a picture of Britain 4

The landscape of the British Isles has been an inspiration for our greatest artists, writers and composers. I'm traveling in their footsteps to some of the most beautiful places in these islands. This week, I'm traveling through the heart of England, exploring the green fields of Warwickshire, Shakespeare country, Traveling through the Cotswolds with their rolling hills and peaceful vill. Then the Malvern Hills, rising up spectacularly from the Worcestershire plain, Glimpsing the River 7, winding its way to the sea. And in the north, Derbyshire, with its moors and woodlands, a wild expanse of natural beauty. But that's only half the story. Most pictures of Britain celebrate the beauty of our natural landscape, of mountains and valleys, of rivers and lakes and meadows and woodland. But some of our greatest artists and writers have been inspired by a different kind of Britain, by the drama of industry, of factories and mines. And they've helped us to find excitement and beauty in the most unlikely places. So no picture of Britain would be complete without that other skyline which devoured our countryside even as it dragged us into the modern world. Manchester, once the first city of the Industrial Revolution, a place of darkness, child labor, poverty and disease. But now its hundreds of smoking chimneys have been erased from the landscape. Cotton mills have been converted into canalside apartments. The grime of industry has been swept away. Manchester has become the pleasure dome of the north. This is the heart of the city's nightlife, pubs, clubs, restaurants, a lively, sometimes rather dissolute scene. But it's light years away from what it was 20 or 30 years ago, when these streets were dark and dank, the buildings grimy, a place that filled people with a sense of gloom. Except for one man who found in. This This city the inspiration that made him. One One of Britain's most popular painters. Lawrence Stephen Lowry. L.S. lowry painted a picture of a world that's gone forever and one we're glad to see the back of the dirt, the poverty, people scurrying through a desolate landscape. But because it's gone, Lowry's paintings are all the more precious. A window on a vanished world. Lowry was unique in being fascinated by. Something Something which most artists for the last. 300 300 years had turned their back on. The industrial sprawl that had taken over great sways of the countryside. Where other people saw something ugly, he saw something beautiful. And he was able to persuade people. To share his vision. That That was what was so special about him. That was why he became one of the most popular painters of the 20th century. I'm heading out to Pendlebury, seven miles north of the center of Manchester. In 1909, Lowrie, age 22, moved here with his parents. At first he detested the place. He was confronted by cotton mills, red brick terraces and chimneys belching smoke, a landscape blackened by industry. But he came to love what he had hated and he painted it obsessively. By day, he tramped the streets as a rent collector. But in the evenings, Lowry lived out his other life a secret to the people who only knew him from his daily rounds. He'd set up a studio in the attic of his parents home at 117 Station Road. He didn't paint views of any particular place. He had favourite buildings, like the many mills in Pendlebury, and he rearranged them their recurring dreams. Lowry's pictures are oddly childlike, with their famous matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs. Straightforward, simple and yet strangely haunting. His painting didn't go down too well here in Pendlebury. People thought the pictures were pointless, ridiculous. The local councillors even complained they were an insult to the people of Lancashire. And his own mother, who he was very close to, thought they were downright ugly. So much so that throughout her lifetime, she never went upstairs to the attic where he painted. And it wasn't until her death in 1939 that Lowry actually brought the pictures downstairs. He used to say he was painting landscapes that nobody wanted. Eventually, people began to see that he had something important and original to say that he was painting a quite different picture of Britain. But Lara's idea of beauty isn't everyone's. Manchester people have always had an escape route into the hills of the Peak District. They're called the green lungs of Manchester. Driving through the suburbs, I'm heading out of the city, through the urban sprawl of Lancashire, into the beauty of Derbyshire, only 18 miles away, with its craggy hills and wooded dales. This is just the kind of landscape that inspired the adventurous painters of the 18th century to pick up their brushes and travel in search of magnificent views. These days, There are over 20 million visitors to the Peak District every year. I'm a rambler I'm a rambler from Manchester way I get all me pleasure the heart moorland way I may be a way slave on Monday but I am a free man on Sunday. That's a fine day to be out walking. Is it? You don't call this lovely. It's like this a lot. What is it that brings you out? Is Is it the physical effort that you. Really Really like or is it seeing the views? It's a bit of old for me. I'm an Accountant by trade. So I'm stuck behind a desk Monday to Friday, 9 till 5. So it's the exercise, the fresh air, the countryside and walking with like minded people. How is the landscape changing over the time? You've obviously been walking a bit longer. Than, Than, well, 60 years at least. 