Baking Like It's 1870: The Victorian Hellscape We Don't Talk About

Across Britain, bakers work to feed our passion for bread and cake. But where did this four billion pound a year industry come from? To find out, four professionals are going back in time. They're baking through 63 years which transformed their trade and our diet forever. The age of the Victorians. From the rural bakeries of the 1840s where baking had barely changed for centuries. To the sweat and toil of the urban bakery at the height of the industrial revolution. To luxurious high street retailers at the dawn of the 20th century. Four modern bakers are reporting for duty deep in the industrial heartland of Victorian Britain. They've come to one of the very few places in Britain which still has a 19th century bakehouse in working order. The Black Country Living Museum near Birmingham. It's very different from the rural setting of their previous Victorian bakery. They've moved forward in time and during the three decades that have passed, Britain's population has increased by 20 percent to over 30 million. We've become the world's first urban economy. By the time we get to the 1870s, you've got over two thirds of the population of living in towns and cities and people were flooding to the cities to work in factories and in various emerging industries. And this boom in population of course created a need for food. You're also in an urban environment in an industrial age which means that as bakers you'll be working longer hours for less money. You can see how it's going to go. It's going to be hard. It's going to be very hard but we should show you the bakehouse first. So come this way. By the 1870s, the industrial revolution had already been underway for nearly a century and almost two thirds of our economy was classified as industrialised. This figure had doubled since Victoria began her rule just 33 years earlier. The astonishing rate of progress is a hopeful sign for modern factory owner John Foster. I'm expecting to see a little bit more equipment. That would be nice. Will we get any controls on our oven? It would be rather nice if there was a mixing machine and we didn't have to mix it all by hand. There we have it. It's a bit small. It's a lot smaller than I thought it would be. Now where's the bakery? So although you might think of Victorian Britain as a place of big factories and children up chimneys, baking really hadn't caught up. This is about the same size as the bakehouse you were used to in the 1840s. Half hundred weight of coal outside's, you know, a bit different to usual. But in terms of how baking worked, it's still very much a lot of brute force. So come and have a look inside. I'm sorry there aren't any fancy machines for you John. I'll sing the blues music. This is grubby as anything. I know what this is. That's a big, big ass tray. Wow. Full sack. Yeah. This is where we get to know how strong we all are. Annie and I are on hand to explain how a bakehouse like this would have worked in the 1870s. But we're depending on the baker's expertise to turn historical theory into practice. Bread is still very, very much the staple of life. We know that in Birmingham there were about 340 bakeries and that's... That's a lot. Bakehouses like this, small bakehouses like this, would probably use sacks of around 280 pounds worth of flour. So you're probably working towards between 90 and 100 loaves. On top of those loaves, one of the things they really developed the taste for Victorians was fresh little rolls that you're also going to churn out for first thing in the morning. So that means, without a doubt, you're going to be working through the night. Nothing changes. You're not scaring us. One final point as well. There is a hierarchy within the bakery. That means a foreman. Yeah, I'll tell everybody what to do. Yeah. A second hand, a third hand and then the fourth hand. And they earned about two and a half times less than the foreman. So you're looking at quite a wage differential as well. I'm basically coal shoveler for the night. That's pretty much it, isn't it? That's where you're going to start. Yeah. Baker's shifts usually started at around 11 in the evening. And since we are about on that now... We'll let you get to work. Thank you. Thank you very much. Catch you later. Okay. Since ancient times, baking had been seen as a valued trade. A venerable craft handed down through generations. Tell you what, guys, this is chuffing heavy. But in the new industrial towns, bakers were increasingly treated as little more than unskilled muscle. Right, shall we have... Actually, I'm not allowed to talk. No, we've got to figure out how to do the dough. Yeah. And how to get these ovens lit. The rapid development of Victorian Britain would have been impossible without coal. We mined 200 million tonnes a year of the stuff and the industry employed one in 10 working men. But it's not something you'd ever see in the bakery owned by 21st century artisan Duncan Glendinney. Having to fire up the oven with coal, this is just a nightmare. I mean, being conscious, running my own bakery and conscious of the cleanliness with which we have to tackle bread making, the idea of me turning my hands to some dough with the hands in the state that they're in is a little bit scary. Fifth generation baker John Swift sets to work with the flour, aided by couture cake creator Harpreet Bhora. A typical bakery of this size would get through at least two 20 stone sacks a night. John's great-great aunt Harriet, who founded his family business in 1863, has one at the ready just behind her. A pre-dough