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00:03So what makes us save buildings? Why do we cherish them? It's as if within them there is a sort
00:11of
00:11radiance, something which tells us about the past, explains the present, which illuminates history
00:18for us, which also shines a light into the future darkness. I think great historic buildings and
00:27places don't just tell us where we've come from, they show us where we're going.
01:00Grade one buildings are the architectural A-list. The ones we've fallen so hard for,
01:08you're barely allowed to lay a finger on them. And whether they're 30 or 300 years old,
01:14they still know how to put on a show. Oh yes, look at that. It's still delivering that sense of
01:21awe
01:22and special delight and magic. In Britain, each nation has its own heritage body responsible
01:29for assessing historic buildings. In Scotland, they can list buildings directly, while in England
01:35and Wales, they have to put them forward to government for final approval. Whatever the
01:40process, the work is vital. If we don't let them do their job, then the country just sort of becomes
01:47a retail park with aspirations. I'm traveling the lengths and breadth of Britain to visit the
01:54extraordinary places we've chosen to save and find out the stories behind them. One architect said,
02:01no, no, no, leave the ruin exactly as it is. Don't touch it. Half of Coventry thought he was mad.
02:11This time, I'm looking at structures that redefine what heritage looks like. Modern buildings that
02:17were innovative, that we protect because they did something radical, really well.
02:34In 1960, the Catholic Church held a design competition for a new cathedral. They said,
02:41we don't want a long nave, we don't want Gothic arches, anything like that. We want something
02:45to stun the world. Seven years later, they had this. This is Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral,
02:58known locally as Paddy's Wickwam. It's a concrete tent on a hilltop, ringed by flying buttresses
03:05and crowned by a lantern tower of coloured glass. It is the largest Catholic church in Britain.
03:17Brilliant thing that no photograph can prepare you for here is that the space is vast. It is a basilica.
03:29It is on that scale. Big, circular, single space, surrounded by this great, dark canopy of concrete
03:39above it, and all of it lifted by the stained glass.
03:49I mean, look at that.
03:54It was designed by the architect, town planner and landscape designer, Frederick Gibbard,
03:59who won a competition held by the Vatican to build a cathedral. It was built in 1967. And as far
04:06as
04:06churches went, his design was pretty out there.
04:10Obviously, the last time someone had tried to build a circular cathedral in Britain was Sir Christopher Wren
04:14with his first scheme for St Paul's. And that got roundly defeated for being too Pope-ish.
04:20Not a problem for this one. No, true. The circular form is actually not that widespread. It had been
04:28experimented a bit in Germany in the 30s, but it had never really taken off. To suddenly build the
04:34biggest Catholic church in the country in this form that was by no means familiar for the church
04:40was quite a shock. Of the 298 entries to the competition, the vast majority were a traditional
04:47cruciform shape with a very long nave. I think there were only about 20 centrally planned circular
04:52ones. And virtually all of them were shortlisted. Interesting. That's a very Catholic idea,
04:59that idea of the accessibility and the democracy. And there's no hierarchy when it comes to the
05:06congregation. It's a very English cathedral, despite its shape, which of course is very
05:10un-English in terms of the traditional long nave. The space is voluminous. This is not just a church.
05:17You sense something bigger and something more powerful at work.
05:23But Gibbard's real triumph wasn't just the shape, it was what he put inside it. Over a thousand square
05:30metres of hand cast glass. Sick chunks of coloured glass set into concrete and resin,
05:36called dalle de verre, designed by John Piper and Patrick Wrenchens.
05:45It's often described as stained glass, but it's not. It's a completely different technique. It's cast
05:51glass. It's about two centimetres thick. You can't make figurative patterns very easily with it,
05:57but it brings itself brilliantly to abstraction. Medieval stained glass produces a set of very
06:03delicate effects. This is actually a series of experiences almost. The quality of the light
06:12is subtle and changing. So within the red, there is orange and there are patches of darker calming.
06:19It's a really unusual colour. I can't quite understand how they've achieved that.
06:23The space doesn't reveal itself through time, but the building reveals itself through the glass.
06:29And that is actually probably one of the most memorable bits that people carry away with them
06:35from here. Whichever time of day you come in, it feels different. So it's not just the space that
06:40changes, it changes with time as well. In what, half an hour that great bar of red light has moved
06:45to a large, four or five metres. It's rather spectacularly effective. Each time you come you
06:53just get a slightly different experience with it, even though it's a singular space.