60 years since I was evacuated during the war and I found the part of Lancashire that hadn't been devastated by the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. What did the Victorians do then that was. Well, they were obsessed with money making and they turned some of the loveliest countryside in England into the most hideous towns and cities in Europe, and we're still dealing with that today. This sense that cities are a constant threat to the countryside has haunted imagination since the spread of the Industrial Revolution. Painters came to Derbyshire seeking a wilderness. But even up here, the landscape isn't completely unspoilt. Walking through this narrow gorge, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in some majestic natural phenomenon. But you'd be quite wrong. What I'm in here is a seam of lead which has been mined over the last 500 years, discovered at the top, glistening like silver and gradually dug out until it reached the bottom. Here you can see the markings on the rock where the lead has been dug out. And a seam might have gone from here right down the cliff, a hundred, 150, 200ft down. Scattered all over this landscape are clues to its industrial past. It's easy for us to see this as beautiful, weathered by age, half in ruins. But in the 1770s, it took the vision of a local painter to recognize that machinery and the structures that housed it could be an exciting new element in a picture. He was to revolutionize landscape painting. His name was Joseph Wright and by the time he'd painted this color confident self portrait at the age of 40, he'd built up a successful living as an artist in Derby. This is one of his great paintings. Groundbreaking before, right, science wasn't thought of as a suitable subject for art. But he changed that. And throughout his career he was to continue to seek out unconventional subjects. One place more than any other inspired him. The town of Matlock. It's in a spectacular setting, nestling beside the River Derwent in the shadow of the formidable Matlock Tour, a sheer vertigo inducing wall of rock. In the 18th century, Matlock was known. As As the eighth wonder of Derbyshire and. Tourists Tourists used to flock here to see. The The spectacular view from the lip of the gorge. They climbed a strenuous 20 minutes or so up this steep hill, now covered in beach trees. But since the 1980s, there's been an easier and quicker route to the top. Even in the depths of winter. You can see why Joseph Wright was fascinated by this landscape. He was particularly taken by the way the light played on the rocks. Wright painted his pictures. In painting, he captured the immense, brooding mass of Matlock Tor in sunlight and bathed by the light of the moon. Joseph Wright was a magnificent landscape painter. He had been famous just for that. But there was something even more interesting about him. He started to look at something that other painters hadn't really bothered with, that the smoke and the fire of the new industry is being set up in these valleys. And so he developed an original way of painting, a new kind of British scenery. Wright revealed the drama of industry in the heart of the countryside. Such was the excitement surrounding Wright's paintings that his reputation spread far and wide. Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, bought this picture. Wright painted the subject more than once. In this version, a labourer is positioning a white hot bar of iron beneath a tilt hammer. The drum, rotated by a water wheel, drops the hammer rhythmically onto the metal. The iron founder is proud of his technology. His daughter looks as though she'd been allowed to stay up late to watch the spectacle. Wright had stumbled on a rich new subject for painting and it proved so popular that within a year, it was mass produced as a print. You can see how Joseph Wright was seduced by the scene, which may seem a bit odd to us, with all that we know about industry and industrial pollution and all the rest, but in those days, the factories and the mines still fitted neatly, comfortably into the countryside. And there was another thing. People were genuinely excited and curious about these new processes. Patriotic almost. And Joseph Wright was there to record the progress. Wright's fascination with industry took him down the Derwent Valley to the town of Cromford, two and a half miles south of Matplot. Cromford is where Wright for the first. Time Time came across industry on a new scale. The huge cotton mills that were at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution. Begun in the 1770s. These buildings must have astounded the first to see them. They bestride the landscape like giants. Rising a full seven stories, people would travel miles to marvel at them. Lit up at night, Wright showed the factories by the light of the moon, candles glowing at their windows. Framed by the landscape, the cotton mills soon became such a landmark. They even appeared on the famous porcelain made in Derby. The mills at Cromford now rank as a World Heritage Site, along with the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids In Egypt, Wright was witnessing the birth of of the modern factory. Large numbers of people and machinery brought together under one roof. What went on here was a new way of organizing production. Families were split. The women and the children came here to work, to mind the machines 24 hours a day, six days a week in 12 hour shifts. The men, in the meantime, stayed at home and wove the cotton. It was mechanized production on a scale never before attempted. And the man behind this transformation of the landscape was Richard Arkwright, one of the first captains of industry and one of the first industrialists ever to be painted. Arkwright