is already fermenting. Normally the foreman would have come in earlier in the day to set the sponge by mixing a little flour with yeast. Looks good. This is looking pretty lively. Then water is added along with the rest of the flour and it's time to mix the dough manually. The team found this tiring enough in their rural bakehouse, where they were making much smaller batches for a much smaller oven. Though the amount of staff employed by a typical bakery didn't increase during Victoria's reign, the amount they were expected to produce multiplied fivefold. This is about as difficult as getting the dog off the bed. Ready. They must have been fitter than us. We rely on machines or sizes of dough. We're not used to it. 20 stone of dough by hand. Bakers now are strong. Bakers back then must have been ferociously strong. The dough is so dense and heavy that John Foster decides a different approach is needed. This is the one and only opportunity in my life I am going to get to knead dough with my feet. I am not missing it. But we will be hygienic. There are some horrified Victorian accounts of bakers using their feet to knead, but most use their hands. Someone must have looked at this and gone, hang on a minute. We're mixing 20 stone of dough. It's killing us. It's killing me now, I tell you. You all right, John? Yeah. He's actually really enjoying this. I think he's got something. Something's creaking. Yeah, something's creaking. The bakers might think this is the best approach, but the kneading trough is feeling the strain. So what have we got in here? We've got 20 stone of flour. So we've got like 25 stone now with John in. Are you coming out? Is that it? Yeah, that's it. Even using his feet, John is out of breath and coated in sweat within minutes. Can I ask you a question? If you don't mind answering, how old are you? 53. 53, okay. The average life expectancy for a baker in this period is 42. There you go. See, you're pushing your luck as it is. You'd be wrong, wouldn't you? Denmark walking, Denmark walking. The thing is you're past it at 30. Yeah. How long are you going to have to knead this for? What are we looking at? Hour, maybe? You can rotate, yeah. If not an hour and a half, you've done five minutes and you're knackered. Yeah. So you're starting to get an insight into the working conditions. One of the things you've got here that you just wouldn't have really in most bakeries, urban bakeries at this time, are these things, windows. Okay, and I can feel the draft coming through here. Now, we know from accounts that the large percentage of bakeries were actually underground. They were in cellars. Imagine doing this down in a basement with no ventilation. No wonder they died early. Well, exactly. Though a baker's life had always been physically demanding, before the mid-19th century, when the majority was still based in the countryside, they at least had clean air and a ready supply of fresh local produce. If I could have this life and still make a living, I would choose so. Rural bakeries were also most often family-owned and run. But in the ruthlessly competitive mid-Victorian city, bakeries were more likely to be owned by businessmen or absent landlords, who would cut their costs by renting cheap cellar premises. Individual bakers rarely had the capital to buy their own place in towns, so they increasingly became freelancers for hire, known as journeymen, with little control over their working conditions. Time to get some shut-eye. You two on the floor. I'm on the top of the tub. Here's the first woman I've slept with in 11 years. It was my wife. Accounts of the time describe how the journeyman would grab a little sleep in the small hours while the dough proved. They wouldn't have had time to get home for this, besides, in many places, they were actually locked into their bakehouses by the owners. We all know that the Industrial Revolution led to appalling conditions, but surprisingly, bakers had it worse than nearly any other profession. One Victorian philanthropist argued that only a job in the bleach works was more damaging for your health. The air in Victorian cities was already pretty polluted due to industrialisation, but it was even worse for bakers in their underground bakeries, surrounded by flying flour dust. One study showed that of 111 bakers, 108 were suffering from severe or moderate lung disease. The flour would make the baker wheeze, cause asthma and a dry throat that would often bleed. Skin diseases were common too. A government sanitary commission found that over two-thirds of bakers had health problems. And for the few hours a baker did get away from work, they may well have returned to a slum. These were also the conditions in which many of their customers would have lived. A small room like this could very easily have housed a whole family, sometimes several, along with various lice and bedbugs, rats and mice. Sanitation was very limited, there was no running water, and the bathroom probably just consisted of a couple of pots. The other problem for everyone's health in the Victorian industrial town was what they ate and what they didn't. You might have a little bit of meat in your diet if you could afford it, some dripping, perhaps some bacon, maybe a sausage, but the meat would usually go to the breadwinner, the man of the house, and then perhaps the children, women nearly always lost out. And your cooking facilities would have been very limited as well, so even if you did manage to get hold of something to vary your diet, perhaps some potatoes or even some cabbage, you'd have to work out how to cook it