07:00But this cathedral wasn't the original plan. Underneath lies something much older and much
07:07more ambitious. The remains of a cathedral designed by Edwin Lutyens. He was commissioned in 1930 to
07:16design Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral. Had it been built, it would have been the second largest
07:21church in the world after St. Peter's in Rome, but with a bigger dome. Construction started in 1933,
07:29but the costs escalated from 250 million in today's money to 1.7 billion. So it all had to be
07:37abandoned.
07:38All that remains today is Lutyens' basement crypt.
07:48The spaces in this crypt seem to add up to a space larger than that of the cathedral above.
07:56And the original intention by Lutyens was to build a much, much bigger building above this.
08:05Thank God he didn't. Thank God he wasn't allowed to progress with his completely overblown ridiculous
08:14plans, which would have made a building that would have overshadowed the entire city and probably
08:18bankrupted the church. Thank God. Are you listening?
08:29The scheme was left unfinished, but in one small chapel there are hints of what the completed cathedral
08:35might have looked like. Oh, this is it. This is the chapel of the resurrection. It's the only bit of
08:45Lutyens'
08:45Lutyens' huge overblown complex that makes up the crypt. The only bit which is finished in this case with beautiful
08:54travertine limestone. Ah, and that sound is the sound of six tons of stone moving. One giant piece of travertine,
09:05stone which rolls down into this opening, reproducing the stone which was supposedly rolled in front of Christ's tomb.
09:16It's quite astonishing, this great big thing.
09:21Quite eerie in the sounds that it makes.
09:30Um, hello? Hello?
09:41Above the crypt, sitting on the interred remains of one man's ambition, Gibbard's cathedral has prevailed for
09:49nearly 60 years and one man has watched over it for a third of them.
09:55Just 20 years, um, which is a long term of service in, in cathedral life really.
10:02I was a youngster in Liverpool when the, the cathedral was being built.
10:07At college we were invited to one of the opening ceremonies here.
10:10So yeah, it goes back a long way. Um, but I'm too old for, uh, another role anyway. So, uh,
10:17I leave here to retire. You've engineered that.
10:26I find the most moving time is when everyone's gone home of an evening. The light in here,
10:31as the sun's going down, is very different. I find it really peaceful.
10:37One of the windows that looks quite ordinary throughout the day, glows golden in the evening.
10:45And it's just beautiful.
10:50There are buildings you admire and there are those you just feel. This is one of them. The coloured light
10:58moves through it all day long, like some kind of spirit, shifting and changing. And Gibbard gave
11:05Liverpool another unique experience no other city has. A cathedral built in the round, where every
11:11seat faces the altar and the congregation worships as one.
11:1927 years ago, I made a film about Liverpool Cathedral. Not this one, the other one over there,
11:25the Anglican Cathedral, which was built in the early 20th century. The two cathedrals,
11:30Catholic and Anglican, are separated rather poetically by Hope Street, which runs along a
11:36ridge between the two. And the two edifices dominate the city centre and the docks down below.
11:44There was no sense of competition really between the two because they are so, so different. And I
11:48think that's, that's a really important point stylistically. But that building was listed and
11:56historic. This one had to sort of earn its stripes. And it only achieved its grade one listed status,
12:03finally in 2025. This building has become an important part of the collective memory of Liverpool.
12:12It's come to be very much loved.
12:29Some of the most controversial modern architectural experiments of our time now carry the highest
12:35protection we can give a building in this country. Lloyds of London is one of the most extraordinary.
12:41When it opened, people called it an oil rig and a coffee percolator.
12:47No one sat on the fence. No one sat on the fence. It was either absolute hostility,
12:51or this is a work of genius. It was designed by Richard Rogers and Partners and contains the oldest
12:58continuously active insurance market in the world. It's a forum for individual underwriters and
13:05syndicates to come together to assess and share risk. The building was completed in 1986.
13:11You know, it's actually the youngest grade one listing. You know, it has the same protection
13:16status as the Tower of London. What got it listed was how it addressed a problem that stretches back to
13:23the beginning of the 20th century. The fluctuating need for space.
13:28So they had a building built in 28 and a building built in 58. So the first one lasted 30
13:35years. The
13:36second one was running out of space after 20 years. The proposition was how Lloyds could expand and
13:45contract as necessary without having to replace the building.
