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.
Starting off in London,
I'm embarked on a new journey.
And my Bradshaw's Guide is going to take me to Kent,
which was regarded as a very important county.
It was the front line of our defences against continental enemies,
it was a rich agricultural area supplying food to the capital
and, of course, it was a good habitat for commuters.
And almost the whole county was put within two hours' journey of London
by a network of railways.
In Bradshaw's time, Kent was the gateway to Europe.
Its railways provided fast links to the Continent for tourists,
businesses and sometimes armies.
On this journey I'll be finding out
how the trains synchronised time across Britain...
If you wanted to catch a train and had your watch set to local time
and the train timetable was on London time,
you needed to know that or you'd miss your train.
...daring to follow the Victorians along the world's first underwater tunnel...
People came in their millions,
but not everyone had the courage to walk under the river.
I have some sympathy with that.
...and travelling on a new generation of high-speed lines
that would've delighted Bradshaw.
Darren, this is very exciting.
Already you can feel the thing really thrusting forward.
On this route, I'll be journeying east out of the capital
before winding around Kent on some of its many railway lines.
From the cathedral city of Canterbury I'll aim for Whitstable
then explore seaside towns
that sit along our closest border with the continent on my way to Hastings.
Today I'll start in London
and travel via Greenwich to the strategic naval port of Chatham.
My first stop is London Bridge, the oldest station in the capital.
My guide says, "The South Eastern Railway
conveys to and from this terminus
the passenger and goods traffic to and from France and the north of Europe. "
In Bradshaw's day, this station
provided the gateway to continental adventures.
My Bradshaw's Guide refers to the platforms being spacious and extensive.
"The wooden roofs over them are light and airy,
the plates of glass with which they are covered
admit and diffuse sufficient light to every part of the vast area."
And I can see the Victorian station behind me,
but many people's experience of London Bridge are the four platforms there
and this 1970s rather horrid station.
And these are very busy.
You can see all the time trains waiting to come into the platforms
like planes being stacked over an airport.
Over the years London Bridge
has grown into a hotchpotch of dark buildings and sprawling platforms.
Thankfully now it's undergoing a billion-pound refurbishment.
And it will sit beneath Europe's tallest building,
the Shard, which is due for completion in 2012.
This train is for Greenwich.
Having caught my connection I'm travelling five miles
along the South Bank of the Thames following London's first railway line.
I'm now travelling to Greenwich on London's oldest railway.
Bradshaw's says "There are as many as 60 trains daily
by this railway to and from London."
"The line runs over viaducts the whole distance
through the populous districts of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe."
It is indeed. It's built on brick arches, 878 of them.
Apparently it took 60 million bricks to build.
They were using 10,000 a day,
causing a brick shortage all the way through London.
Imagine how it changed the capital,
suddenly you found these railways in the sky
plunged through the place where you'd been used to living.
Before the railways, the Thames provided the fastest means of travel.
When the Greenwich line opened in 1836,
travellers were reluctant to exchange the boats for trains,
but within a short time 1500 passengers a day were using the service.
Greenwich, with its stunning park,
was transformed from a leafy village outside London
to one of the capital's most popular suburbs,
and Bradshaw could see why.
Talking of Greenwich Park, Bradshaw says,
"We cannot but hope that the park and heath may be preserved for ages to come
as an oasis in the desert
when the mighty city has spread its suburbs far beyond it
into the hills and dales of the surrounding country."
Bradshaw 's wish has come true.
The park and the heath have been preserved.
But even George Bradshaw, with his great imagination about the future,
cannot have anticipated
the mighty bulk of the structures of Canary Wharf, which are magnificent.
In Bradshaw's time, the splendid historical buildings at Greenwich
attracted tourists from across the world.
Now the Naval Hospital and the Q ueen's House
form part of a World Heritage site
which includes the park's crowning marvel, the Royal Observatory.
My Bradshaw's Guide says,
"The Royal Observatory occupies the most elevated spot in Greenwich Park."