on a very, very small fire, no oven, and really very little health. In this kind of context, it's no surprise that the major source of calories for working people came from the bakery. Bread was still the main part of the working class diet. Certainly your diet depended on exactly how much money you had, but it's still fair to say that along with coal, bread really did fuel the industrial revolution. After considerably less than 40 winks, the bakers get back to work. Come on, guys. I'm unused to that. I actually feel worse having stopped and laid down. The coal has brought the oven to the right temperature and the dough is ready to be weighed out and moulded into the 90 or so loaves which a 20 stone sack of flour would usually make. Oh, it feels nice. It's just four pound lump of dough. The quatern was double the weight of a modern sliced loaf and a working man would get through four of these four pound whoppers a week. Yeah, looking good. The dough is the most basic household variety. The shapes are plain mounds like giant baps. This was no frills, utility bread, basic fuel for hardworking people. Right, first one's going in. Are you ready from this side, guys? Is that what you want? Like virtually all bread in Britain at the time, though, it's white. From the start of the 19th century, that's what even the poorest customers demanded. Each loaf would be sold for eight pence, roughly a third of a typical worker's daily wages at the time. Well done, everybody. It's five in the morning, but the shift is far from over. The main reason bakers now had to work through the night is that urban customers expected fresh morning rolls with their breakfast. These belong to a class of products called fancy breads, not something rural bakers had much call for. Hello. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Now, you've baked what to me looks like a very respectable night's baking, but here you are still baking on making these fancy breads. But this, in many ways, is a bit of a moneymaker for you. What the customer wants... Customer gets. If you think about towns and cities, OK, you've got the people at the top of the pile, and then you've got the working classes. But what you do have emerging within the towns and cities is that middle class. You know, every warehouse, every factory, not only does it have its people working on the ground, but it's also got its clerks, all its admin staff, and all its money people. So you've got this developing middle class, and they've also got money to spend. They've got disposable income. What they want to do is they want to spend that income on the things that they like, and one of those things would be fancy breads. You know, slightly sweeter breads, but they want them first thing in the morning, cooked nice and fresh, of course, as we all do today. These are going to be small. Made with more expensive ingredients like fresh milk and eggs, fancy bread was a little like brioche. Yeah, and I'll peel them over to you, and you just... And as with premium or artisan ranges today, for this slightly more elite line, bakers could get away with charging a bigger markup. By 8am, the first night's bake is finally done. It's just the two slices, yeah? Yeah. Left side and right side. You can have that. Smells lovely. Crusty bit. Oh no, it's really lovely. It doesn't taste anywhere near as coaly as I was expecting. The amount of coal dust is just ridiculous. You can feel that this is worker's bread though, I think. The size of these loaves, just... This is a man's bread, basically. This is what is fuelling the factories of Birmingham at this point. One of the things that the poor used to put on their bread was treacle, which is basically the goo left when you start to refine sugar. At this point in time, if you're a manual worker, you're needing anything between 5,500 to 6,500 calories a day. Your calories have got to come from somewhere. And if you are on the bread line, if you're a journeyman baker, and you really have no idea whether or not you've got work tomorrow, then you go for what's cheap. And what's cheap is sugar-based calories. It's 8.30 in the morning, but the end of baking did not mean the end of the shift. As the most junior bakers, Duncan and John are now expected to deliver to customers. What a whopper. The idea of bakers selling in their own shops still wasn't standard in the 1870s. Last to be loaded are the oven-fresh fancy breads. Don't forget these. Wow. OK. Well, I don't want to eat all our profits, so I'll just have a go at that. Hmm. Smell funny. They are a much higher class of bread. Delicate, white, suited to the middle class palate. Quite like them. Tastes awful. That's eggy and... Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it? Oh, it's delicious. The sweetened bread isn't to the taste of sourdough-loving Duncan, but refined white rolls were exactly what aspirational Victorian customers would have paid a premium for. Good morning. Good morning, madam. They're like an English-Victorian take of a brioche. This is really nice. Oh, thank you very much. That's made the night worthwhile. By law, Victorian bakers were obliged to weigh each loaf in front of the customer. Right, and fingers crossed. Well, there you go. We've been very, very generous last night. If it was underweight, or you were caught not weighing it, you could be fined up to £5, which would be 40 times your weekly wage. Bread would also be delivered to factories, so junior bakers were sometimes still working 18 hours after they'd started. I've got some lovely loaves for you. Yeah. I'll get this one, you can get that