13:50The architects devised an inside out idea, maximising the space inside by putting all the services and
13:58toilets on the outside, freeing up more internal space than they needed that could be opened up or
14:04closed off as the business expanded or contracted. So what Lloyds is, and you don't see it from the
14:12street, is basically a rectangle with a hole in the middle. And all the things you see on the outside,
14:17they're usually in the middle of a building. They're on the outside because that allows the
14:22flexibility on the inside.
14:25It looks like a building assembled by robots, but the reality is the opposite.
14:31It was basically built by the cottage industry, artisans, by specialists and everyone did the best
14:40job they could. The fact, for example, that you can see all the electrical conduits
14:45means that the electrician is taking pride in their work.
14:49That costs nothing. This idea that it looks as if it's been made by machines,
14:54was actually handcrafted by people, but to look as if it was being made by machines.
15:01A lot of the duct work made in this factory in Warrington apparently started its life making
15:06bicycles. I remember being in a working men's club in Leeds and someone saying,
15:12we've been looking at some of the duct work on that building in London.
15:16You know, to hear that kind of conversation, it was just extraordinary.
15:21Coffee shops were the places to do business in the 18th century,
15:25and it's where Lloyds of London started life.
15:27It originally operated as a coffee shop and it was where ship owners
15:32would come to ensure their risks and then that evolved over time.
15:37Lloyds still holds on to its origins in the uniforms the staff wear.
15:42It goes all the way back to the coffee shop era when we first started.
15:46And if you were looking at some of the paintings or photographs of Lloyds throughout the years,
15:52this uniform will be there.
15:53Another strong Lloyds link with tradition is the Lutine Belle, salvaged in 1858 from HMS Lutine,
16:01a French frigate that sank off the coast of Holland in 1799 carrying a million pounds in gold and silver.
16:09And for over a century, it was rung on the Lloyds trading floor, once for bad news,
16:14twice for good, to alert underwriters to ships lost or saved at sea.
16:19We still record the losses in the book.
16:22We still use good old-fashioned quill and a combination of black and blue ink,
16:26the same kind of ink that you would find on your birth certificate, mainly because it lasts forever.
16:33If a ship was reported sunk, the head waiter would ring the bell once, safe harbour twice.
16:40When the architect of this building, Richard Rogers, when he passed away, we rang the bell once on his behalf.
16:48It is a building of stark opposites, high textile and glass and 300-year-old tradition,
16:55nowhere better seen than on the 11th floor.
16:58It was designed by Richard Adam. This room has followed Lloyds around.
17:03Boward House was a stately home in Wiltshire. The chairman of the Lloyds at the time went there
17:08and was going to buy some fireplaces and some doors, ended up buying the entire room.
17:13So it was taken down section by section and then moved into the old Lloyds building across the road.
17:19And then when we moved across, Richard Rogers thought,
17:22I'm going to make sure that the 11th floor can take this room and it's actually going to be reinstated.
17:30Rogers designed a building that could change with its occupants for a century.
17:35Then in 2011, the heritage system decided it was too important to risk and listed everything.
17:42The steel, the glass, the cranes and all the pipes.
17:49We were, you know, a little bit worried at the time, but we actually came up with a management agreement.
17:54So a hand rail, you know, we can replace a hand rail, fine, we don't need any consent for that.
17:59But there are features like where the luteen bell is on the rostrum, the Adam room, they're even more special
18:05and protected.
18:09They said, well, it's crazy. It's a flexible building. It's not something that can be frozen in aspic.
18:16But then when we spoke with Historic England, they basically said, this is not about not being able to change.
18:25It's that if people wish to exploit its flexibility, it's done within the spirit of the building.
18:32It is still flexible, but I don't think you'd come in here for a suspended ceiling in this form.
18:39Historic England welcome one important alteration.
18:43Lloyd, like so many financial institutions, was populated mainly by men. Slowly, that's changing.
18:50As a young underwriter, I remember being quite intimidated by the long aisles full of mostly men.
18:56And so it's very, very noisy a lot of the time. I've always quite liked these escalators.
19:02They're very striking because of the exposed mechanisms. You can see everybody on the floor
19:07and see what they're doing and who they're talking to. And as an underwriter, you want to see what your
19:10competitions do.
19:13Over the last 23 years, I've seen so many buildings spring up around Lloyd's.
19:18Much bigger buildings, much taller buildings, but nothing that remotely resembles Lloyd's.
19:25I often think that the architects of those buildings miss the chance to go absolutely crazy.
19:30Even though they're fantastic buildings, they're still just skyscrapers.
