4. Story of England: Industrial Revolution
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2023
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Modern England as we know it started in the industrial heart of Ironbridge in Shropshire- now a verdant gorge that once was black with smog, fire and slag heaps. Dan tries his hand at casting iron at one of the last working foundries in the country and gets the scoop on the scandals of Georgian high society with historian Catherine Curzon. The Regency period was a wild time of £15,000 pineapples, the marriage market and the tell-all memoir of a famous courtesan who named and shamed the Duke of Wellington. But the new wealth England experienced came at a price; Dan traces the dark history of Europe’s addiction to sugar and Britain’s slave trade, while actor Paterson Joseph recounts the powerful words of Black Georgians who spoke truth to Britain’s imperial power and fought for its abolition.
Dan goes back to the Victorian times at the Blists Hill Living Museum in Telford to discover just how gruelling work at the coalface of the industrial revolution was and how great ideas...and not so great ideas... changed the daily lives of Victorians with the help of Collections Curator Kate Cadman.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges. Edited and sound designed by Dougal Patmore and artwork by Teet Ottin.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm in a foundry now and it's all going off. We're just waiting for the iron to heat up to around |
| 0:08.5 | 1,450 degrees centigrade. There's a huge furnace in front of me. I can just see through one |
| 0:14.8 | little hole that observation hole is just white hot in there. I've loaded charges. That's like |
| 0:21.1 | basket through ingredients, all bits of iron, limestone which has the effect of oh here we go, |
| 0:25.8 | here comes the iron, here comes the iron. It's like a bright orange molten river of fire, |
| 0:36.9 | like a little waterfall. It's white hot, it's kind of orange, I don't think I've ever seen before. |
| 0:42.9 | It's already cooling down so the two guys are picking up this bucket and they're walking |
| 0:48.4 | along a line of moulds and pouring this liquid iron into the moulds where it will take intricate |
| 0:54.9 | shapes that have been carved out in these sand moulds. They might be door stops, they might be |
| 0:59.6 | parts for the cars on motorbikes, depending on what they choose to make on the day. Quick pour, |
| 1:04.8 | three seconds, fill up the mould and then they start cooling and within five or six minutes |
| 1:10.4 | I'd probably still be very hot, molten hot but they'll take in the shape and you'll be able to take |
| 1:14.4 | the sand moulds away. I'm in a place called Ironbridge, a name that gives you the clue that |
| 1:26.6 | this is the very heart, it's the birthplace of England's industrial revolution and it's |
| 1:31.6 | dominated by a massive bridge made of iron, the world's first. The transition from human power |
| 1:40.4 | to machines in Britain while it changed the world. Suddenly we had the ability to create |
| 1:46.6 | almost unlimited energy and that transformed transport, transformed trade, warfare, migration, |
| 1:54.2 | our food and we now know the environment. The modern world started in this beautiful |
| 2:02.3 | gorge in tropshire. We sped through the Stone Age, the Romans, the bloody battles of the medieval period. |
| 2:12.0 | We're in Kennellworth Castle yesterday for the golden age of Elizabethan England and now we're |
| 2:18.0 | whizzing forward. If the Georgian Victorian era is when modern England, as we recognise it, |
| 2:24.8 | the shops, the streets, the houses, the family structures, it'll be going to take shape. |
... |
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