Close-knit mining communities developed their own traditions,
and one, the rapper sword dance,
is sustained by local resident Ricky Forster and his family.
You're beautifully turned out for what? For rapper...
- Rapper sword dance. - A rapper sword dance?
- Northeast tradition. - It goes back how long?
1800s. I've got family in it in the 1800s
carrying the dance through to the present day.
Your family has been doing it all that time?
- And what is it you're carrying here? - A rapper sword.
A rapper sword. Is that sharp?
No, no, it's blunt. It does cut like a scissor.
So what was this used for?
For cleaning pit ponies' backs.
So, will you give us a dance please?
Oh, I think we could manage that.
During the 19th century,
groups of dancers travelled all over the Northeast by train
performing at competitions in pubs, clubs and miners' galas.
As well as dancers, comic characters provided light relief.
You tell them what to do. Tell them what to do.
- Shall I tell them what to do? - You do what he says.
Right, come on then. Down here.
Oh, no! Who's lost a hand?
I'll put it in the handbag!
Howay, bonny lads!
That was absolutely fantastic.
As I say goodbye to the rapper dancers,
it's been brought home to me how this region of Britain
was shaped by two staple Coal and railways.
History never ends.
Railways have revived and coal, so recently written off, may return,
its energy harvested in a new way.
In Bradshaw's day, the Northeast became rich on the back of the railways,
and they in turn depended on the superabundance of coal.
If we could master the technology
and turn the coal that remains underground into gas,
then maybe coal could supply our energy future as well.
On the next leg of my journey,
I'll be experiencing how tough the work was on a steam train...
The heat from the boiler is intense.
And... the coal is heavy.
And the locomotive... is very hungry.
...meeting one of the first locomotives...
It's in the most beautiful condition. Am I allowed to?
- I think you are, absolutely. - It's quite thrilling.
...and sounding out the seaside town
that inspired the Victorian horror story "Dracula".
How was that?
Ripped By mstoll