built himself a palatial home next door to his Cromford Mills and he put up rows of houses for his workers. Joseph Wright wasn't the only one to. Find Find these new sites compelling. The tourists who flocked to Derbyshire to see the great wild extravagances of the. Countryside Countryside also wanted to have a look. At At Arkwright's great industrial achievement. So much so that he was forced to build this rather elegant hotel here in the middle of Cromford, to accommodate them all. There was one site not to be missed on the Grand Tour of Derbyshire. The Peak Cavern at Castleton. A huge cave which the wind rumbled. Through, Through, so the locals called it, quite appropriately, the Devil's Ass. Painters and poets came to marvel at the Devil's Ass, at its miraculous rock formations and its use as a natural factory. Visitors would watch rope being made in the mouth of the cave before venturing deeper into the hillside. In those days, the passageways were flooded, so visitors were squeezed into narrow boats, rather like an early tunnel of love. A great romantic who never forgot the thrill of it all was the poet Lord Byron, who came here in 1804. Lord Byron, as a young man lay in a wooden box boat like this. Only unlike me, he wasn't alone in it. It was a bit wider than this. And beside him lay Mary Chawworth, the girl that he was desperately in love with. The two of them were pushed by a ferryman through the narrow entrance of the cave, he wading through the water until they came out the other side. But I can't describe them. And it's as well. I'm driving the old coach road from Derbyshire to shropshire. The road 18th century painters and tourists would have taken on their grand tour of the heart of England. North Mill in Belper, the health and safety marvel of its day. The world's first metal framed factory. Earlier mills with their wooden floors and roof beams often burnt down with great loss of life. And this is Derby, with its splendid silk mill and reputation for fine china and strong ale. Travelers would stop for a pee break here in Ashborne, Stoke on Trent, the center of Britain's pottery industry. Now a large city, it was once six small towns which grew and merged after the opening of the Trenton Mersey Canal. A few summers ago. I I came down this canal on a barge and it really is a magical way of seeing what the old industrial Britain was like. I mean, it's all in ruins now, but you could imagine it with warehouses with the chimneys all smoking. This canal went 140 miles. It went over 169 aqueducts, it went under nearly 100 bridges, it had 75 locks. It was a magnificent achievement. And of course, what it meant was for the people who made china here in Bursalem, like Josiah Wedgwood, he could get his things which were being sent off to America. He'd get them to the port in one piece. When they went by road, by packhorse, they were always braking. So it was genuinely a godsend to him. Not for nothing, the company that built it said it flows for country and people, and it did. On to Shropshire, heading towards one of the greatest sites of the 18th century, The iron bridge at Cobrookdale, the first cast iron bridge in the world. Artists flocked here and their mass produced prints and engravings entice people to come and see the bridge for themselves. It's a wonderful marriage of industrial genius and landscape. In 1779, this bridge was opened at Coalbrookdale, each of its sections cast locally, a stunning display of skill and the whole thing. Leaping across the River Severn, proudly proclaiming the source of the area's wealth, iron. Coalbrookdale was the centre of British iron manufacturing in the 18th century. This wooded gorge rang with the sounds of heavy industry. Visitors were drawn to the industrial sites of the gorge then, just as they are now. And the ironmasters who colonized Coalbrookdale were quick to grasp the tourist potential of their industry. Iron casting is a spectacular show of heat and light and noise. And the old ironmasters used to post their times of work so that people didn't miss the show, much as they do today. For visitors to this recreation of Victorian. Coalbrookdale. Coalbrookdale. It was the sheer ingenuity and innovation that excited the visitors. This is what's called the inclined plane. They had a problem here. They had to get raw materials and goods from the Coleport Canal at the bottom up to the Shropshire Canal at the top. Now, they could have done it by building a whole series of locks, but instead they came up with this solution. They built tracks right the way from. The The bottom to the top, it's 200ft or more. The barges at the bottom were loaded into cradles and pulled up to the top here and tipped over into the Shropshire Canal. Absolutely marvelous. One painter who visited the famous Bedlam furnaces here in 1801 was the grandly named Philip Jacques de Lautherberg. Born in Alsace, he'd made his home in Britain, where he was affectionately known as Leatherbags. He painted the moment when water was poured on red hot coke. The rising steam forms clouds in the sky. Above, a volcano erupted. Sitting in the middle of the English countryside, The ground is littered with discarded iron. A cart laden with castings rushes from the scene. De Lauthenberg seems to relish every detail. When Deliferberg came to Colebrookdale, the Bedlam furnaces were blasting full tilt. Britain was at war with France and they were making the cannons to defeat Napoleon. And so his painting wasn't just a dramatic celebration of industry, it was also a stirring portrait of Britain's war effort. You could almost call it a kind of propaganda. Paintings of industry had