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Kevin McCloud's Listed Britain - Season 1 Episode 1
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00:04I'm standing on the tower of All Hallows Staining, a 14th century building that is one of the last
00:11pieces of medieval architecture that survive in the city of London. This building went through
00:17the plague, the great fire of London. It survived the blitz, even the planners. Now somebody wants
00:24to put a skyscraper here, so this structure is currently floating mid-air on stilts while
00:31they dig a basement underneath it. That's the extent to which we will go to save our heritage.
00:39That's what it takes, and that's what this series is all about. The battles, the planning,
00:46the obsession, and occasionally the complete craziness of it all.
00:52Welcome to Listed Britain.
01:04Places are listed because the government have judged that they are of national or international
01:09importance, historically or culturally. Buildings, structures, and sculptures can be listed.
01:16In England and Wales, there are three levels of protection. Grade 2, special.
01:22Grade 2, star. Really special. And Grade 1, exceptional. The best we've got.
01:31Britain has about half a million listed buildings, but only a few thousand of them are Grade 1.
01:39Yes, they're old buildings. They're beautiful. But these are the buildings in front of which somebody once
01:47stood and said, no, leave it alone. And anyone can say, leave it alone, and put a place forward for
01:57listing. In England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland, anywhere in the United Kingdom. In England,
02:04historic England, the government's heritage advisors, assesses the case, then the government makes the final
02:09decision. And once a building is listed, even small changes usually need formal consent.
02:15So listing tells you a place matters. And this series is about the stories that made it matter.
02:30That sounds like the Queen Mary's just arrived docking in Hereford Cathedral.
02:36I'll look at buildings that needed people to fight to save them.
02:41I felt, if I can't pull this off, I will personally have failed.
02:47Buildings that challenged ideas of what heritage could be.
02:51Ah, and that is the sound of six tons of stone moving. One giant piece of travertine.
03:03Hello. And places and things born from sheer personal obsession.
03:10But before all that, there's a more basic question. What makes any building worth saving in the first
03:17place? What makes it worth listing? This time, that's where I'm starting. And for this next building,
03:24it's the combination of engineering ambition and pure spectacle.
03:33I hardly need explain what this is or where it is. It is a symbol of London, an ambassador for
03:41Britain,
03:41universally acknowledged, recognized throughout the world. It's Tower Bridge.
04:08A steel-framed bridge, dressed in Gothic stone, with a roadway that could open to let tall ships through.
04:16There were so many that the bridge opened up to 30 times a day. These days, it's usually twice.
04:24It was listed in 1949. It's wonderful to watch from the street. It's spectacular to see from above.
04:34Ah, there are two walkways.
04:38Right from the start, the bridge was designed to allow pedestrians doing bridge lifts to come up here
04:46and go across. So the bridge would lift up and then your pedestrians could then mount the towers
04:51and walk over the top. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
04:58These aerial walkways were built as a shortcut, a way to keep London moving when the bridge lifted.
05:04Today, they do a different job, not moving commuters, but drawing visitors up from the street
05:10and into the bridge with an experience that is pure theatre.
05:16It's a transparent piece of glass. Yep. That's extraordinary.
05:23How high are we here? Hi. We're high enough for it to hurt if you went through that.
05:30But installing this over 42 meters up in a grade one listed structure was not easy.
05:37It was quite an undertaking, Derby, because obviously you have to get all the permissions from English
05:43Heritage. One of the requirements was that this work is reversible. So anything we do,
05:51it can be put back and returned to its original state. All the parts of the building are listed,
05:58and that affects the work we can do on its fabric. Yeah.
06:0520,000 vehicles a day cross this bridge. Sam is one of only six people allowed to operate it,
06:12and today he's letting me have a go.
06:16This is the control room? Yes. This is like Thunderbirds.
06:20Today we're just going to be doing a maintenance lift, so... Okay.
06:23I'll talk you through it as we go through. I think you'll be able to pick it up pretty quickly.
06:27I'm very excited by this. Are you nervous?
06:28Well, I'm nervous. I'm nervous principally because I do not want any kind of reputation
06:32for holding up London's traffic. So we're going to start off with the first announcement,
06:37so if you want to say staff announcement, staff announcement.