"For the guidance of shipping, the round globe at its summit
drops precisely at 1 pm to give the exact Greenwich time."
Oh, dear, I'm going to need a better watch.
The Greenwich Observatory's time ball
has been helping accurately to set watches and clocks since 1833.
- Hello, Jonathan. - Hello, Michael.
Jonathan Betts is the senior curator of horology.
The famous ball here, what is that for?
What does it do?
It was necessary before you left your home port
to set to local time, and that's what the time ball was for.
It was to enable the ships in the Docklands below
to set their chronometers correctly.
They'd be on the ships with their telescopes looking up
and measuring the exact moment the ball fell.
And at one o'clock every day...
And of course the public regarded it very much as a time service for them.
With the dawn of the railway age
Greenwich assumed additional importance.
Until then time was set locally
so Bristol was 14 minutes behind London time and Plymouth 20 minutes.
That caused havoc for train timetables.
Is it really the case that the railways were the main force
driving towards having standardised time in this country?
Principally it was, yes.
The railways and the electric telegraph went hand in hand.
With the introduction of the railways and the electric telegraph,
it was realised we needed one time for the nation.
If you wanted to catch a train and had your watch set to your local time
and the train timetable was on London time,
you needed to know that or you'd miss your train.
Then eventually Greenwich gets into the business of telegraphing the time
to towns and cities all over Britain.
Yes, electric clocks had been created in the 1840s
and we created here something called an electric master and slave system
in which the master clock sent out electrical time signals
using the electric telegraph along railway lines
to virtually anywhere in the country to provide Greenwich time.
Towns and villages outside London instantly received the Greenwich time
which would be displayed in public places using signal devices.
Jonathan has several Victorian examples.
Your workshop is a busy-Iooking place.
Yep, there's plenty going on here.
I've actually got two time signals out for you to see.
From the 1870s this type of time signal
was being used by subscribers all over the country
to provide a Greenwich time service for their customers.
In front of jeweller's shops like Hancocks, for example, in Bond Street,
you'd find a big group of people standing with their pocket watches
waiting to set the time.
As the moment approached there'd be mounting excitement.
And this one is more like your ball here at Greenwich.
Very much so. This is a miniature version of the time ball.
There were many of these made.
First of all, we have to...
This would happen about five minutes before one o'clock.
The person receiving the time signal
would arrange for the ball to be raised to the top of the mast
in time, of course, for the Greenwich time signal to go through.
And then with everybody standing outside waiting with their watches
at the moment of the signal, the ball would drop.
- And there you have it. - That's magnificent.
- Isn't that fun? - It is. Absolutely wonderful.
I've been thinking about railway time since I started making these journeys.
But it really brought it home to me today.
That really is fascinating. This is how it worked.
Precision timekeeping.
The railways created the need
for standardised time in Britain and in other countries, too.
That gave rise to time zones.
Since 1884 time around the globe has been set by reference to Greenwich.
One last thing to do before I leave Greenwich,
Bradshaw's comments
that large quantities of whitebait are caught in the season.
"Whitebait dinners form the chief attraction to the taverns adjacent
and here Her Majesty's ministers
regale themselves annually on that fish,
the seasons from May to the latter end of July
when Parliament generally closes for the season."
And I can tell you that those dinners aren't just historic.
When I was a minister
I went to one of those whitebait dinners at this very tavern.
- Hi. - How are you?
- There's just one of me. - Yes.
- Can I have a table, please? - Follow me.
- Have you got any whitebait on today? - Of course.
- Your great tradition. - Very traditional.
It's certainly a table with a view. Isn't that fantastic?
I'll have a whitebait dinner, please. Thank you.
Famous statesmen from William Pitt to William Gladstone
enjoyed whitebait suppers, so I follow rather eminent diners.
Thank you. Fresh from the Thames?
Not any more, unfortunately. We get them from the North Sea.
I believe this tavern was associated with Liberal politicians.
