Fred Dibnah's Building of Britain - 6. Victorian Splendour (BBC)

A magnificent town hall like this one here at Bolton is a grand example of Victorian civic pride. The success and prosperity that the Industrial Revolution brought to towns like this left us with some magnificent buildings. The Victorians loved to have everything beautifully ornate, very pleasing to the eye. The ornamentation were almost as important as the building itself. The look I've been taking at the construction and engineering skills in the building of Britain has at last brought me to my favourite period and some of my favourite buildings. Definitely the great age of Victorian splendour. I first became interested in buildings when I was about 15 years old. I lived here in this small terraced house and my mother and father wanted me to be an undertaker. I didn't fancy that, so I got on my bicycle and I pedalled off to the Youth Employment Bureau where they fixed me up with a job as a joiner. Work as a joiner got me into some of the splendid mansions that the cotton mill owners and bleachworks owners had built. This actual house was built by a bleachworks owner. The thing is I couldn't help but notice, having come from a house that hadn't got any scutting boards, the quality of the woodwork. All the beautiful scutting boards and marble fireplaces and architraves and panel doors and best of all the fancy plastered ceilings. Made me wonder, how ever did they do it? Of course it's a pub now, so really everybody can enjoy it. The Victorians went to great lengths to make things pleasing to the eye. Whether it were a great civil engineering project or something as small as a window catch. The great detail, much more ornate than what we do these days. On their buildings they did all this ornamentation on a really grand scale. Something I was able to see at close quarters. About 30 years ago when I was in my prime, I got the job of repairing the lantern on top of this town hall behind me. Then I thought, you know, I've reached the pinnacle of my career. Around the top in the bulla strade of the lantern there are 16 stone pillars. And I made a machine and actually turned these stone pillars. And then of course I talked myself into gilding the ball on top and pointing the whole lantern right down to the top of the leg. When it was built in the 19th century it was a time when they had a great respect for the past. And they wanted their buildings to reflect the values of an earlier age. They built new houses of parliament that matched the medieval splendours of Westminster Abbey right next door. And they made country houses look like castles. Eastner Castle in Herefordshire isn't really a proper castle. What it is, is a big comfortable country house designed to look like one. It was built for the first Earl Summers in the first part of the 19th century. And he wanted everybody to know how rich and well established his family were. So he commissioned the architect Robert Smook to design a place that would look as big and impressive as one of the castles that Edward I had built nearly a thousand years earlier. Eastner took six years to build and cost over £85,000. At a time when Britain's aristocracy felt threatened by the recent French Revolution, it sent a very clear message to the ornery people round about. It said, remember who your masters are. The scale of this building is as impressive as any of Edward's castles in Wales. In the first 18 months alone, there were 4,000 tonnes of building stone used, 16,000 tonnes of mortar, 600 tonnes of wood. And this was just in only in the construction of the walls. These walls are built directly onto the granite bedrock, so there was little need for any foundations. But when you look up, it makes you wonder how they got the walls so smooth. And of course, where are the putt boggles for the scaffolding? How could they make the archways so big? How could they vault such a large cavernous space like this without using massive structural timbers? We can find out such a lot about Smook's building techniques and the way he went about doing things. Because of all the records he left behind here at Easter Castle. And this is James, the current owner, who's got all these wonderful plans and things and he's going to tell me a few tales and read me a few letters about it. We're very lucky that we've kept these. It is a very good record, both of drawings and of letters describing the process. And I think one of the first things to notice is there was a huge amount of stone required for the house. They were very keen to quarry it locally. So in the original estimate, which is here, which was for a total bill of £82,000 approximately. It's incredible, isn't it? They said, we don't expect to take the stone more than five miles. But in fact, when they looked locally, the stone was mostly granite around here, but actually they had to look elsewhere. There's a letter here saying, I'm sorry to say, we must abandon all hope of procuring building stone from the ground westward of the house. So then they went to look a bit further. And that's how he came down to the Forest of Dean and the house is built of Forest of Dean sandstone. Very obvious, Mr. Smook kept very tight controls over the finances and his accounting system. The one we've already seen is this costing for the whole building of £82,000. And the interesting thing is at the end, it had cost £85,000, so it would be only £3,000 over budget. But this account is interesting because it shows how he was drawing on craftsmen from around the country. And