one. Let's go. 18 hours in that environment with that soot, lifting those weights, you know, I'd literally take my hat off because, quite frankly, I don't think many people can do that anymore. This tiny glimpse that we've had into their world has just made me realise just how difficult their lives would have been and how hard they would have had to work to put, you know, bread on their own table, let alone feeding the nation like they've done as it was growing. From the mid-19th century onwards, legislation limited the working day to 10 hours for an ever-increasing number of trades, but not baking. In a freelance industry with 14,000 journeymen competing for jobs in London alone, employers had the upper hand. You could hardly blame bakers for spending what little free time they had down the pub. Exhausted by the inordinate amount of work exacted of them, how strong is the temptation during the brief periods which they can snatch from labour and sleep systematically to repair to the alehouse to stir up their languid frames by means of stimulating draughts. No wonder, then, if in the course of time they abandon themselves to dissipated habits. Have you got any dissipated habits? I have many. I have literally, I've got a whole closet full of them. I think we all have. I kind of feel a bit depressed for them because I can go back to my life and even though that's a lot of hours, difficult, it's not this. You know, it's not the drudgery of 18 hours through the night, 20 stone, caked in all sorts of muck. It was dirty. It wasn't about the quality of the product. It was purely about the volume. People at the top are wanting more and more money, more profit, and are pushing us harder and harder. In the mid-1870s, bakers' hands earned between 12 and 20 shillings a week, often less than an average male factory worker, but they worked more hours. Despite this, bakehouse owners were struggling to make a profit as they tried to hold on to business amongst hundreds of competitors. The biggest challenge came from the so-called undersellers, which, much like supermarket chains today, won custom by competing ruthlessly on price. They were sometimes owned directly by milling firms who, by cutting out the middleman, could supply cheaper flour. We move into a time where really, in order to make a profit, you have to start cutting corners. One of the ways in which you can become competitive is to become an underseller. Now, there's all sorts of ways in which you can do that. You can cut costs through labour, cheaper labour, longer hours. You've already kind of experienced that, but there are other ways within which you can do it, and that has to do with adulteration of the flour itself. We're going to turn out around the same number of loaves as yesterday, but we'd like you to use a lot less flour. You're going to be making one full sack of flour, the aim of which is to bulk it out. We'll give you what you're putting into it shortly. And then a half sack of flour, where the aim is to really work on the whiteness of the loaf. Here we go again. Let me get in there, John. Shall I get the water, guys? That sounds good, yeah. Beautiful sponge, and what are we about to add? What a travesty. For much of the Victorian era, there wasn't effective regulation in place to check whether food or drink were being sold in a pure state. So there was little to stop traders adding ingredients, usually with something cheaper. A common act of adulteration was watering down milk. Flour was by far the most expensive outlay for any bakery. A single sack cost five times as much as a junior baker's pay for the week. So using less of it would massively reduce the owner's running costs. Here is your first adulterant. Chalk. Chalk. Lovely. We know from accounts that people were adding about 10%. So what we've done is taken out 10% of the flour. Here's 10% chalk. I can't believe that this went in there. I mean, I'm... It's got this grittiness to it. The texture of it is just ridiculous. My God. It's so dusty. This is not good, guys. This is not good. Welcome to the future. It smells like it's a mortar mix, like you're mixing up like plaster or something. It genuinely does. There's nothing that smells of bread in here. It's got this grittiness about it, which is just awful. There's nothing that's right about this. And the idea that they would have reached this level of trying to eek out, you know, as much as possible from their ingredients is just... It's just crazy. I know it's a test, but I feel ashamed even though it's a test, which is... Which I didn't think I would do. We're doing it not from any moralistic point of view. We're doing it because we're cheating. That's the issue. It's cheating. There's no other word. The trough was slightly damaged by John's feet kneading the night before. So this time, the bakers will stick to using their upper bodies, which they soon appreciate is much, much harder. The whole thing is pretty much sickening, in all fairness. And the physical exertion you've got to put just to get this damn stuff made. I've got an oven to the back of me. And... A baker to the right. It's just ridiculous that even though we're making all this effort, there's absolutely no way you'd want to stick to your own shop. It's just... What a thankless task. It's just nuts. Right, I'm sweating buckets. It's dripping into the trough. Look at this. You'd have to move so I wipe this off. You'd never get it mixed. I think everyone's feeling quite low because you don't mind working hard when you're excited about the end product. But the level of excitement about this chalk bread is just on the floor. I've never needed this quality. Come on! This level of physical exertion would be illegal in a modern bakery. 