06:40Staff announcement, staff announcement. The bridge control system is about to be switched on.
06:48Please stand clear of the moving structure, machinery and controls.
06:54Okay, now press this button. Press that button. All the hydraulic pumps are going to be starting
06:59to run up systematically, so we'll do pump by pump. What else is pumping hard? It's my heart.
07:05Right. Now, let's stop the road traffic. So hit that button.
07:08That's the best button. It is. It's a fun one.
07:15That turns the lights to red. If only we could all have a button like that in our lights.
07:19My God, Sam, it is exciting. Do you get a thrill doing this or is it just a process for
07:23you?
07:24At the start, it was really exciting, but now it's just sort of another day-to-day thing.
07:28Oh, man. It's pretty novel for me. I'm very stoked by this now.
07:32Okay, so we're ready to open the bridge.
07:35Grab the lever, pull it back ever so slightly into that crew position.
07:40Unlock the bridge.
07:43And we'll see the bridge starting to crack.
07:45Oh, my God.
07:45Now pull it all the way back. All the way back, all the way back.
07:51We don't move when it gets going.
07:56This is one of the most exciting things I've done in my life.
08:02131-year-old, grade one, listed steel moving through the air.
08:17The gateway into London. It really is.
08:25Catch your breath.
08:26Yeah.
08:29Stand clear. Pedestrian gates.
08:31Opening gates.
08:34Look at them. They're all happy.
08:40The lifeblood of London continues to flow. The artery is unblocked.
08:50Next door to the modern control room is the original control room with signal box levers,
08:56pressure gauges, brass dials.
08:59You can pull the levers. You're not going to accidentally open the bridge.
09:02Oh, that's good.
09:02Oh, and it's all notched, so it's like a brake.
09:07And then you let that off.
09:08And then you broke it, lift it up.
09:12There we go.
09:13I'm mended it.
09:14Bunch of dials, each one in pounds per square inch.
09:18It's more steam railway equipment, really.
09:22How do you actually operate the bridge?
09:23Well, how would you do that here?
09:24Once all the levers are open and everything's unlocked, the bridge is unlocked,
09:27you'd turn these two pedestals and you'd sort of wind it up.
09:32They're from a ship's bridge.
09:34That says east, that says west, it says rise, fall.
09:37That's brilliant.
09:39The extraordinary thing, of course, is because it's so well built, it's all still here.
09:43Yeah.
09:45So, man the pumps and hoist the mainsail.
09:49Then head below deck where this bridge stops pretending to be a ship and starts showing off.
09:55What a place.
09:57I was not prepared for this.
09:59That is an enormous steel weight sitting on top of water.
10:04Yeah.
10:05So that weighs a hundred tons.
10:06It's just full of sort of scrap iron, scrap lead.
10:10Cripes.
10:15The bridge is effectively a seesaw.
10:19Powered by 1894, Victorian ingenuity at its best.
10:25The huge steel weight was part of a pressurised water system.
10:29When the bridge needed to open, valves released the weight and another one on the other side of the bridge,
10:35which forced water through the pipes to machinery that turned the cogs that lifted the roads.
10:41When the bridge closed, steam pumps forced water back under the weight, pushing them up again,
10:47recharging the system, ready for the next lift.
10:50Today, electric motors do the work, prosaically.
10:54This technology is now being used in wind turbine farms.
10:57It's been used to store energy as effectively as a kinetic battery.
11:00You can put all that huge amounts of power very gently, slowly into a system, into a battery,
11:07and then suddenly release it.
11:08You're clever people, the Victorians.
11:11Below each tower, below the river itself, is a vast hidden chamber.
11:18When the bridge opens, the short end of each chunk of road, loaded with 400 tons of counterweight,
11:27swings down into here.
11:28This is what it looks like from below.
11:53It's vast.
11:54I've seen photographs of this.
11:57It's ten times bigger than I thought it would be.
12:03Amazing.
12:04Just amazing.
12:05So everything that's painted white moves.
12:07Everything that's painted blue is stationary.
12:09I've been down here for bridge lifts, and it's silent.
12:13If you had your back to do it, it would knock you over.
12:17It is like a cathedral to engineering, this place, and it moves.
12:23It still moves.
12:24It moves me.