there's obviously some very busy ones in London from Smith Street. One from Carlisle. And then finally, at the bottom of the list, he's put his own bill in for £1,641, 11 shillings and tuppence. It's quite obvious he used a lot of new techniques for that period. I think Smook was prepared to use modern methods or what were becoming modern methods then. And introduced cast iron into the house. I think it was a shortage of wood at the time that the castle was being built. So although a lot was cut here, they still needed more wood or support material. And what they could find. So Smook used big cast iron beams to support the structure and to enable us to have these large roof spans, which otherwise could only be managed with arches. So Fred, this is the biggest cast iron beam we've got in the house. And you remember seeing a picture on the drawing. It's a cast iron bearer. And this was fitted in 1818, just as the castle was being topped out. And you can imagine in a much older building, there would have been a massive stone vault to support the superstructure. We do at least know who the people were who actually reckon they did the job. Mr Penn and Mr Worth, the joiners. It's amazing there's only two of them. They must have been fantastic men. They'd be the ones who were literate, maybe. There'd be a big army of labourers as well. Over here, you'll see there's something inscribed, which describes one of the things that happened at the time that the beam was actually being fitted. In memory of this day's events, July 13th, 1818, John Worth, George Clark, George Botto, James Currie, all stoped a quarter for being too late by John Penn and J.G. Clark of Works. So they missed out on a bit of money for turning up late. The reason for the great cast iron beam at Easter Castle is to actually hold up the front wall of the tower, you see. Because this wall on this tower is situated roughly halfway along the Great Hall. So instead of building a great big arch like the Normans would have done, they cast these two iron beams. They're held together by big bolts with big square headed nuts. The whole roof's made of iron. There's no wood at all. The only wood involved is the actual ceiling of the Great Hall. When you get up there inside the roof space, you find that they're all units. They're all like pieces, say, eight feet long with dovetails on the end and mortise holes and pin holes and holes for keys to be knocked through. So the length of assembly will be very quick. And, of course, you'll never get dry rot in it and woodworm and all that. It'll be there in a thousand years if you keep going up and giving it a quarter tower every now and again. Mr Smirk made very clever use of cast iron in the building of the castle. Not only for the structural part of it, but the ornamental bits as well. I mean, if you study this staircase here, at first it appears to be made of wood. But these actual posts here are cast iron. And, of course, the way that they would do this is to make, first of all, a wooden pattern and bury that in the sand in a moulding box and then pour in the molten iron. The great beam that we looked at up in the rafters would be made in exactly the same way, but on a much mightier scale. It wasn't the only modern technique that Smirk used. In a letter he mentions that he purchased an hydraulic engine. Now, at this time, 1818, steam engines were being used to power various sorts of machinery, no doubt stone saws and all sorts of things, big wood saws and all of that. Here in my garden I've got a steam engine that would do all the same things that Smirk's men would have needed to build the castle. It meant that great amounts of stone could be cut and made nice and smooth within a fraction of the time it would have taken to do the job by hand. One man could now do what hundreds were needed for in the past and they were able to more or less mass-produce beautiful detail and ornamentation. It's this that I like about the Victorian era. That's why I've got so much of this sort of stuff here in my house. I mean, this wonderful bit here came off the front of a shop somewhere and you couldn't see it, of course, for the paint, the detail. So I boiled it up in caustic and all the paint came off, revealing all this lovely fancy work. It's made of pot, actually, terracotta. And then, like the wonderful age of Victorian gaslighting, the trouble that they went into, there must have been lots of gas leaks from all the various joints and taps. Oh, there, we've got some more terracotta lion's heads off a pub. Even things like sports trophies, you know, were beautifully made. I mean, my grandfather here, the guy with the funny shorts on, he were a runner at the turn of the century and he won lots of wonderful things, you know, lots of French clocks and this specimen here, this palm tree with the cut glass ball on top, one of the nicer items that he won. And it's been handed down over the years in the family and I've ended up with it. When you think about it, when you're having building work done, the plasterers and the tilers and the joiners are as important as the men who actually built the place. Once Eastner Castle had been built, they proceeded with the interior work and it was all pretty lavish. This is the Gothic drawing room, which was redecorated in 1849. And for me, this is the height of Victorian splendour and embellishment. And it's a very fine example of how good they were at decorating places back in them days. The man responsible for the room was the architect and designer, Augustus Welby