20 stone. I mean, you're only allowed to lift, by today's standards, 16 kilos, which is like two and a half stone. Here you are, in a trough, next to a furnace. You know... You can't have people doing this. At the moment, not only do I want to throw up because I'm leaning over this, my back's hurting, my legs are hurting. Then might I suggest it is time to stop? Never. Yeah? The reason I came here was to see what my family did. If this is what they did, then who am I not to do it? You want that on your gravestone? No matter how much you mix that, you're not going to pull it together. But are you talking from a health... I mean, love you to bits, but are you talking from a health and safety point of view or just the fact you like us and we don't want to be dead? Not dying is a bit of a bonus, but I still don't think that you're going to pull together to get the type of dough that you're expecting to get. All I want to do is not give up. I don't give up. Eventually, John accepts he needs a break. My shirt is literally... I'm going to have to peel this off later on. If it gets any hotter in here, it's going to be Naked Bakers Central. Many bakers did need topless, another cause for Victorian concern about what was being added to their bread, leading food writer of the period Eliza Acton described how the violent exertions of bakers who were overflowing with perspiration led to torrents of sweat pouring into the bread. She summed up the conditions bakers worked in with a simple word, killing. So she campaigned for what today seems the obvious solution to both the poor hygiene and the human misery. Where are the machines? It's the Industrial Revolution. Where are the machines? It's still nowhere near where I thought we'd be. You've got to work out how you power your machinery. When you consider that most of the bake houses are this kind of size, where are you going to site the machinery? And the capital cost is immense. And then you look at things like this, not just the fact that labour's cheap. Is that steam, electric? Is that, what's that? It's hand-cranked, hand-cranked. So it's still using the labour they've got? You've got to fill the machine by hand. You've got to turn it by hand. You've got to get the dough out by hand. When you've done all of that, you think, well, you know what, actually, what's the point in spending all this money? I might as well just do the whole thing by hand. And when you've got people like... Cheap labour. Yeah, the journeyman bakers... Expendable. It is expendable. It always comes back to that. What's the one thing that they can afford to use, abuse, burn out and turn over? It's people. The other thing is that journeyman bakers themselves resist mechanisation. And their argument is, well, if you bring in a machine, it does away with the jobs for all of us. They're scared. So put scaredness on top of this. You're going to work your arse off, aren't you? Your guts are going to come up doing this because you don't want to be out of a job. What a horrible, horrible situation we're in. Although the average small-scale bakery didn't mechanise, a few large factories found more success at this time. This machine was capable of converting two sacks of flour into 400 two-pound loaves in just 40 minutes. It would take our four bakers all night to do the same and the resultant bread was 20% cheaper. No wonder the company who owned it became a household name to Victorians. Today, they have largely been forgotten but you can just make out traces of the aerated bread company over there in the street signage of Fleet Street. None of their extraordinary machines survive but at the University of Huddersfield, there's a food scientist who can recreate the bread once enjoyed by millions of Victorians but which barely anyone has eaten for a century. And as Professor Grant Campbell explains to me, the ABC machine marked a revolutionary break with millennia of bread making. For thousands of years, we've been getting bubbles into bread using yeast to slowly, slowly produce the carbon dioxide and that makes our dough piece rise. We put it in the oven, we bake it into bread, we've got this nice aerated loaf but the Victorians had discovered what carbon dioxide was and how to produce themselves and how to make carbonated water, soda water with that. Now, here we have some carbonated water. If you then mix that with flour to create a dough, keeping it all under pressure, then you'll get a lot of carbon dioxide dissolved in your dough. When you release the pressure, your dough expands, you can put it straight in the oven and bake it and you haven't had to wait around for the yeast to produce the carbon dioxide. Though Grant's aerating machine clearly isn't steam-powered like the original, it does replicate the process of forcing carbon dioxide into the dough mix under pressure. And even on a small scale, you sense what an appealing alternative it must have seemed to handmade bread. This was sold in part that it was pure and it was hygienic and that you were no longer, when you were eating your bread, eating quite a lot of baker's sweat. I would have bought this new bread for that reason alone. The Victorians were simply very experimental. It was a time of massive social change and industrial change and they wanted to try new and modern things that made business sense as well. There was an element of the science and the engineering allowed this. Oh, wow. That's grown. That's raising. Another reason why Victorians