19:34Wherever it is, we could be absolutely anything. It could be something from a science fiction movie.
19:38You know, it's that special.
19:42Lloyd's was designed around movement. Every escalator, gallery and walkway serves the rhythm of the trading floor.
19:5050 years earlier in the 1930s, another architect designed a similarly open and fluid building for a different kind of
19:59user.
20:00Penguins know what they like. They like water, they like fish, speed, and they like privacy.
20:07However, one architect had the idea that an enclosure which was modernist and sleek and white and abstract would somehow
20:19provide a template for these animals to modify and improve their behavior.
20:25Turn them into modernist penguins, living a life of order, clean, calm.
20:33Yeah, you can't do it. It's not edible.
20:38This is the penguin pool at London Zoo, designed by Bertolt Lubetkin in the 1930s.
20:45It was somewhere people could see penguins parade and splash into some icy London water,
20:50via two extraordinary helical ramps, which seemed to defy gravity.
20:57This is the coming together of two powerful brains, that of Lubetkin, emigre, architect,
21:06with a passion for science and research, and a love of reinforced concrete, having studied it in Paris.
21:13And another emigre over Arup, who was the guy who started Arup Engineers, the great construction engineer,
21:25who was able to design and make these floating forms.
21:31I think of that spiral as representing those two individuals.
21:34One of them is Lubekin, the other one's Arup.
21:41When it was first opened, 1934?
21:441934, yeah.
21:45What was the reaction?
21:46Oh, amazing. It was something so radical, so different.
21:49Well, no-one had built an exhibit just for penguins.
21:52So it was, you know, something this white, pristine, sort of microcosm of Antarctica.
21:57That's radical.
21:59Yeah, absolutely.
22:00And as I say, it's still iconic today.
22:03People will still come. It's a reference point within London Zoo today.
22:07But the penguins no longer live here.
22:10Lubetkin consulted leading zoologists in his day to understand penguin behaviour.
22:15But by 2004, our understanding of the penguin mind had changed.
22:22This presumably is offering these guys much more than the Lubetkin pool did.
22:29With the Lubetkin pool, it just generally isn't big enough.
22:32Also, it just wasn't deep enough.
22:34So our pool is two metres deep right at the front.
22:36So they can really, really showcase that natural diving behaviour as well.
22:40And also, we have got lots of different nest boxes around as well.
22:43So the penguins have a bit of privacy.
22:45They can choose to be on show or not if they want.
22:47You mentioned they also burrow into the sand.
22:49Yes.
22:49You can't burrow into concrete.
22:50No, you won't get very far.
22:51Yeah.
22:52And then, like 70 years later, the penguins developed this problem with their feet.
22:57What was it called?
22:58It's called bumblefoot.
22:59Bumblefoot.
23:00Yes. Or pododermatitis.
23:02To give it its...
23:03Yeah.
23:05Walking on the hard concrete of the old pool caused micro tears in the birds' feet,
23:09which got infected.
23:10But in the new pool, they exude health and happiness.
23:15It's like watching sharks now. It's a huge feeding frenzy.
23:19Don't worry about the fish on the floor.
23:20OK, I'm not going to worry about the fish on the floor.
23:23I'm just going to worry about the fish on the tube.
23:25And the fish that fall down my sleeve.
23:27Yes, and you might have a little bit of fish juice on your coat later.
23:31Thanks.
23:32This is what I train for, you know, standing in the rain in a bucket.
23:39Highlight of your career.
23:40It's one of them.
23:42Might be the highlight of today, so, you know, don't knock it.
23:46After the penguins left Lubeckin's pool, the zoo did try it for other animals.
23:52As a mark of its adaptability, this structure has not just served the use of penguins.
23:57No, no, they have had porcupines here, and Chinese alligators, and Harry Styles,
24:04who came to make a video, although not with the alligators.
24:08That... that would have been worth watching.
24:13The porcupines ground their teeth on the concrete, eating away at the grade one listed structure.
24:20And the pool was close to the children's playground,
24:23so the Chinese alligators were a bit of a safeguarding issue.
24:26So, now it's empty.
24:30The penguin pool has not been in use since 2010.
24:34There are the historical, there are all the kinds of social and cultural and architectural reasons why the building should
24:39stay.
24:39Yeah.
24:40But is there a zoological reason?
24:42No. So, the science has advanced over the years.
24:45Um, we learn more and more about penguins, we learn more and more about different species,
24:49and therefore over time, it's just become obsolete in terms of being able to fulfil welfare.