I'm slightly out of place here. Well, maybe not in coalition times.
Thank you so much.
- Enjoy. - I will.
As good as ever. Absolutely great. Crisp, beautiful.
I've left Greenwich and made my way to nearby New Cross
and now I'm headed for Rotherhithe on London's newest railway service.
Part of the London Overground, it opened in 2010
although a portion follows the route of a railway
that dates back to Bradshaw's era.
In the 1860s when it was first built, it was known as the East London Railway.
I'm travelling just two miles to my next stop.
The refurbished East London line has wonderful new trains.
They remind me of trains I've seen in places like Hong Kong.
You pass from one car to the next with no doors
and the whole thing is just like one long continuous tube.
I'm pleased to find that my enthusiasm for this new rail service
is matched or exceeded by one of its passengers.
- Hello. - Hello.
- It's terrific, the new service. - Yeah.
- Have you been on it before? - Oh, yeah.
I was the first ever person to go on the new line
from Shoreditch High Street to New Cross Gate
and to Dalston Junction and back to Shoreditch.
- You were the first ever person? - Yeah, on 15th April.
- You wrote in or telephoned? - I emailed in.
- Really? - Yeah.
What's so special about this line?
What's special is the Thames Tunnel
between Wapping and Rotherhithe Stations
built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
We'll be arriving at Rotherhithe soon. That's where the tunnel begins.
That's where I'll get off and have a close look at that tunnel.
- Bye-bye. - Bye-bye.
I'm getting off at Rotherhithe
where the new line follows the original Victorian route
and takes advantage of one of the 19th century's most daring achievements.
So it's London's newest railway service
but it passes through a tunnel familiar to Bradshaw.
"The tunnel from Wapping to Rotherhithe was commenced in 1825
and opened in 1843 by the projector and engineer Sir IK Brunel."
Then he gives all its dimensions
and he says, "It's a double archway brilliantly lighted with gas
and opened each day and night at a toll of one penny for each passenger."
This tunnel wasn't built for a railway, it was built for pedestrians
and I'm going to take a walk through it.
From 1am the line is closed,
and I'm assured it will be safe to walk along it.
I'm meeting Robert Hulse from the Brunel Museum,
a keen admirer of this tunnel.
Hello.
Here we are in the middle of the night.
We hope the trains have stopped when we go into the tunnel.
It's quite a special tunnel.
Yes, it's the first tunnel under a river anywhere in the world.
And it's the first project that Isambard Kingdom Brunel worked on.
So, in a way it's also the origins of underground railways.
Yes, this is an international landmark site
because it's the birthplace of the tube. Not just for London but for everywhere.
This 365-metre tunnel
was originally built as a fast way to transport cargo across the river.
It was engineered by Marc Brunel
and the work was supervised by his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
For the first time they would bore beneath water
at enormous risk and in appalling conditions.
Was machinery used to build this in any way?
No. It's dug by hand.
It's dug by men working in cages
with short-handle spades showered with Thames water.
In 1825 when the Thames was the biggest open sewer in the world,
it just really doesn't bear thinking about
what was showering down on these poor unfortunates
as they toiled under the river.
It took thousands of men, working by oil lamp, to construct the tunnel.
Officially six people were killed building it,
but that doesn't include others who died from cholera and TB.
It was a lethal enterprise.
It began just here.
Imagine this as a cage, 36 tiny cages,
a row of 12 along the top.
- Each one has a man in it? - Each one has a man in it.
The method of building had to be original, never been done before.
This is Marc Brunel's patented method
and modern tunnelling machines are based on this principle.
Men dug out the earth four inches at a time,
then the exposed flanks were quickly lined with bricks
but after 18 years, there was no money to build cargo ramps
so the tunnel was opened to pedestrians instead at the cost of one penny.
In the first 15 weeks there were a million visitors
but that's only a million pennies
and the tunnel was conceived
as a cargo tunnel that would've got tolls from the shipping agencies.
So they have pennies.