become as exciting as the most dramatic paintings of countryside, and artists were eager to capture each new technical innovation. Of course, the rapid expansion in the use of steam changed the landscape, and not least when steam was harnessed instead of horses as the main means of locomotion. The world's very first steam locomotive was made here at Colebrookdale. And in no time at all, its development led to the establishment of a railway system that spread right across Britain. The London to Birmingham line was under construction in the 1830s. These drawings are by John Cook Bourne, who made railways his specialty. He recorded the line being cut through two and a quarter miles of hillside. It took 400 men three and a half years to remove 1,750,000 tons of soil. Many landowners had to be one round before they'd allow the railway to slice through their property. So pictures like these were partially designed to reassure landowners that they had nothing to fear from the intrusion of the new. But what Bourne's drawings don't capture is the utterly new thrill of traveling at speed. Landscape would now be seen for the first time as a blur. In 1844, one of Britain's greatest painters, William Turner, left us in no doubt what he thought about the railways. He was passionate about them. They were the future. His excitement comes through in the way he applies his paint in hazy dabs and WHIRLS A hare darts in front of the train, but there's no danger of it being crushed. It could easily escape Turner's snorting beast. Average speed, 33 miles an hour. The crowds on the banks of the river are cheering the spectacle. This is natural speed and mechanical speed in harmony. But not everyone was as thrilled by progress as Turner was. Some writers were beginning to worry about how industry was disfiguring the landscape. Oh, violated Coalbrookdale, a poet wrote. And another writer said this whole valley was far too beautiful to be desecrated by the horrors of industry. You can't really see what they meant now because most of the industry's gone. But if you look back up the gorge there, at the cooling towers put there in the 1970s, you may just get an inkling of the kind of shock they felt. And there was more to come. Here in the West Midlands, the march of industry would come to be seen as an invasion, threatening to destroy all nature in its path. Black by day and red by night, is what they used to say of this landscape. Britain's own heart of darkness. At the start of the 19th century. It'S the Black Country. It was first called the Black country by a 19th century American visitor who was horrified by the soot and filth. Today, it sprawls from Dudley to Wolverhampton. But in the 18th century, there were only hastily assembled shacks as far as the eye could see. Coal and ironstone lay just below the surface here. And if you could put up a hut or a cottage overnight, you had squatters rights to work the land. Squatters started moving in to Mushroom green in the 1500s, eking out a living making nails and later, ch. The Black country was the Wild west of the Industrial Revolution. People came swarming to these hills, setting up shanty towns, hoping to make not. A A fortune, but at least a living. And at the heart of it all, the Dudley family who lived in the. Castle Castle here, they ruthlessly, remorselessly exploited their land for iron and coal beneath it, with often rather unpredictable results for the ground above. By the middle of the 18th century, around 20,000 ironsmiths were hammering away within a 10 mile radius of here. But they had no efficient link to the outside world. Until just over 200 years ago. There was one drawback to manufacture in the Black Country. Everything that was made here had to be put on a horse and cart and taken to the river Severn, nearly 30 miles away. And for that reason, they made just. Small Small things nails, hinges, locks, chains. All that changed with the building of the Dudley Canal. Turner stood by the canal's edge to paint this view of Dudley, he took in the whole scene from the ancient castle on the top of the hill to. To the modern activity beneath it. It's an extraordinary vision. On the right is an iron furnace with piles of coke ablaze beside it. Every square inch of the landscape pulsates with industry as the barges set off laden with goods. What this picture doesn't reveal is the next dramatic stage of their journey. Beneath the castle under the hill was a construction that revolutionized trade in the Black Country. This is magnificent, But. It's an astonishing feat of engineering. Sometimes only 5 foot high from the water to the roof of the tunnel, seven and a half feet wide. So So you could just squeeze these boats. In In the water, only six foot deep or even less. It's quite spooky going through these tunnels. It's cold, the wind. Keeps coming at you. And what's really exciting about it is. That That by making this astonishing underground tunnel. They They were liberating the Black Country. They They were freeing it up where it. Had Had been virtually landlocked, unable to get anything out. Suddenly, this offered freedom. Alan, how much stuff could they get. Through Through here in a day? Well, there were 41,000 boats recorded in one year. So that would mean that one boat came out to the end there every five minutes if they worked six days a week. And each one would be carrying 20 tunnels, and that's a vast quantity of material. We always complain of traffic jams on the motorways. Were Were there traffic jams on the canals? Oh, Oh, yes, yes. In the 1840s, boats waded outside this tunnel for up to a four fortnight to come through. No. Really? Yes. Heavy