were trying to make bread without yeast was the work of contemporary French scientist Louis Pasteur. For thousands of years, the action of whatever it was that was making bread rise was mysterious and a bit sinister. And then Pasteur comes along and shows it's a living organism and not only that, it's the same sort of stuff as germs which make you sick. Some Victorians began to worry whether yeast itself was another dodgy additive. The growing temperance movement were also suspicious of it because, like booze, yeast relies on fermentation. So why isn't aerated bread still on sale today? Here we go, then. It's bread. It's missing something. And it's... it's cloy-y. I am missing the yeast. Yes. It's not inedible. No. But I don't know whether that's a... that's a go-to bread for me. It's a fantastic taste of Victorian Britain. A taste of scientific... Yes. ...and technology-driven Victorian Britain. But I don't know that it's a taste that would necessarily take off today. Possibly not. But in the 19th century, unadulterated aerated bread was stealing sales from independent bakers, making their lives harder still. How many more? By 3am, the bakers have their chalky dough in the oven. They still have another 50 standard loaves to bake and for those, they're going to experiment with a different additive. Oh, that looks beautifully white. Yeah, lovely. Oh my god, it's horrible. I'd be quite careful with this one if you've got cuts on your hands. This is the adulterant par excellence. This is alum. Alum. Which is potassium aluminium sulfate. It stinks. Doesn't that cause brain damage? Not immediately. Oh, okay. No. This was an adulterant that was in really common use. We know from the examinations of bread done by the Lancet, every single loaf of bread in London had this in it. The point of alum is really threefold. One is it is supposed to be a flour improver. Another is that it's supposed to help you to add more water to the dough and the other is that it whitens flour. The bakers fetch the flour they'll supposedly improve with alum. It feels gritty. It actually is really smelly and precisely as Annie said, I've got a cut on this finger that I managed to do yesterday while scaling off and it's starting to sting a bit. So there's that immediate change that you can tell and we are not happy bakers today. Jeez, it stinks. Stinks. It's very dry. Make sure it's in my... Get all of that water in. Just smell it. There's something just not right about this. When mixed with alum, flour becomes more absorbent. That means the weight of each loaf the bakers sell will come more from water and less from flour, so they save on their most expensive ingredient. You want more water in? We'll have more water. Fantastic. I don't think we need the... Water's free. Thank God for alum. Yeah, yeah, good old alum. Water's free. So from a historic point of view, we're in the money, guys. We're in the money. Many Victorian consumers would never have tasted unadulterated bread and bakers would have become skilful in the artful use of additives. But our 21st century bakers can't draw on the same experience. It's just like foam, like sludge. Victorian accounts are vague about quantities and techniques. The bakers may have added too much alum and misjudged the flour quality. Really, really strange to work with. There's nothing to actually... To do, yeah. Yeah, but this is better, apparently. Something's happened to this, definitely, because there's just no stretch to it. It's not bread as we know it. But Victorian customers judged bread not on stretch but on appearance. By the end of the shift, the bakers have successfully turned out 150 decent-looking white loaves. How much repeat business they'd have got is harder to say. So, this is what I've been most interested to see, is what it tastes like. Here we are. You start off, Duncan. I'm the guinea pig, am I? Go for it. If you choke, we will all run. Now, this is the one that's got the chalk in, isn't it? Yeah. Oh. Have you just hit the chalk? Oh, it's gritty. There's a grittiness about it. Oh. What do you think? It tastes like bread, but there's a... That would grind your teeth down. It would bring a new definition to the meaning of a sandwich, wouldn't it? The thing is, it's whiter, so... It's whiter, definitely. What you have achieved is something that is marketable. Yeah. In terms of how it appears. It's time, I think. Still a bit of warmth in this one. This makes me sound like a diva, but I don't even want to try it. I'm not even going to try it. And it's not really the health thing, it's just... I mean, this has been really upsetting, having to make this, and it's kind of more what it represents to me. You're not going to try it? I'm going on strike. Okay, well, I know John will try it. Yeah. John, verdict? Barley bread. Really? Just like barley bread. Barley bread with fizz. Is it fizz? Yeah. There's fizz in that? Fizz. What? That? It's actually disgusting. Oh, well, it hits you. It's sort of borderline rancid, and then you get that fizz. Can you compare it to anything that you've ever... No, I can't compare that to anything I would put in my mouth and enjoy eating in any way, shape, or form. That's disgusting. There is an extra twist to this. Now, millers are renowned for adulterating the flour before you even get it. So I don't know how much you picked up on it, because I know you were so appalled by the fact you were using alum, but there's a substantial portion of sour flour in here, properly off rancid flour. So some of that sour note is due to the fact that we, or rather our miller, had adulterated the