24:54So, we've yet to find something where that building will be suitable for zoological reasons.
24:59Yeah.
25:00But that doesn't mean that we can't translate it into something that can be great to be able to communicate
25:04the zoological work that we're doing.
25:06Of all the ideas you've heard, and I'm sure you've heard many, what are the most imaginative, do you think?
25:11Turning it into a sort of very immersive space where we can transport people into
25:16the worlds that animals might come from.
25:18Sound, noise, smell, yeah, that very 360 immersion.
25:24For the architect's daughter, that's an unsatisfying outcome.
25:30Now, you are on record as saying that your father's work here at the zoo,
25:35well, specifically the penguin pool, or to be blown to smithereens.
25:39Yes.
25:40Are you still of that opinion?
25:42Well, I wasn't entirely serious.
25:44What I meant by it was that it was designed for a function.
25:49It wasn't designed just as a beautiful objet.
25:52It was designed as a place, as an enclosure for penguins and for people to admire penguins.
25:58And since it was no longer used for that purpose, maybe it was useless.
26:03You know, that's what I meant.
26:05So, was it a sad day for you when the penguins left?
26:08Of course, terrible.
26:10I mean, the building suddenly lost its raison d'être, didn't it?
26:14It was just an object, a beautiful object, but not populated anymore.
26:19Yeah, that's it, not animated.
26:21Yes, the soul had gone from it.
26:24But there ought to be a creative reuse that can spring the pool alive.
26:28Oh, given the genius and the imagination that went into designing the place,
26:33you would think that we could, between us all, come up with some new and exciting purpose for
26:37this building.
26:38I mean, after all, it is grade one listed.
26:40It's not going to go anywhere.
26:42Me?
26:43I'm looking forward to my invitation to the first ever holographic performance of penguins on parade,
26:50in which no animals will be hurt in the making of that production.
27:02There are few better ways to understand an age than by looking at the buildings that did its work,
27:08not the palaces or the monuments, the places that powered things.
27:13But when the purpose is gone, what do you do with them?
27:17What a beautiful landscape.
27:20It's all wildlife and bird sanctuaries.
27:25Lakes.
27:27In the middle of it all sit these, the remarkable cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Saw near Nottingham,
27:35Britain's last coal-fired power station, shut down in September 2024.
27:40They're not listed. They are scheduled for demolition.
27:44Magnificent.
27:46And this is, this is the dress circle seat.
27:51What a show.
27:56They are incredible figures in the landscape.
28:00Otherworldly, isn't it?
28:01Visiting the remnants of another civilization.
28:05Cooling towers are giant heat vents built to carry waste heat out of a power station
28:10by letting hot water shed its warmth into the air.
28:14The towers are owned by the energy company Univer, who ran the site from 2016.
28:19What do you say to people who feel that actually this industrial heritage should be in some way kept?
28:25I like these structures, but the practicalities of keeping them standing up, you know, the thickness
28:31of these structures, 17 centimetres, and the repairs that we have to do year on year to actually
28:37keep the things just standing.
28:39Yeah.
28:40Um, you know, it's not really practical to keep them for, for, for a long, long time.
28:43I mean, they're kind of like egg crates, these structures. Thin. I mean, how fragile are they?
28:48If you were to scale up the, say, the thickness of an egg to the size of a cooling tower,
28:54the wall thickness on the cooling tower is actually thinner than the shell of an egg.
28:58Wow!
28:59Wow.
29:00I've noticed this tower and that tower, they've got enormous steel posts added to their bases.
29:10Were they in danger of collapsing or what?
29:11Yeah. These two towers had, uh, some extra reinforcing, some double skins to, uh, help brace
29:18the rest of the site.
29:19Right. So they're on the windward side taking the brunt of the weather here.
29:23Yeah.
29:23Yeah.
29:23That's right.
29:24Yeah.
29:25The concern Sean voices is well founded. In 1965, three cooling towers at Ferry Bridge in Yorkshire
29:33collapsed in 85 mile an hour winds. One eyewitness described them as moving like belly dancers before
29:40they fell. They gave way because of a principle known as vortex shedding.
29:48When wind hits a cooling tower, it doesn't always flow smoothly past. It can swirl to one side,
29:55then to the other. Each swirl, each vortex gives the tower a small sideways shove, usually harmless.
30:03But if those shoves become rhythmic, the tower can start to slowly wobble.