12:27Any architect or engineer coming here would be inspired to somehow mimic.
12:32I mean, you see these shapes in cathedrals, in brutalist buildings, and you understand where they came from.
12:41The sound down here is wild.
12:44The curved walls bounce and reflect any noise.
12:48It's operatic, though.
12:50Yeah, it is.
12:50It's like an auditorium.
12:52What this face leaked with this amazing reverberation is a modernist piece of music,
12:57which would comprise a series of noises made specially for this, for this place, like,
13:10Somewhere an inspector from historic England just felt a shiver.
13:17Even now people stop on the riverbank and stare.
13:22Tourists, commuters, Londoners who've seen it a thousand times.
13:27It still makes you look up.
13:30It would have cost over 150 million pounds in today's money to build this extraordinary spectacle.
13:37Just imagine seeing it just after it had been built.
13:42It's 1894.
13:45You have a small business in Dulwich,
13:48and today is the grand opening of this extraordinary new bridge you've heard about.
13:53You get into your dray with your spouse and your two kids.
13:56You get here and you look up just in time to see a bridge perform an extraordinary magic trick.
14:04Thousands of tons of steel are just moving silently through the air.
14:09You run up with your children to the bridge.
14:12You climb the towers.
14:12You run across the walkway just in time to see beneath you a four-masted sailing ship
14:20pass underneath your feet.
14:23It's the first time you've seen the city from the sky.
14:26It's the first time you've been that high.
14:28It's the first time you've ever seen a boat as if you were a bird.
14:32I mean, it must have seemed as if you were witnessing the eighth wonder of the world.
14:39I mean, the eighth wonder of the world.
14:42It's still a contender.
14:55Out of the hundreds of thousands of listed buildings in Britain,
15:00only about 10,000 are grade one listed.
15:04They are monuments not just to beauty but to ambition, ingenuity and hard graft.
15:12These places matter, you know.
15:14They matter because that's our history.
15:16The whole bit of our own past and the work of our forefathers.
15:22One such place stands in Bristol.
15:27In the 18th century, this was the second wealthiest city in Britain.
15:32A booming port where trade made huge fortunes.
15:37Some of that money helped create what would become one of the most important
15:41theatres in the country.
15:43And more than 250 years later, it is still there.
15:50Bristol Old Vic Theatre was built in 1766.
15:55It is the oldest continuously working theatre in the English-speaking world.
16:01And it's grade one listed.
16:04And it is glorious.
16:08At its heart is a Georgian horseshoe auditorium, intimate and elegant,
16:13and still doing exactly what it was built to do more than 260 years ago.
16:19Pulling audiences and performers closer together in the same tight, charged space.
16:27But wrapped around it now is something newer.
16:30A foyer of Douglas fir, glass and light.
16:35A piece of 21st century architecture carefully stitched onto an 18th century theatre.
16:42That's quite a poetic mix and match of ancient and modern.
16:46That's a lovely idea.
16:48The architect, Roger Watts, stripped away a 1970s concrete extension that had
16:54walled the theatre off from the street and exposed this.
17:03The original wall from 1766.
17:09A patchwork of blocked doorways, chimney breasts and repairs.
17:15260 years of change written in brick.
17:22I really admire the fact that not only have you kind of been very pure about exposing, conserving,
17:29not tidying up that old elevation too much.
17:33No.
17:33You know, making entry points, creating clear, readable circulation, all of that.
17:39In fact, all of these openings were as found.
17:43So we managed to sort of weave staircases to plug into those.
17:47Yeah.
17:48Almost like a sort of advent calendar wall.
17:51Yeah, that's a very nice way of putting it.
17:52And we've got little sort of stop-off spaces as well.
17:55So if you're running out of breath, you can just stop off and sort of people watch.
18:00Historically where you'd have a fag.
18:01Not these days.
18:05Step through the ancient doorway in the 1766 wall and you reach the original Georgian Horseshoe Theatre.
18:17Theatres that were built around the same period lasted on average about 15 years.
18:22Because if you can imagine, it's all lit with chandeliers and the effects are all pyrotechnics.
18:27So theatres tended to catch fire and burn down.
18:30So the fact that this theatre is still here 260 years later is kind of mad.
