How Britain Worked

Victorian Seaside Resort

45 min

Guy visits Llandudno to help get this Queen of Victorian resorts up to scratch in time for the summer season. The great British seaside holiday was a largely Victorian invention. Once it had caught on, tiny fishing villages up and down the country were transformed into giant pleasure parks complete with all the latest attractions. Over the course of the winter, Guy gets stuck into essential and dangerous restoration work on the town's magnificent pier, rebuilds a towering original helter-skelter ride and gets up to his elbows in grease servicing the town's funicular tramway. He learns how our appetite for sea-bathing began when word began to spread that it was good for the glands. He finds out how the engineering developments taking place in the great factories also led to a revolution in musical instruments. And he joins a brass band to play his part in a special promenade concert - with mixed results...

Newcomen Beam Engine

45 min

In this edition Guy's project is the first piston engine ever built. The Newcomen Beam Engine was the first practical device to harness the power of steam and kick-started the Industrial Revolution by allowing coal mining to operate on an industrial scale. Newcomen engines were used throughout Britain and Europe, principally to pump water out of mines, thereby allowing coal mining to go deeper and operate on a scale never before envisaged. If Guy and the restoration team at the Black Country museum can restore their Beam Engine to full working order it will be the only working example of this ground-breaking technology in the world. Success would mean witnessing the glorious sight of one the Industrial Revolution's most impressive inventions running again just as it first did 300 Years ago. Guy helps replace the rotting timber structure above the shaft, restore the worn parts and clean the boiler and he makes fire bricks the Victorian way to re-build crumbling brickwork around the engine. Meanwhile he learns about the lives of the men women and children who went down the mines to dig for coal. Joined by his girlfriend Steph, Guy heads deep underground to dig for coal and experience the almost impossible conditions that miners worked in.

Brixham Sailing Trawler

45 min

Guy helps restore the oldest surviving Brixham sailing trawler, the boat that launched the modern fishing industry and transformed the way a nation ate. Guy learns how the trawler's radical design saw off the competition, tries his hand at the precision joinery that made that design possible, tests his own version of an Industrial Revolution life jacket by jumping into the sea, and makes rope using the original machines that wove the ropes for Nelson's HMS Victory. He experiences deep sea trawling - said to be the most dangerous job of the 19th century - for himself, and discovers how Britain acquired its taste for fish and chips.

Birmingham Botanical Gardens

45 min

Birmingham Botanical Gardens may seem an unlikely place to explore the wonders of the Industrial Revolution, but hidden behind its fragrant borders Guy Martin finds a hidden world of hi-tech Victorian engineering, show-off architecture, intrepid plant-hunters scouring the furthest corners of the Empire, and city fathers terrified of the 'degenerate' urban poor. As Guy helps to get the gardens back into shape, he tries to learn one of the Industrial Revolution's most skilful and dangerous jobs: blowing glass for the gardens' enormous greenhouses. He has a go at rebuilding the very first lawnmower - another great British invention. Guy also uses a little-known 19th-century technique to make his own rock to go in the garden's restored rockery and then - if all goes to plan - he'll be given the job of turning on his newly installed fountain at the grand opening ceremony.