Pugin. Pugin had a great passion for Gothic architecture of the medieval cathedrals, all those pointed archways and ornate stonework. To him, Gothic architecture wasn't just a passing fancy, he really believed in it with his heart and soul. This is St Giles at Cheadle in Staffordshire, which was designed by Pugin when he was at the height of his career. He got together a team of craftsmen to provide the decorative detail for buildings like this. And I went to see how some of it was done. Pugin's beautiful tile designs were actually manufactured by Herbert Minton. And Chrissie is going to let me have a do at making one in exactly the same way as they did. Hi, Fred. Hi. OK, this is one of the earliest forms of decorative tile manufacture. This is very much a Pugin design. So we start off with the buff colour, the light colours, and they're pressed into the plaster mould, and then the background clay is added. You want to have a go, Fred? Yeah, yeah, go on, Matt. There's the clay. Just use your thumb and push it into all the corners. Hang on, I've not got enough on. That's it. Take your cake of clay and just pat that on the surface and slap it down right in the middle there. And then you need to beat the clay in. Beat a row up the middle. That's consolidated the clay, and the next job is to wire the surplus off. So you take your wire, stretch it out taut. It's quite hard stuff. So we can get rid of that. That's it, that's enough. Pull it out. And that's the back stamp. There it is. Once it's dry, we can release it round the edges. Then we take a liquid version of the clay and pour it into the recesses that are left in the pattern. The final stage in the process is to scrape away the surplus on top of the tile. This is very time-consuming. So as Minton became more successful, they had to find ways of speeding up production, and they started to use tile presses, beginning to semi-automate the process. He even saw many of the printed designs still needed to be finished and glazed by hand. So you can see, Pugin came up with a strange mixture of the old and the new, and he created some magnificent designs. It's said he never stopped working, you know. He did over 2,000 designs for the fixtures and fittings in the houses of Parliament alone. This was the job that made Pugin's name. He got it as a result of the old Palace of Westminster burning down in 1834. The commission to rebuild it had actually gone to someone else. Sir Charles Barry was the main man for the classical style of architecture that was popular at this time, buildings like Bolton Town Hall. But the contract for the job stated that it had to be in the Gothic style, which wasn't really his thing, so he turned to Pugin for help. It was quite acceptable for Pugin to marry a modern building with the ancient Gothic style, and that's exactly what he did with the houses of Parliament. If you look at the two buildings behind me, one were built at the time of Henry VIII and the other were built in the 1830s. Can you spot the difference? No, you can't, and that's the point. Pugin wanted to build something that would match Westminster Abbey next door, so what he and Barry did was to blend what was left of the medieval palace with their design, and they came up with a splendid new palace that would be a fitting home for Britain's government. Work began in 1837, and the Pugin-Barry partnership was dead right for the job. While Pugin looked after the detail of the design, Barry was free to tackle the even more difficult problems of actually to build the palace in the first place. As you can see, it's a building site today, but in 1836 it would have looked pretty similar but for one or two things. The fact that there would have been quite substantial scaffolding, I should imagine, not even fur poles, you know, a big eight-inch square box of timber, and really grand platforms for working on. The other thing, like there wouldn't have been any cement mixers, there would have been maybe a steam-driven mortar mill, and of course winches for drainage for lifting up the stones. The fence they erected to hide the work was made out of wood in those days, not wire mesh, but behind it the workmen would have been doing very much like what they do today. Lane pavings, mixing mortar, flattening the surface with steam rollers, all that sort of thing. It would have been a hive of activity using all the most up-to-date machinery of the day. Even though it looks medieval, there's a lot of quite modern material that's been used in its construction. You know, I mean, in medieval times, you know, everything were wrought iron, you know, it had to be banged with a big hammer in a fire. Here, there's the great use of cast iron everywhere, like all the roof is cast iron plates, and there's a lot of cast iron girders and beams inside. So this building, although it mimics the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the site, you know, when it was being built, would look very similar to them cathedrals, apart from the modern age of the 1830s, like the steam engine. In order to get the foundations for the Houses of Parliament so close to the shoreline of the river, they come up with an ingenious solution of, like, building a cofferdam, that means driving a great row of wooden piles into the bed of the river, and making them safe, and then caulking up the seams, same as they did the decks of ships. And then, of course, they would pump the water out of the banking side, where they were going to do the foundations for the wall of the Houses of Parliament. They, of