flour before we'd even got here, which means the baker really can't win. Well, that explains it. So by the time that that loaf gets to the customer, if we've adulterated it and the miller's adulterated it, what are they going to get? It's basically nothing. Alum was used to improve flour, but this bake was impossible to salvage. Today, it's just been a kind of a travesty to my trade, my craft, and sort of everything I stand for is sort of a modern artisan baker. We've actually been looking at this real dark side of the baking industry in Victorian era, and that's something I've never come across before, and that's been really interesting. To be this tired, having done nothing valuable, is just heartbreaking. John Swift's family bakery was started in this period, exactly the time when adulteration would have been rife. I reflected and thought, you know, have my family at some point use these methods, the chalk and stuff, and there may have been a chance that we actually didn't do it, but there is a massive chance that we did. I mean, they were living in times where, you know, if they didn't eat, they died. If they lost their job, they were at the workhouse. So, you know, when push comes to shove, who knows? They may have. Good evening. Got something else to add here to your trolley. You're very, very lucky because Britain has access to enormous supplies of cheap grain coming in from the United States. It would be mailed in ports like Liverpool, Manchester, and then brought down to places like this on the barge, but of course also on the railway lines as well. So you've got good, cheap, unadulterated, pure flour to work with. And the other thing you've got is sugar. Sugar comes down enormously in price during Victoria's reign, and of course consumption of it goes up in direct relation to the price of it. So we know that sugar consumption pretty much doubles from the beginning of Victoria's reign till in the 1880s, we're consuming around 80 pounds per head per person per year. So tonight, not only are we going to be baking loaves, we're also going to diversify, and that's where the sugar comes in. We're going to be baking that great 19th century classic, buns. Let's make our way to the bakehouse. This is edible. British baking was turning a corner at last. Now that's finer. Look how white that is. I'm really excited to work with this actually. I'm pretty sure this hasn't been contaminated. As soon as the bakers start working with the flour, they notice the difference. Do you feel like there's a buzz in the bakery, eh? Yeah, I mean we're definitely all upbeat now, because we've got something decent to work with, and I don't feel like we're going to make something that's going to kill children. God, this looks so much better. This is so good from where we've been. This is, yeah. It's literally, it's so familiar as well, the way it feels. I'm even considering catching my sweat so it doesn't go into it, because I'm thinking I don't want to ruin the dough. North American flour is naturally high in gluten, making it perfect for bread, and it's still widely used in British baking. I would really, really like to be able to buy the lovely spelt that is grown and milled literally 10 miles down the road from me, but the reality is that there has to be some compromises. I'm a big believer in local, but only when it works for my business. So we buy local when it's better? Yeah. By the end of Victoria's reign, 90% of British flour was imported, and our wheat industry came close to collapse. We're doing this, we're killing ourselves. But it's for a purpose. Day in a row. Yeah. But at least it feels like we're making something decent again. Yeah. What a difference the dough makes. I didn't hear much laughing yesterday. That's because yesterday we were bloody depressed. Better flour wasn't the only example of technological progress finally improving life for 1880s bakers. I think we can safely say that the Industrial Revolution has finally arrived in the bakehouse, heralded by the advent of tins. And these things, I think, are a progressive step in the sense that you can just get more in the oven with tins. It's a lot cleaner because we're still on the floor. We're still firing with coal. Yeah. We're still getting that dirt. So using these is cutting out the amount of filth on the bottom of the loaf. I can sense the sort of morale is lifting in the bakehouse. Morale could not possibly have been any lower yesterday. This dough is really different. From the moment you cut it out the bowl, you can tell it's got that elasticity where you can really pull it out without it breaking. And you've got that stretchiness. Seam on the bottom, seam on the bottom. Of course. Average wages for working people began to improve in the 1880s. Even a humble factory worker could afford the occasional bun, which is good news for cake baker Harpreet. Doesn't it feel good to be working with sugar again? OK, that's about right. And then we want a pint of milk. For centuries, bakehouses only sold bread. But as the price of sugar fell, bakers increasingly diversified. Buns weren't too big a leap from standard bread dough. Still reliant on yeast for their texture. Wow, that is awesome. Isn't that fun? Just leave me here, guys. I'm in heaven. So this really is a sweet treat. This is when you come into your own then, Harpreet? So now to the sponge, we're adding this fantastic peel, which is the best thing I've smelt in days. Other than Duncan, of course. Oh, that smells nice. This is for the bath buns? Yeah. Well, they're known as London buns. They have their origins in the Great