18:35So a bit of it is just a fluke.
18:38Luckily for us, we have this beautiful preserved gem still here.
18:42A place that's as exciting to watch plays in now as it was then.
18:50This is a really intimate auditorium.
18:53Absolutely.
18:54Everyone can see each other.
18:55The actors very much can see everyone else here in the audience.
18:59Oh yeah.
18:59So it creates such a wonderful intimacy and immediacy.
19:02Do people say they feel transported?
19:05Absolutely.
19:05And I just think the architecture just helps it.
19:08It's these passages.
19:09It's how it envelops you.
19:10It makes you feel like you're aware of everyone that's here.
19:14Yeah.
19:14And this is, of course, this is a working historic building.
19:18It's serving the same purpose and the same function for which it was designed,
19:21which so many historic buildings are not doing.
19:24They've become fossils.
19:25So here you've got this opportunity when the lights go down
19:29to witness something in exactly the same way
19:32and to share it in exactly the same way as somebody would have done 250 years ago.
19:37Absolutely.
19:41But the really exciting bit is getting into the hidden spaces only a select few ever visit.
19:50This attic was a forgotten maze until the theatre was renovated.
19:55It's where the marks of theatre workers past remain.
20:00That is one of the theatre managers being told what to do with their sexuality.
20:08Up here in the roof of the building is where the management would never come.
20:12This is the sort of flotsam and jetsam of architecture where staff bent their frustrations.
20:20Everything up here is listed, including the graffiti
20:24and an extraordinary contraption, the likes of which I've never seen before.
20:30This is our thunder run. It's one of only three thunder runs in Great Britain.
20:34And this is the oldest one by over 120 years.
20:36Hang on. We're sorry. It's a thunder run.
20:38It's a sound effect, effectively. It has the balls going through this channel
20:42and then down back across again. When you're in the theatre downstairs,
20:45you get the sense of rolling thunder above you in the ceiling.
20:49So it's an 18th century sound effect machine.
20:51So I'm familiar only with those steel sheets that used to hang in theatres
20:55where you just hold the handle and rattle the sheets.
20:57Thunder sheets, yes. Yeah.
20:58This, what, you drop a ball in the trough and it goes off.
21:02It uses this whole space we're in like the sandbox of a guitar.
21:06So when you're up here, it sounds a bit like a skittle alley.
21:09Yeah. But when you're downstairs in the theatre,
21:11you get the reverberation across the whole roof space
21:13and the sound of the roof space reverberating,
21:16giving you the thunder sounds it rolls across.
21:18Oh, genius. And if you imagine in 18th century Bristol,
21:21Yeah. The feeling that, sitting in a room,
21:24hearing that going off around you would have been awe-inspiring.
21:27Yeah. I mean, it's the kind of thing we should be putting into modern houses.
21:29It should just be going into architecture as a matter of course anyway, shouldn't it?
21:32Yes. Like, you know, magical, supernatural sound effects.
21:35Yeah. And here just created mechanically.
21:38Yeah. Using, using a ball and a skittle alley.
21:41Yeah. This is the West Country after all, the home of skittles.
21:44David, I was expecting like a cannonball thing.
21:47What we discovered was that one ball makes one tone of noise.
21:51Yeah. The thunder swells.
21:52So we have a range of wooden balls running up to this size.
21:56That's more like it.
21:57Your balls are bigger. Yeah.
21:59The team here have learned to effectively tune the instrument,
22:03and they start off with some smaller balls, then grow to bigger ones, bigger ones,
22:07and then decrease, and then decrease again.
22:09Yeah.
22:09So as the different baffles are pulled, you get the next section of balls roll out,
22:14and you get the thunder peel and sort of roll into a louder noise,
22:18and then decrease down to a thinner noise again.
22:22Let me introduce you to Jim.
22:24Hello.
22:24Jim's our head of stage.
22:25Jim. Hi.
22:26Hello.
22:26Nice to meet you.
22:27Can we have a go?
22:27Yeah, I'll follow you.
22:29So you have how many baffles here?
22:31So four baffles.
22:33Yeah.
22:34Some small balls in there, bigger balls, bigger balls, and small balls at the end.
22:38Okay. And Chloe's going to catch all of these.
22:42They do go down the track at a fair lick.