industry was now sucking more and more people away from the land. Soon, country dwellers would be outnumbered by workers in towns, slaves to a new machine world. For a visual artist like Turner, it was a feast for the eye. But to a writer like Charles Dickens, more concerned with human consequences, it was horrifying. Dickens traveled through the Black country in 1838, and he drew on the experience in his novel the Old Curiosity Shop. He wrote, on every side and as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance. Tall chimneys crowding on each other and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form which is the horror of oppressive dreams poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light and made foul the melancholy air. Dickens didn't find industry on this scale at all inspiring. Quite the opposite. He was appalled by it. Those rows of chimneys pouring out their plague of smoke. He saw more than just landscape being destroyed. He thought people's lives were being destroyed and a moment would come when they'd rise up and exact a terrible revenge. From being an exciting element in the landscape. Industry was now demonized. If Dickens vision was grim, then the painter John Martin takes us to the very gates of hell. This huge painting of the end of the world, six and a half feet by 10, expresses the horror John Martin felt when he traveled through the Black country at night. The fires consuming civilization have become the fiery furnaces of industry, swallowing up the 19th century Britain. The industrialized world is collapsing in on itself. Martin said of the Black country that he couldn't imagine anything more terrible. Even in the regions of everlasting punishment. For many, this picture of Britain had become unbearable. It's always said that when Queen Victoria traveled through the Black country on the. Royal Royal Train, she insisted on having the. Window Window blinds pulled down. Britain's romance with industry was coming to an end. It had transformed the way people lived and worked and even children were sucked into the factory system. 200 years ago, here on the Dudley Road outside Wolverhampton, there stood a factory that made Doll's house furniture. It was owned by a wealthy black country businessman, Sidney Cartwright, and his workforce was mainly young children. In 1834, he was paid a visit by a government inspector. This is the inspector's account. John Mosley, aged nearly 12, A poor little creature for his age, all in rags, unhealthy, unhappy. Daniel Ford, aged 10 or 11, doesn't know what month of the year it is, has never heard of a snowdrop or crocus. Mary Perry, age 10, feels very tired at night. A poor sickly little thing, thing. Cartwright amassed a fortune through his use of child labor and he spent his money building up an art collection. When he died in 1883, 200 of his paintings were given to Wolverhampton's art gallery. Cartwright wasn't interested in pictures of industry. He saw enough of that every day. What he liked were sentimental scenes of rural life. And as the monster of industry grew, most Victorians came to share his taste. One of the pictures Cartwright bought was Surrey Cornfield by William linnell. Painted in 1860, it shows agricultural labourers working and relaxing under a perfect summer sky. Children running in and out among the corn stooks. It's a good painting, but it's a fantasy really. A sort of idyllic country scene, almost too perfect. If you were employing 10 year old children in your factory though, would you want to come home to pictures of. What What their real life was like? Or Or would you rather enter this dream world where childhood is still a state of innocence. Pictures like these acted as a comforting reminder of an older, perhaps a more stable rural world. By the end of the 19th century, British artists had all but abandoned painting Britain's industrial landscape. And the few that did have almost all been forgotten. But the vision of one Black country painter does live on in the basement of this building. His pictures are neither comforting nor pretty and perhaps that's why even today they're left down here. He was called Edwin Butler Bayliss and we don't know much about him except that his family owned an iron foundry and that he lived all his life in this area. He was. He was called the poet painter of. The The scarred landscape of Wolverhampton. Here are the pictures, some of them anyway. And you can see the exact opposite of a landscape painter. Where a landscape painter would have had open countryside and trees, he has slag heaps, factory chimneys, where he might have streams. He's got molten residue coming out of the foundry. It's a gloomy picture everywhere. This one has got. Got a little bit of landscape. A cow here with its back to. Us, Us, a white cow. But But look behind. Instead of mountains, what have we got? Huge slag heap. But you see, for him this is the same sort of reality that for a landscape painter the trees and the streams and the meadows and the mowing of the hay are. And there are still painters today in the Black country who find a beauty in the ugliness of industry. What is this slag? Industrial Industrial waste turned out. Probably a blast furnace or a foundry of some kind. Is there a lot of this left around? Very little. It's the only one I ever come across. Really? Yes, yes. Arthur Lockwood is a local artist fascinated by the last days of heavy industry in the Black Country. Lots of artists would paint the countryside, woods and hills and the sea. Yes, you do something completely different. What's the appeal? Well, I felt that the Black country industry was never recorded and