Exhibition, which was a sort of generation before, really, 1851. This huge exhibition set up by Prince Albert to kind of showcase British industrialism. So you can imagine this Great Exhibition, six million visitors, all of them needed feeding. And there was lots of food stalls put on. Schweppes, they were one of the contractors providing food for people there. I've got an appendix here which lists all of the foodstuffs that were sold. Soda water, lemonade and ginger beer, over a million bottles. But most importantly for our purposes, bath buns. Okay, so this bun that had come from the West Country, from your homeland, Duncan, 934,691 bath buns. That's... That is insane. I mean, that's nearly a million buns. The bath buns sold at the exhibition were reputedly cheaper and sweeter than the traditional West Country variety. And so, according to some, the London bun was born. It's turned into a bakery. This is the nice bit. We've got certain jobs being done in certain places. It's like, you know, in the environment we're in, it isn't exactly a modern bakery, but the actual system's in place and the ingredients coming in is starting to feel like more of a modern bakery. It's starting to feel like what we're used to. And you can tell that by everyone's faces because they're all smiling. It's just really nice working with a dough that you just know is packed full of delicious stuff. And they must have loved this back in the day. This would have been the height of luxury. Butter, mixed peel. Peel, sugar. Yeah, all these exciting ingredients coming in. It's just great. So I'm kind of feeling excited because I know that they would have been excited by all of this. It smells lovely. Smells like Christmas. Smells lovely now, doesn't it? With new ingredients and improved flour, Pride is returning to the urban bakehouse. There you go. Oh, wow. I cannot wait to tuck into that. That is just the business. That, I mean, you could sell that in a shop in the 21st century. You've got the flour line where you put it on and it's moved. It's jumped. It looks good. Great, let's get the rest out. Are you going on for the racks, yeah? Nice colour on them. Let's pop these on. They smell amazing. Job done. London buns. They do look pretty good. For the first time since arriving at the urban bakehouse, the bakers are excited to taste what they have produced. That's lovely. Best we've had. I'm actually really impressed that we made this in this kitchen. Right, who's up for trying these buns? Really delicate, really lovely. I think it's really helped with the peel and the sugar on top. That's actually really nice. What a difference a day makes. With the last shift in the industrial bakehouse at an end, the bakers are finally getting some fresh air and enjoying time off, 1880s style, with a brass band in the park. Alex and I have also dressed in the fashion of the time to join the bakers in a new commemorative ritual of the period. Photography was becoming cheaper and more widespread towards the end of the 19th century, and bakers were among the tradespeople who lined up to be captured on film. Here we go. My god. Oh, wow. That is literally bonkers. You look like the real deal. That is absolutely bonkers. That looks superb, doesn't it? Yeah, that is fantastic. Captured the moment of a wonderful week's baking, I think. Don't be using words like wonderful. We took you to the brink. Yeah. You literally did. Although the working through the night isn't very nice, in terms of the physicality of life and in terms of the expectations on people and in terms of the fact that if you fail, there is no safety net, I think this is very reflective of the working class experience in late Victorian Britain. I have a massive respect for my family now because they were baking at this point with these conditions, and for my family to have gone through what I went through last night, it's just humbling and quite emotional. Let's face it, they are aware they're going to go back to a world that has a welfare state and a health service, so actually, you know, they've just scratched the surface of what it would have been like. When our hands are not dirty, it's sucked. I actually don't think I could have been a Victorian baker because the level of graft that was required in terms of kneading those doughs, I was just physically not strong enough to do it. So I think I definitely would have got sent to the workhouse. When I look at a bread mixer in future, it will hold a special place in my heart because I know what it's doing. It really is taking that back-breaking, arm-aching, horrible work out of it. I think I'm going to go back to my bakery and hug a few things. The Victorian period, everything was expanding. Everything was growing. And if you could make money somewhere, you would, but there was always a price to pay. And I think it's opened their eyes to that. I've been quite militant with my approach to bread and my not wanting the other types of bread, the commercial stuff, to even really be in existence. But I understand that we've kind of gone through periods in history where it was a genuine need to feed the nation. Bread is what the industrialisation was kind of fuelled on. They didn't want to adulterate that bread, but the reality is if you had family members at home, if you had a wife and children at home and you had to keep your business going, you would have had to. And these are still arguments we're having today. What goes into our food? What price do we need to pay for things? How much is too much? How cheap is too cheap? Physically, I hope it gets easier because I think I'm done.