22:44And there's a risk therefore of flying through the ceiling onto the audience below.
22:48Would you like to sign one of the balls?
22:50Um, not the kind of question you get asked every day.
22:53Yeah, I'd love to.
22:56What an honour and a privilege this is.
23:01This is a grade one listed ball.
23:04Not for skittle use.
23:07Indeed. We'll cherish that.
23:08Here we go.
23:25That sounded like some balls of various sizes rolling down a big wooden chute to me.
23:30But in the auditorium, that's where the magic happens.
23:35It should do.
23:37What storm approaches, it is thunder!
23:43It's not, but in a few minutes it might be when they've remembered to start running the balls.
23:55Oh, it's very good!
24:06It came from over there, and it came from over there, and it seemed to move across the sky above.
24:10It's, this is, this is 18th century surround sound.
24:16The guy who invented the thunder run for the Theatre Royal Drury Lane,
24:21went to a theatre, heard somebody else using his device to create thunder in their theatre,
24:27and stood up and said,
24:28you've stolen my thunder!
24:29The thunder!
24:31The thunder!
24:32True story.
24:34For decades that sound was silent.
24:38The thunder run lay abandoned.
24:40Now it trembles again.
24:46You know, I think most of us, at some point, have been into a secondhand shop and bought a pair
24:51of old boots,
24:51or a lamp, or a bag, and thought, oh, I could revive this.
24:56And you might re-stitch the handle or something, or replace a clasp.
25:00You might polish it up just a little bit, but not too much,
25:04so you can still see all the marks of the wear and tear, all the character of the thing.
25:09And there comes a point in that process where the object sanks you, like an actor stepping into the spotlight.
25:18Suddenly, there's this magical moment where it speaks of its own history, and you get it just right.
25:26And that, that is exactly what they've done here.
25:41When we think of Grade 1 listed buildings, we tend to picture the usual suspects.
25:47Churches, castles, country houses.
25:50But the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking widens that narrow view,
25:55showing a Britain that was more connected and more layered than the heritage cliché suggests.
26:01It was built in 1889 by the Jewish scholar Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner.
26:07He was born in Hungary in 1840, and he was actually of Jewish origin.
26:13And the special thing about Dr Leitner was that he was an amazing linguist.
26:18It was said that he could speak up to 50 languages.
26:22By 15, he was a colonel, interpreting for the British army in the Crimea.
26:28By 21, professor of Arabic at King's College London.
26:32Then he went to India and founded nearly a hundred institutions.
26:36He established the Oriental Institute, and then he built the mosque as a place of worship,
26:42mainly for Indian Muslim students.
26:47His actual vision for the site was not just to build a mosque.
26:50It was to build a mosque, a temple and a church and a synagogue.
26:56He only got as far as the mosque.
26:58He got a local architect named William Isaac Chambers to design it.
27:04There was no purpose-built mosque in Britain for Chambers to visit,
27:08so he borrowed drawings of Mughal buildings from the India office in London
27:12and worked from those to remarkable effect.
27:19The Shah Jahan Mosque is probably one of the most unique mosques,
27:23not just in Great Britain, but in Europe.
27:25You kind of feel like you're on holiday maybe in South Asia.
27:27But it really has an old traditional Indian style.
27:33The mosque was built in the Mughal style.
27:35The Mughal Empire ruled India from 1526 for 300 years.
27:41They built with red sandstone from Rajasthan, white marble from Makrana.
27:47The Shah Jahan Mosque was built with what could be sourced closer to home.
27:52All of the materials used to build the mosque are all from Britain.
27:56Bath and Bargate stone.
27:57We have Yorkshire stone on the outside.
27:59The dome is made from copper and zinc.
28:02The founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, prayed here.
28:07So did the Emperor of Ethiopia.
28:09One of the first public Eid celebrations in Britain was held here in 1922.
28:15For 50 years, this small mosque in Surrey was the centre of Islam in Britain.
28:23It is built by a Jew, designed by Christians and it is used by the Muslims.
28:32I didn't know much about it at all.
28:34It was really only when we moved to this area that I realised what a special place it was
28:40and how it was the birthplace of British Islam.
28:43Something that I was quite astonished by.