30:08Cooling towers are vulnerable because they're tall, hollow and curved. And when several stand together,
30:14they force the vortices of wind around each other, complicating the turbulence and the rhythms.
30:20The danger isn't just strong wind. It's the pulsing rhythmic movements in the wind created by the towers
30:28that they themselves can fatally begin to follow.
30:35Love that door. Never knew a door looked like that on the side of a cooling tower.
30:40Look at that.
30:40Oh. Oh. Oh. That's fantastic.
30:49We're locked in, uh.
30:57The noise is, it's like being in a cave, isn't it? You can hear the weather outside.
31:04Yeah.
31:07I see, the shape is like an eye from here, but it's half shut.
31:12Because we're not in the middle, so as you go to the middle, I'm sure it becomes a perfect circle.
31:16Yeah.
31:20A phenomenal place.
31:22It's vast inside.
31:27Is the acoustic different in the middle here?
31:30Yeah. If you just give that board a bang.
31:35How many was that? About seven. Hang on. Once more.
31:42I think I counted 11.
31:45That, that, that's phenomenal. Yeah.
31:49And it's not an echo. It's, it's a, it's a repetition. It's not a kind of gentle.
31:53Reverberation. Yeah.
31:56Fantastic. What a thing.
31:59It speaks.
32:00It does.
32:06When Radcliffe closed, 170 people lost their workplace. Some had been here their entire careers.
32:16So this is my 30th year.
32:1930 years.
32:21Heavens. How do you feel about it sitting silently now?
32:24Oh, it's just so different now from how it used to be.
32:27Even when the units weren't generating, there was always a hum, the transformers were always on.
32:32Yeah.
32:32You know, you'd walk around and there'd always be a noise, but now it's silence.
32:37What was the atmosphere like here?
32:39It was fantastic. It's like a big family.
32:42Yeah.
32:42Everybody worked together. The common goal was to keep the units running.
32:48How does it feel now? It feels as if you're kind of embalming the site, as it were, you know,
32:54preparing it for its long journey.
32:56It does, yeah. It feels as if now we're packaging it all up, boxing it all up, wrapping everything up.
33:02It's quite a final feeling now.
33:05How do you imagine you'll feel there when it's gone?
33:06I don't know. I feel a bit of a shock. I don't want to be here when it's being demolished.
33:13Yeah.
33:14I've put my heart and soul into looking after it and, um, and I really don't want to see it
33:19coming down piece by piece.
33:21I think when you put so much of your life into a place and got so much out of it,
33:26Yeah.
33:26To see it simply taken away from you is brutal.
33:30Yeah, yeah.
33:34It's the energy of the place.
33:36Yeah.
33:36Walking down the turbine when the unit's on load, just feeling that,
33:40near enough, three quarters of a million horsepower in the turbine train as you're walking by.
33:46That's the...
33:47Each one?
33:47Each one.
33:48Good grief.
33:49Yeah, yeah.
33:49The energy of the furnace, you know, the power that these places have, that's the bit that,
33:54that's the bit that I'll miss.
33:56Do you subscribe to the view that machinery in use generates something of a soul for itself?
34:02Yeah, definitely, definitely that. Yeah.
34:04And if you're walking around the boiler and it's swinging, it's kind of like, it's angry.
34:09You can kind of feel that energy. You can walk down the turbine.
34:12Just the rattling and the movement, it gives off that energy.
34:15And you can feel that as you're walking around.
34:16I don't expect to hear an engineer say that.
34:18No, no, 100%.
34:19Yeah.
34:20Wow. Where have those cells gone now?
34:23What's happened to them?
34:23Suddenly, uh, suddenly no longer here, but, uh...
34:26No, they're nearly departed.
34:27The experiences and, as I said, the memories just stay with the people, don't they?
34:30Yeah, yeah.
34:40The towers themselves are really quite beautiful.
34:42But what's extraordinary is the very dynamic and quite violent shapes they make
34:49in the sky, the negative shapes.
34:53So it's almost like drawing mountains.
34:59I've been wondering how to kind of, um, make my peace with these structures before they disappear.
35:05We tend to think of the drive to preserve and keep our heritage as being something that requires a
35:11lot of campaigning energy, a lot of, a lot of anger. And that can be quite negative.
35:17Whereas it's also possible to celebrate and champion our built heritage in lots of different ways.
35:24You can do a sketch. You can write a poem. You can have a picnic.