course, would have had steam-driven pumps, but I'm siphoning it out, or most of it. That's it. Now, the builders now could proceed to put in the foundation. They put a slab of concrete in, ten feet thick, in the bottom, and then started with the mercenary. And once the palace was built, it was left up to Pugin to decorate its interior. This is the interior of the House of Lords. And here, Pugin used all his skills to make a grand statement. He busied himself with every detail of the decoration, from the detailed carvings, to every piece of its 1,100 items of furniture. He even designed the wallpaper. The original designs for Pugin's interiors were done by Kress Brothers. And here at Call & Company's, they've got the actual original Pugin blocks. These blocks were used to print Pugin's patterns onto sheets of wallpaper. You have to line it up with a mark, and press down hard with a foot pedal. There can be as many as seven different printing processes to go through. Another method Pugin and Kress used was to print the pattern onto the wallpaper with glue, and then stick flocking to it to give it a textured look. And they still beat it on today in the same way as it was done in Pugin's time. Pugin died in 1852, but work on his designs for the Houses of Parliament went on. In 1858, the Westminster Clock Tower was completed, the one we call Big Ben after the bell inside it. It stands 316 feet high and 40 feet square, and is constructed of Anston stone from Yorkshire, with a brick core. By 1860, all the work had been completed, at a total cost of just under £2,200,000. Big Ben has 334 steps leading up to the belfry, and a further 59 to the lantern above. When they built this tower, they installed a steam hoist to raise up all the machinery for the clock and the bells, and I suppose all the cast iron work that forms the lantern on top of Big Ben. When the job was finished, they shifted it all out the bottom. In my opinion, they should have left the steam winch, because this staircase is the only way up here, and believe me, it takes it out of here. These are the original clockworks that have been here since 1859. It used to take six men eight hours to wind up the clock with these handles at each end, but of course nowadays it's electrified, which has took a lot of hard graft out of it, but there's still certain bits of it that are androlic, like this one here in the middle. This has got to be done once every two days, you know. The design of the mechanism followed strict requirements from the Astronomer Royal, who wanted to ensure that no matter how hard the wind blows on the hands outside, the rate of timekeeping remained constant. They couldn't control the temperature, though. Over the seasons, the pendulum expands and contracts with the heat, so these old pennies are used to adjust the weight. Each penny makes the clock go faster by two-fifths of a second. In 1976, they had an unbelievable disaster here in this tower, you know. The mechanism on the chiming side of the clock, the brake failed and the weights began to descend inside the tower, and reputedly reached the speed of 200 miles an hour, which had made these wheels go round a hell of a speed, and of course the centrifugal force got so great, the frame blew to pieces and the wheels danced about all over the place. It only took 13 hours to get the actual clock mechanism going again, but it took a further nine months to get the chiming side right. That's what they're going to say next week when I go to the hearing aid clinic. There are four quarter bells which chime the introduction to the great hour bell, Big Ben, but it isn't the original Big Ben. The original one was cast at Stockton-on-Tees, but it shattered under the weight of the hammer when it was first hit, so they had to melt it down at Whitechapel and recast a new one. Two months after this particular bell was installed, two more cracks appeared, and of course here you can see where they chiselled in to find the true depth of the crack. There were no radiography then, you know. Then, to solve the problem, they moved the walled bell round a quarter of a turn and reduced the hammer by almost half its weight. The clock tower is the crowning glory of the Palace of Westminster, and it's one of the greatest and most recognisable national monuments we've seen in the building of Britain. While we've been going about on our travels, we've met a lot of craftsmen of all sorts, you know, wallpapers, plasterers, lead men, everything, you know, stonemasons. It's so nice to know that there are still craftsmen and craftsladies about who can still do this type of work. The big enemy now, really, is time. Everything comes and is erected in a matter of months and not years like it used to be in the olden days. A stonemason working on a cathedral, he got out of bed in the morning and his only great worry would be the sharpness of his chisel and how good his hammer were at his dinner, maybe. And he'd work away all day for possibly just for food and a gallon of bitter or a gallon of brown ale. If you want to do a beautiful building job, it takes time. They spent hundreds of years on some of these places, and what we see today is a wonderful example of Britain's creative genius over the centuries. From the solid stonework of the great medieval castles and cathedrals through the growth of the country house between the 16th and 18th centuries to the elaborate grandeur of Victorian Gothic, all of them are a credit to the people whose vision and craft and sheer hard work have made Britain what it is today.