28:45Here, Grade One Listing celebrates a first, Britain's first purpose-built mosque.
28:56On Fleet Street, it celebrates something else.
28:59Survival.
29:00A church destroyed and rebuilt seven times.
29:05This little area here is called Scent Brides.
29:08And in it, there's a type of a building which has stood on the same site for as long as
29:15anybody can remember,
29:16which is about 1,500 years.
29:21And that building is a church.
29:33The church you see today was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed in 1675,
29:40just nine years after the Great Fire destroyed its medieval predecessor.
29:45For nearly three centuries, Wren's interior survived.
29:49Then, on the night of December 29th, 1940, German incendiary bombs gutted the building.
29:56The walls held.
29:57The famous tiered spire held.
30:00But everything inside was destroyed.
30:02What we see now is a 1950s rebuild, faithful to Wren's drawings, but entirely new.
30:09A church remade from the ashes for the second time.
30:17It's 1950s, but it feels quite Wren.
30:20It's very much, sort of, very much of the 1670s, 1680s, right?
30:25There are aspects that are certainly more true to the spirit of Wren,
30:29because I think the Victorians did a lot of things with the interior.
30:32Not all of them helpful.
30:34They sometimes call this church the Phoenix of Fleet Street,
30:37because it's been completely destroyed at least twice.
30:41Great Fire of London, it was burnt to a crisp.
30:44But also in 1940, when we were firebombed.
30:47And it always rises from the ashes.
30:50And sometimes when I'm south of the river and I look across
30:53and I see the little spire of St. Bride's dwarfed by some of the modern buildings.
30:58But I think, actually, that's a symbol of hope.
31:05A symbol, also, of resilience.
31:08One that has endured for 2,000 years.
31:11Step down into the crypt and you walk through the proof.
31:14The walls of every church that stood here before this one.
31:19Until you reach the oldest thing in the building.
31:22You can see the Roman pavement there from AD 180.
31:27So you can see it's a tessellated pavement.
31:29Yeah, I find it just.
31:30And I find it extraordinary that I sit here in the morning.
31:33With a view.
31:34And I can see a bit of 2nd century London from where I sit.
31:38You really do feel the prayers of the centuries here.
31:41You really do.
31:42And you reflect on what these walls have seen and lived through.
31:47Among those baptised and married at St. Bride's was Polly Nichols.
31:53The first canonical victim of Jack the Ripper.
31:59She was born about 100 yards away from where we're now standing.
32:03She was married here on the 16th of January, 1864.
32:08She married a printer and her story was such a tragic one.
32:11She was the mother of five children, but her life fell apart.
32:15She ends up destitute and on the 30th of August, 1888, she was in a Doss house in Whitechapel.
32:24She didn't have the fourpence she needed for a bed for the night.
32:27And that's why she was out on the streets the night she was killed.
32:31And we feel such a duty of care to Polly Nichols.
32:34She was one of ours.
32:35Somebody said to me, we ought to have a memorial plaque to Polly Nichols.
32:39And it's up there.
32:41And very importantly, it says, remember her life, not its end.
32:46Nothing makes sense until you know the stories of a place.
32:55But this church was a place of rest for parishioners long before Polly Nichols.
33:01In the basement, a medieval charnel house holds bones that were carefully moved here centuries ago,
33:08when London's crowded churchyards needed room for new burials, some date to the 14th century.
33:17It doesn't matter how meaningful your life is, or how rich you are, or how grandiloquent your funeral is.
33:36Ultimately, this is how we all end up.
33:43St. Brides has always been a place that embraces all, rich and poor, famous and forgotten.
33:50But it also has a very particular association.
33:54In the 15th century, Caxton's apprentice, Winkin de Word, set up a printing press in the churchyard.
34:01Other printers followed.
34:03Fleet Street became the engine room of British journalism.
34:07And St. Brides became its parish church, known the world over as the Journalists' Church.
34:15It's a very moving spot, this.
34:17You know, I walk in here and it's actually very touching.
34:21I mean, there are familiar faces.
34:22There are friends of mine whose pictures are here on the altar.
34:26But it just is a very powerful reminder of how journalists put themselves literally in the line of fire,
34:32in order to bring truth to us all, hopefully,
34:34and to tell the story of what's going on in the world.