35:30Maybe on a nice day near something that you love. We can all do our bits.
35:35Because in being positive and celebratory, we add another layer of history.
35:41Another chapter to the story of a place.
35:48The 20th century society has been fighting to save Britain's cooling towers.
35:55Cooling towers are some of the most extraordinary structures ever built in Britain.
36:00They're a tour de force of engineering.
36:02How many did there used to be? 200 and odd?
36:05There were 200 at their peak in the 1960s. There were 240 individual towers across the country.
36:11We're now down to 37 power station cooling towers. And we're losing them at a rate of about six or
36:16eight
36:16a year. So by the end of this decade, they will almost all be gone. All of the power station
36:23cooling
36:24towers are covered by what's known as a certificate of immunity from listing, which essentially means that
36:28for a period of five years, they are prohibited from being given statutory protection. You know,
36:34that gives certainty to building owners, but it also gives a window of time whereby they can be demolished.
36:39How many of the existing 37 cooling towers are covered?
36:43All bar those at Drax power station in Selby.
36:46Oh, which is still functioning. Yeah.
36:47Yeah. What kind of roles could a cooling tower take on?
36:53I think it only limits your imagination. In Germany, there's one that forms the center
36:57of an amusement park with a telescopic ride that pops out the top of the tower.
37:02In South Africa, there's one that's been turned into an extreme sports center.
37:05I mean, in Italy, there's a couple of interesting ones, one that overlooks the Venice Lagoon
37:09with a viewing platform at the top and another in Milan, which is the Pirelli headquarters.
37:15And they've literally constructed an office block around the outside of the cooling tower,
37:18little meeting pods and cubicles within and bridges that connect them.
37:22They exist on borrowed time and it's difficult, you know, to take the long view.
37:25I mean, Anthony Gormley talks about them as the Stonehenge of the carbon age.
37:30If we are going to save them, we have to step in now. Now's the time.
37:33Yeah.
37:34I was having a conversation with a very well-known architect and designer,
37:38and they said, have you considered buying one?
37:41And I sort of laughed it off initially.
37:43But actually, there are a couple that are for sale for little more than you could buy,
37:47you know, a semi-detached house.
37:48Seriously? You could own a cooling tower.
37:50No.
37:50So how about the mother of all crowd funders and we do a whip around and buy some?
37:55Start it. I'll sign up.
38:05Buildings can find new purposes. Industrial buildings can especially be reinterpreted and reimagined.
38:11So why don't we do more of that in the UK, hmm?
38:14No, we prefer to pursue the new.
38:17I think maybe what's lacking is political will.
38:21Maybe political leadership.
38:24And almost certainly in Britain.
38:27A lack of imagination.
38:43After World War II, Britain was rationed, bombed out and exhausted.
38:48There was a need for something to lift the nation, what people often called a tonic for the nation.
38:55So, the nation threw itself a five-month-long party.
38:59The Festival of Britain on London's South Bank.
39:02There were temporary pavilions, a vast dome, a floating tower, and the jewel in the crown,
39:09a concert hall. And unlike most elitist concert venues at the time, this was intended for the people.
39:16There famously isn't a front door in the Royal Festival Hall. The whole point about the architecture
39:21was that it was built with doors on all levels and all sides. And the idea was that it would
39:26be
39:26a welcoming space that anybody could come in and make it feel really inclusive and accessible.
39:35My dad grew up in East London, left school at 14, but was a very talented pianist. And he used
39:41to bring
39:41us here to the piano recitals. And he felt that the Royal Festival Hall was for people like him.
39:45It wasn't a posh place. It was very welcoming. And he loved coming here.
39:51There's a main auditorium with 2,700 seats, a ballroom, six floors of foyers and bars,
39:59a poetry library founded by TS Eliot, roof terraces looking over the Thames.
40:05We have something different on almost every night. We have six resident orchestras,
40:10contemporary music, we do dance. But here in the public spaces, we program a lot of activity for
40:16families, all of which is free. 40% of everything we do is free. It's a very precious thing to
40:22have
40:22all this public space. So this is our singing lift. This was an installation by the artist Martin Creed.
40:31And if we press to go up to the top level, you will hear what a wonderful thing the singing
40:39lift is.
40:50There we are, top of the scale.
40:53The Royal Festival Hall has six floors and covers a whopping 30,000 square meters inside.
41:00Incredible, then, that it was built in less than three years.
