How We Built Britain
Featuring David Dimbleby
Scaling the roof of magnificent Ely Cathedral and ducking through the Victorian brick-built sewers beneath Manchester are just two of the many memorable moments David Dimbleby experienced on his epic journey around the British Isles.
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The author and presenter of How We Built Britain travelled thousands of miles in his Land Rover and explored 1,000 years of history to discover and celebrate the houses, factories and public buildings that reveal who we are.
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Says David: "When the 大象传媒 suggested the idea to me, I leapt at it. I know there is a great appetite for seeing Britain through its landscapes and this seemed a particularly interesting way of looking at our history.
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"The buildings are not chosen haphazardly because they are beautiful, they're chosen because they tell the story of how Britain鈥檚 changed over decades and centuries. That鈥檚 what really inspired me.鈥
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Researching and filming the project 鈥 as well as writing the book to accompany the series 鈥 started more than a year ago.
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David explains: "I'm not a historian or an architectural critic; I'm a layman in all this, so it's as exciting for me as I hope it will be for the viewer. I read a lot and talked to a lot of people, we had our own research team and an architectural historian on hand to advise us, and everywhere we went people turned up and helped explain the origin of buildings. I kept discovering new and interesting things.
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鈥淚nstead of taking the straight architectural view, what I鈥檝e been trying to do is ask what a building tells us. What does it say about the people who鈥檝e built it and why they built it the way they did? These buildings tell us the story of the big social changes over the last 1,000 years.鈥
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In each programme, David visits a region where the buildings strongly reflect periods of British history, beginning in East Anglia where the Norman conquest of 1066 led to a medieval construction boom.
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His journey takes him through the Tudor country houses of the Midlands, the castles of Scotland, the classically-influenced West Country towns, the Victorian industrial revolution in the north, and ends in London and the south of England, which witnessed a dramatic transformation in the 20th century.
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Says David: "Buildings tell us where the power lies. All the grand buildings that have survived spring from power. First was the power of the king, then the power of the Church. After the dissolution of the monasteries the power spread to a new class of rich entrepreneurs, then to the courtiers under Queen Elizabeth and their great trophy houses, then you get the rising power of a new middle class under the Georgians, building cities like Bath and Dublin.
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"Following that is the power of the industrialists in the Victorian era, and finally in the last century and in our century it is the power of the big corporations and of the State."
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To enable viewers to "get inside" the mix of buildings and bring the structures to life, the films are shot in High Definition, frequently using cameras on helicopters and moving cranes.
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But David also gets involved at grassroots level. He tries his hand at medieval carpentry to build a simple A-frame like the 1,500 that have held up the roof at Cressing Temple in Essex since the 13th century. He samples the ancient arts of pargeting and weaving, and gets put in the stocks in Warwickshire.
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"I think a point made by doing something is twice as good as a point made by talking to someone about what they're doing. Diving into priest holes, eating a medieval banquet, sawing logs as the underdog or going down the sewers of Manchester 鈥 it's a bit of fun."
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David also leaves a personal contribution for future generations high up among the spires of Ely Cathedral.
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"The stonemasons working on the Cathedral invited me to leave a time capsule. They often leave coins behind stones so that in 100 or 200 years, when it鈥檚 being restored again, people find them. It's like discovering old newspaper behind the walls of your house."
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In his box hidden behind the stonework are a pack of cigarettes, a day's TV listings, a shopping bill and a Mars bar.
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"At the Millennium, the Cathedral hid a time capsule which was full of documents of the church so I thought I'd do something different. I thought the cigarettes would be good because people probably won't smoke in the future and perhaps they鈥檒l be travelling to Mars. But the cigarettes will probably disintegrate and the Mars will turn to powder!"
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Exploring the delicate stonework of Ely, Burghley House in Lincolnshire with its 76 chimneys, the fortresses amid the rugged landscapes of Scotland and the grand porticos of Bath gave David a new appreciation of the people who created such stunning contributions to the nation's heritage.
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"Although the architecture is magnificent, I gained a real admiration for the builders. The way in which the master builders adapted materials and learned how to use them is as exciting as the arrival of the great Palladian architects.
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鈥淚 was also fascinated by the constant battle between the two main styles over the 1,000 years. The gothic and the classical are in constant collision and are the two strongest threads on our journey.鈥
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The series takes David back to his family's humble beginnings in Dembleby, Lincolnshire, to Oxford where he studied, to Bristol where he began work and East Anglia where he was a young reporter.
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"I saw places I already knew with a fresh eye but I also went to places I'd never been before, and that was one of the pleasures of it. I'd never been inside Manchester town hall with all its strange gothic architecture and I鈥檇 never seen the Blackhouses in the Outer Hebrides or Craigevar in Aberdeenshire.
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"When you're filming it's hard work and you have to keep moving, but often emotionally and physically I had to be dragged away. The producer was saying, 'come on David, we have to hurry', and I was saying, 'just let me see round this corner'."
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David refuses to name his favourite buildings on the journey.
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"I rather disapprove of highlights. I see them all as important. The prefabs in Catford to me are as important a part of the history as Blenheim Palace. They all tell you something, from the humblest of homes to the grandest of palaces. I leave it to people to decide what they enjoy the most.
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"That said, some places have an added aesthetic excitement. You get a thrill from seeing Kings College or Burghley House or the circus at Bath that perhaps the prefabs don鈥檛 quite provide."
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From ultra-modern landmarks such as the "Gherkin" in London and the Scottish Parliament building to new housing estates, How We Built Britain also considers how history continues to influence design today.
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Says David: "People enjoy buildings like the Gherkin and are excited by them, but bring a modern touch to their own home and they don鈥檛 like it much. There were attempts after the War with tower blocks to try to persuade people to live in a different way 鈥 instead of streets on the ground it was streets in the sky. It didn't go down very well but I think one of the reasons is that you like your children to play within sight of you, not 10 storeys down.
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"In the 21st century what we like is flamboyant, new, exciting buildings for our public buildings and big corporate HQs but we still like our houses to look vaguely Georgian. It's partly that we like our past but it鈥檚 also that we are comfortable with a particular notion of a house which is not shared by any other country.
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"We think our houses should have a back garden and a front door. Modernism doesn't do that because it's full of light and space and technical efficiency, which we don't value as highly as shutting our front doors and being private."
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David suspects that future generations may not be able to look back at today's buildings and discover what they reveal about 21st-century society in the same way.
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"If you go down a Victorian sewer, the bricks are beautifully shaped, even though no-one would ever see them, and the builders couldn't do a bad render or bad pointing. We have a different attitude 鈥 we are much more 'here today, gone tomorrow' with our buildings.
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"I don't think the Victorians built their structures intending them to stand for 1,000 years but if you build in brick and stone they are much more likely to last than if you build in materials not known for their longevity, like steel and glass.
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"One of the curiosities that we shall never know the answer to is whether the modern buildings going up now will survive 100 years. They may just come to an end. It may be that ours is the first generation not capable of being read in the future through our buildings."
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