34:37And it's getting more and more dangerous out there.
34:39You know, we only have to look at how many pictures there are here.
34:42The few I've met, the thing I often find is there's a sort of strange duality about them.
34:49They're very affected by their work, very, very powerfully affected.
34:53But they can't stop.
34:55Yeah, yes.
34:55They keep going back.
34:57Yes.
34:57Call it what you will.
34:58It is commitment.
34:59It's huge bravery.
35:00It's almost a compulsion, isn't it?
35:02But thank God there are people out there who are prepared to do it.
35:04It's terribly important that there are still those stories being told and brought back
35:09from the dark corners of the world.
35:10You know, that is what the press is trying to do at his best,
35:15is, you know, holding authority to account, isn't it?
35:19Well, I'd like to think that it really is in the bricks and mortar,
35:22in the stones and the bones of this place.
35:24You know, the people who are buried here, remembered here,
35:27they stand for something really important that we have to cling on to.
35:34You know, amidst all the layers of history in this place, all the work that goes on here,
35:39the stories associated with it, there's one quality which shines through and that is
35:45its resilience.
35:46It's the fact that people turned up every day during the history of this place for centuries
35:51to fight for its survival, to rebuild it through the great fire of London, the plague, the blitz,
35:57The purpose of this, the work didn't stop.
36:00The purpose of this, the work didn't stop and core to that work is a questioning,
36:07a powerful desire to confront those in authority, hold them to account,
36:15to be questioning, to fight for freedom and for truth.
36:24The gilded cherubs and the pretty carvings,
36:29that's not why this place is listed.
36:30It's listed because of its resilience, the energy here,
36:36what it represents.
36:38That's why we save places like this.
36:54Grade one listing isn't just for the buildings whose stories are clear.
36:59Sometimes it protects the places that still refuse to give up their secrets,
37:04places that remind us history is not neat or settled,
37:08but full of gaps and puzzles.
37:12Beneath the streets of Margate, hidden below an ordinary terrace,
37:16is a winding underground passage,
37:19leading to a chamber lined with four and a half million shells.
37:28No-one knows for certain who made it, when or why.
37:34Some people say that it's really quite ancient.
37:37Some people subscribe it to the Romans.
37:39Some people say it was later, maybe medieval.
37:43Some say it's even later than that, 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, folly.
37:50The grotto is unique in Britain.
37:53It is an extraordinary feat of artistic engineering.
38:01Grottos like this were often built by aristocrats in the 17th and 18th centuries
38:07on their estates to show off to their friends.
38:10Not this one, though.
38:12It doesn't match any of the stylistic choices that are made in grottos elsewhere in the UK.
38:18It doesn't use any exotic shell.
38:21It's purely humble British shells, which wasn't a way to show your wealth.
38:27The patterns are intriguing, too.
38:30They feel like they hold a deeper meaning than the whimsical expression of a wealthy landowner.
38:37This one, I think, really looks like a corn.
38:40You have the long stalk, the leaves, and then the head of the corn at the top.
38:46So some people interpret some of the mosaic to depict human genitalia.
38:53So there are a few phalluses believed to be in the grotto, notably up here.
38:59There is a vagina on the other side as well.
39:02These are Grade 1 listed shell genitalia, the most protected genitalia in the country.
39:10The cave was discovered in the 1830s completely by accident.
39:15The grotto resided within the grounds of the school in 1835.
39:19The daughter of the headmaster, who would have been about 12 years old,
39:24when she uncovered the grotto, her and her brother removed some chalk bricks.
39:29They crawled through.
39:31She describes beautifully how they had these lanterns around their neck
39:34and they scrambled and the chalk got onto their dresses.
39:37The shell grotto is quiet, hidden and anonymous.
39:43But the buildings we give Grade 1 status to aren't all serene masterpieces.
39:54Some places are protected because they are quite the opposite.
40:02They provoke, they divide opinion.
40:07They cause trouble.
40:09Places like Cosmic House in West London.
40:14The design of this house is very intense and some people will love it, some people will hate it.
40:19When you visit, you can't help responding to it.
40:23Cosmic House is Britain's first Grade 1 listed postmodern home.
40:27Inside, it's a riot of colour, shapes and strangeness.