They are a huge success as a visitor attraction
but they have no revenue so to speak.
So they built the world's first underwater shopping arcade
to try and make some money.
Each of these little archways was a shop.
There's just room for you and a barrow and a table of souvenirs.
They sold items like this.
They sold Thames Tunnel gin flasks,
Thames Tunnel pin cushions, Thames Tunnel snuff boxes,
Thames Tunnel coffee cups.
If they'd had baseball caps, they'd have sold those.
People came here in their millions
but not everyone had the courage to walk under the river.
Some people walked under the river very, very briskly
and broke into a run at about this point
which is halfway where most people's resolve fails them.
I have some sympathy with that.
Sadly what opened as a shining avenue of light
under the River Thames to Wapping
became by degrees a little less shiny and a little less respectable.
- Oh. Became a bit seedy, did it? - It did.
It became a haunt of thieves, cutpurses
and what the books demurely describe as "women no better than they should be".
In fact there were all kinds of transactions
conducted under the River Thames in these dark spaces.
And so at that point it was ready to become a railway tunnel.
Yes. In 1865, they sold the tunnel to the railway.
The tunnel became part of the growing rail system
and is now the centrepiece of London's newest train service.
I still don't like touching that electric rail, even if it is off.
- Healthy respect. - Yeah.
The next day I'm heading to St Pancras Station
to pick up a very fast train that will carry me to the heart of Kent.
If Bradshaw were still publishing,
he would be lyrical about this service.
This is a very exciting moment for me.
This is the first time I get to ride on a high-speed train
on a domestic British service.
And I bear the scars of this line
because when I was Minister of Transport in the 1980s, we were planning it,
and the people of Kent were up in arms
that they would have noisy high-speed trains passing near their villages.
What I suppose they couldn't imagine then
was that many of them would get travel times to London
that would be a fraction of what they'd experienced before
and at speeds that would have exhilarated George Bradshaw.
Oh, and by the way, I get to ride in the cab, too.
Driver Darren Stevens is going to demonstrate how modern track
allows high-speed travel.
Darren, this is very exciting, isn't it?
Already you can feel the thing really thrusting forward.
You will do when we go into the tunnel.
I'm looking at a very steep gradient.
These trains can really cope with steep gradients.
They can. The route's like a roller coaster. As you'll see.
This dedicated fast line
was built for Eurostar trains to cut the journey time to the Channel Tunnel.
It opened in 2007 and permits speeds up to 186mph.
From 2009 it's also carried high-speed domestic services to Kent.
This has made a dramatic difference to journey times.
It has, yeah. We've had nothing but positive feedback
from a lot of the passengers that use it.
I think it's made a big difference to the journey times.
It's sliced off somewhere up towards an hour.
I spoke to one lady, she was saving over two hours a day travelling.
This new service, transforming commuting,
is reminiscent of the impact that railways had in Bradshaw's day.
Look at your speedometer climb now. It's going crazy.
Shooting up towards 160. Is it going to get to 160?
The acceleration's very good. We're up to 200 now, maximum line speed.
We're allowed to go to 200. Even here in the tunnel?
Yes. We do get up to 225 in the tunnels.
Wow, this is awesome.
This is the newest tunnel under the Thames.
I think Mr Brunel would be impressed and Mr Bradshaw would be exhilarated.
Darren, this is my stop, Chatham.
I've really enjoyed the ride. Thank you.
- Thanks for being here. - Safe journey.
In the 19th century,
Chatham had one of the greatest shipyards in the country,
which, not surprisingly, features strongly in my guidebook.
"The dockyard, to be seen by application at the gate,
was commenced by Queen Elizabeth,
following the wise policy of her father, and is about a mile long."
And I'm going to see what I think
is a really vital part of British naval history.
My "Bradshaw's" goes on to describe
the vast array of facilities at the dockyard.
"It contains six building slips, wet and dry docks,
rope house, 1140 foot long, ore and block machinery by Brunel. "
The list goes on.