41:03This building was built with remarkable speed. The government gave approval in August 1948,
41:11and the first concert took place in May 1951. There had to be substitutions of materials along the way.
41:18The building ended up being built to a smaller scale than had been originally envisaged,
41:22because there weren't enough materials to build it.
41:25Material rationing was still in essence, and this had to be finished for the opening of the Festival of Britain.
41:31And they were really struggling to get all of the timbers they needed. And at one point,
41:35were apparently given a seizure order to go down to the docks, find shipments of timber,
41:39and say, we're having that, it's coming to the Festival Hall.
41:42There are dozens of different types of stone and timber in this building. And when any of them wears out,
41:48replacing it is always a problem. In Lister buildings, you can generally replace like for like.
41:54The difficulty here is a lot of the materials are now hard to source.
41:59You can see this slight change in colour in timber floor between here and here.
42:03This timber is Burma teak. Burma is now called Myanmar, which gives you a bit of a clue as to
42:08how
42:09difficult it was to source. In the end, we found this from a reclamation yard reclaimed from a yacht.
42:14Then there's the ballroom floor. So this is the claw ballroom, and the floor here is Babinga,
42:20which is a sort of rare tropical African hardwood, and on every endangered list you can think of.
42:25So I'm really hoping that this one doesn't need repairing any time soon, because we've got no idea where to
42:30source this from.
42:32Even the carpet's listed. Designed in 1951 by Robin Day, the pattern's based on a sound wave from an oscilloscope.
42:40There's one factory left in England that can make it.
42:43You've got millions of feet coming across the floors every year. It's all wear and tear,
42:48and all of these materials will eventually wear out. It's wonderful to see people coming here,
42:53but the more people come, the faster everything's going to need replacing.
42:57It's a victim of its own success.
43:00The foyer handrails, they've got a groove in them for your thumb and a groove for your fingers,
43:06and it sort of telegraphs when you're going up, and the groove stops at the landings as if to tell
43:11you,
43:11now you can pause. And then as the flight goes up again, the groove returns,
43:16and just everything about it is showing you how to use the building. And it's so subtle,
43:20that unless you look for it, you'll never notice it.
43:28Listing protects this building, but it doesn't pay to maintain it. There's a 50 million pound repair
43:34backlog, and the roof is leaking. Every penny for repair work comes from what the building earns,
43:40the cafes, the bars, the ticket sales. It's a fight to keep it going.
43:47The loss if we don't maintain a building like this is, where else? There are so few spaces now,
43:53which are safe, which are warm, where people can come together. And I think in increasingly divided
43:58times, it's incredibly important that we preserve it. These spaces contain memories and stories,
44:05incredible events that have happened here. In 1970, Keir Rock Ballet came, the lead ballet dancer. On the
44:15second to last day of the performance, went out shopping in Oxford Street, and managed to escape
44:20her KGB handler and defected to the west. The next day, two visitors on the backstage tour went into one
44:26of the dressing rooms, and in the bin was the last pair of her shoes she used to perform, signed,
44:31wrapped in a newspaper. And they took it, and then they donated it to us on our 50th birthday.
44:36That's not a story you'll find in the listing. It's not in the walls, the roof, or any of the
44:42carefully protected fabric. But it is part of what this building holds, because stories are what allow
44:49old buildings to speak to new generations.
44:56You know that thing where you pick up a book that's 50 years old, or go to an art gallery,
45:02and you look at some paintings, and you don't understand any of them, and you end up not going
45:07back. You end up putting the book back on the shelf, not relating to it, because the story just doesn't
45:12make sense to you. It doesn't communicate. It's the same with buildings. They constantly need to be
45:20reassessed, reinterpreted. The stories they tell, the stories of their building and their generation,
45:25the stories of what's happened in them and to them over the centuries, they need to be retold,
45:31to awaken, to refresh our imaginations. Stories are what spring buildings alive. Stories are what
45:42springs our imaginations alive. And stories help us interpret and reinterpret and carry on telling
45:50other people those stories. And that's why old buildings matter, because their stories are still
45:57unfolding, and it's up to us what happens next. Next time, I'll be visiting structures created by
46:06personal obsession, like a space telescope. There's a whole set of experiences here, which are kind
46:13of otherworldly. I'll get inside the mind of a world-famous historical hoarder. So as he continued
46:20to collect, has run out of space. And there's grade one dinosaur dentistry to be done. Oh no!
46:26Calculation. I've just failed my dental exam.
46:30Let's get started.
46:31Let's get started.
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