40:31Modernism stripped back buildings to their essentials.
40:35Postmodernism said, why can't they be fun?
40:40Postmodernism is something like a pizza with all the toppings on it.
40:45A library made of bookcases that look like little houses.
40:51And fake door handles.
40:54The ideas behind this house stem from my parents, Charles and Maggie.
40:59They really believe that postmodernism could be a new way of designing architecture that approached a wider public and could
41:08be more accessible to people.
41:10And it is.
41:11Because the ideas in this house aren't architectural in-jokes.
41:16They refer to stuff we all get.
41:18The ground floor represents the seasons which you can walk through.
41:26There's a spiral staircase at the centre, leading upwards seemingly to the sun.
41:32Climb its 52 steps and you're walking through the year, a step a week, each marked with its own symbol.
41:40The house is basically a calendar you can live in.
41:45And then there are the quirks.
41:47I think my parents were really fun.
41:50Some of the jokes are kind of silly.
41:52In the spring room, of course, there are spring lights.
41:55Never miss the opportunity for a bad pun.
42:01There's colour and strange shapes everywhere.
42:08Yet there's one room that's different.
42:11Maggie and Charles worked on the design together of the house.
42:13But I think my mum was slightly less enamoured by symbolism everywhere.
42:18So this is her study.
42:20She said, symbolism stops at my door.
42:26Even in a house this relentless, someone drew a line.
42:30Maggie knew when to stop.
42:34Maggie Keswick Jenks also believed that buildings had a real effect on people.
42:40They could lift their spirits.
42:42She died of cancer in 1995.
42:46And her greatest legacy?
42:48Maybe the architect designed Maggie's cancer centres.
42:51When Maggie was diagnosed with cancer, she found herself in a very grey hospital room where she had no space
43:04to reflect.
43:06Maggie and Charles started to design the idea for the Maggie's centres from the conviction that architecture itself can be
43:20a healing environment.
43:21I do believe that in many ways the roots for the Maggie's centres came from this very house.
43:30The same ideas that filled these rooms with colour and meaning and bad puns, the idea that a building should
43:38make you feel something, now comfort people facing the worst news of their lives.
43:46When the house was grade one listed, my father wasn't very well.
43:50All he said to us really was don't make it a mausoleum.
43:54Make sure it's not preserved in aspic.
43:57It needs to stay alive.
43:59And the foundation now really does that.
44:06Charles Jenks died in 2019.
44:09The Cosmic House opened to the public in 2021.
44:17And everything he poured into it is still in the walls.
44:28So what makes us save buildings?
44:32Why do we cherish them?
44:34I think it's all to do with the energy that goes into making a good building in the first place,
44:38a good place.
44:39And that comes with the craftsmanship and the care and the passion, the dedication to do something really well.
44:45And of course buildings radiate that energy long after they've been finished through the decades and the centuries.
44:52It's as if within them there is a sort of radiance, something which tells us about the past, explains the
45:02present, which illuminates history for us, but which also shines a light into the future darkness.
45:11I think great historic buildings and places don't just tell us where we've come from, they show us where we're
45:19going.
45:23Next time on Listed Britain, I'll be visiting structures that power built, including the country's finest urinals.
45:32Even the gent's toilets offer delight and craftsmanship at every turn.
45:38I'll see historical figures brought back to life.
45:41We've reimagined Eleanor using AI technology.
45:45And visit buildings that are epic, grand beyond belief and occasionally ridiculous.
45:51Lord Bute was a bit concerned that too many punchy monkeys were looking down on his wife while she slept.
46:13And Dylannan Trejo and David M.
46:14Lord Bute is a good teacher.
46:15And a great teacher.
46:15Let's take a look at them.
46:15Let's talk to life and have them before the next show.
46:15Only a day and have them before they go.
46:15Reforms for you and a lot of people.
46:16I'll see myself and somebody else.
46:16For some of those people and a lot of people and a lot of people, we don't see them now.
46:18It's an important part of this show, but for some of the time they have to be in this show.
46:19It's an excellent point of their business.
46:20It's an important part of their relationship and the rest will always be.
46:24And I'll be interested in this show that I have on the sports show and it's a great experience for
46:26you in general.
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