At the time of writing, England was still on the defensive against France
in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.
With fear of European invasion ever in the air
and the arrival of new technology,
the dockyard was rapidly expanded from 80 acres to over 600.
I've come down to the dockyard and I'm very impressed by the scale of it.
It is huge. And it reeks of history.
Some beautiful historic buildings.
Such an extensive dockyard in Bradshaw's day
required its own network of tracks.
Hello, Richard.
Richard Holdsworth is the museum and heritage director at Chatham.
I assume it was because the place was so big that it needed a railway.
It had a huge transport system built here.
The railway arrived in the dockyard in 1879
and then for the next 15, 20 years the dockyard was furiously building
standard-gauge railway lines across its entire length
and that process went on until the 20th century.
So you could bring trains off the national system...
Right into the yard where they were carrying the sorts of materials
that were needed to build ships, specialist tools, equipment,
guns, things like that.
The railways were crucial
to keeping Britain at the forefront of naval engineering.
In the late 1800s
trains hauled in the materials required for shipbuilding
and the technology of steam was used to modernise the vessels.
The Victorians had created a vast global empire
and Chatham supplied the latest warships to defend it.
HMS Gannet strikes me as a pretty unusual ship
because it's both sail and steam.
That's right. She's transitional period,
at the heyday of the dockyard of the navy and Victorian times
when Britain's navy is projecting power across the world.
These are the sorts of ships
that were designed to patrol the widest-flung parts of empire.
From about 1892 to 1905 something like 250,000 tons of warship
entered the Medway from these slips behind me.
And they were the cream of the Royal Navy,
the envy of the world
and Chatham was at the core of ship construction and ship repair.
The vast new docks
and the new technologies became a tourist attraction in themselves.
Visitors came to marvel as up to 2,500 craftsmen readied the ships for sea
and produced essential naval equipment like ropes.
It strikes me as rather ironic
that one of the things that survived here is the ropery.
I imagine as you move from sail to steam, you need many fewer ropes.
That's true. From about 1866 onwards, the navy cut down the rope it used
but in the heyday, it had four roperies all of its own
and bought a huge amount in commercially.
When built, the ropery was the longest brick building in Europe.
It's still used for the same purpose as in Bradshaw's time.
Nothing prepares you for that. It's just endless.
It's one of the seven wonders of the world.
This is the oldest rope manufacturer in Britain.
The building is so long because the strands of rope
had to be laid out to their full length before being twisted.
The length of the room is so you can make these enormous stretches of rope.
The length of the room is designed
so that the navy could make rope in 120 fathoms.
That works out today as 220 metres and that, funnily enough,
is the international length of a standard coil of rope.
Today the ropery makes natural-fibre ropes for theatres and zoos
as well as boats, pleasure cruisers and the Ministry of Defence.
This scene I could have seen
at any time in the last couple of hundred years?
It's a process that's going on today in the same way
it has done for a couple of hundred years and it's a commercial venture.
Following my "Bradshaw's" around Britain, it's useful to remember
that the Victorians enjoyed
one of the longest periods of peace in British history,
yet the danger posed by France at the beginning of the 19th century
made them guard fiercely both homeland and empire.
It can sometimes be difficult to grasp the mentality of Bradshaw's era
because they believed in empire,
an idea that's passed from fashion and just as well.
But when I was in Brunel's Thames Tunnel,
I was struck that we're still using and adapting Victorian engineering
and the reason is
that the same qualities that inspired the Victorians to global supremacy
were the ones that led them, those remarkable ancestors, to build to last.
On my next journey I'll be hopping with excitement, Victorian style...
- Do I just yank this, do I? - Yeah, give it a good pull.
...discovering the secrets of paper from one of the country's leading experts...
Would you like to know where this paper was made?
- Don't tell me you can tell that? - I can.
...and learning how the trains transported a very English game
all over the country.
If you look at a map of the expansion
of the rail network around England and Scotland,
cricket follows those lines.