so I want to catch the last of the kind of the industry before he found finally disappears. So I go into foundries and other kinds of factories, nail making factories and things like that, and catch them before they close down. So So is it a different nature from the person who would paint the picturesque? I just don't do that kind of painting, so it's never appealed to me. Never Never ever. You never paint a sunset or. No. Or I might put a sunset behind an industrial scene to give it a sense of drawing drama in fact. But no, no. From the Black Country. I'm driving south out of the darkness and into the Light heading for the Cotswolds. For over a century, people have been coming here to escape the city. One man made this landscape his front line in a war against the march of industry. William Morris, the pioneering designer and political revolutionary who wrote Forget six counties overhung with smoke. Forget the snorting steam and pitch piston stroke. Forget the spreading of the hideous town. Think rather of the pack horse on the down. Morris was a passionate defender of the English countryside and its way of life. In his world, it was perpetual summer. When Morris moved to Kelmscot Manor, a fine Tudor house in the South Cotswolds. He was inspired by the trees and flowers around him to create some of his best loved designs from the willows overhanging the stream at the bottom of his garden. He got the idea for his famous willow bough pattern which is still sold in the shops. But there was more to William Morris. Than Than designing wallpaper and curtains. All the things he's remembered for today. As he travelled in these villages around Kelmscote, he saw a way of life in the farming communities that seemed to him to offer an antidote, an answer to the social divisions of industrial Britain. Morris believed that in the countryside, people's working lives were in harmony with nature. He argued that factories turned people into machine, denying them happiness and a full life. He was horrified by society's scramble after progress at any cost. Morris thought it was destroying much that was valuable in the past. His love of history led him to set up the Society for the Preservation of ancient buildings. St John Inglesham was the first church of many that he saved from a Victorian makeover. But his campaign was about much more than a love of old buildings. Morris declared war on the Victorian idea that industrial progress was inevitable, the way. The The world had to be. I mean, he didn't have a hope in hell of changing the course of things single handedly. But he did challenge the idea that man had the right to do what he wanted with nature. And more important than man had the right to do what he wanted with other people's lives. Morris put his ideas about how he'd change the world into a novel called News from Nowhere. It imagined what England would be like in the year 2102 after a revolution. Central government has been abolished, half London has been grassed over and Manchester has disappeared altogether. His picture of Britain, the perfect Britain. Was Was a kind of Cotswolds run by British benign communists. I think he'd have been a bit surprised if he came back now to see the workers houses, many of them Taken over as weekend retreats for the successful. The Cotswolds, extending northeast from Bath to Chipping Camden, with their dramatic empty uplands and lush green valleys, became a favorite destination for artists. And the years after Morris discovered Kelmscott, This landscape of farms tucked into steeply wooded hills seemed the best of an old England. By the end of the 19th century, writers and artists were becoming anxious that the way of life of the countryside of old England was being destroyed. This is the heart of Shakespeare country, Stratford upon Avon. A local mp, Benjamin Stone, came here and to villages roundabout to capture traditions he feared were about to vanish, Killed off by new urban pleasures. His photographs have a wonderful innocence. It's hard to believe that life was ever like this. If you lived in a little village in the 1890s. No radio, no television, you had to make your own entertainment. And of course, that would often involve folk dancing, folk music, the kind of thing people slightly snigger at today. But Stone realized that with progress, these. Old habits might well die out. And so he went from village to village, lugging his camera equipment with him to record the old customs before they disappeared forever. While Benjamin Stone was making a visual record of folk customs, a young composer, George Butterworth, was touring many of the same Midlands landscapes, collecting folk songs and dances for posterity. Butterworth believed that country folk music was the true culture of England, and he wove country tunes into his own lyrical music. An early home movie shows Butterworth dancing a jig in June 1912. When war was declared in August 1914, Butterworth enlisted as an ordinary soldier. For the first time, men were facing death on an industrial scale. Butterworth wrote no more music. The vision of rural England that had inspired him could never have survived the onslaught of mechanized warfare. One of the most popular poets during the First World War was A.E. housman. His collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad, portrayed the countryside as a place of freedom, but also of deep sadness. Many soldiers took his poetry with them to the trenches. Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows. What are those blue remembered hills? What spires, what farms are those? This is the land of lost content I see it shining plain the happy highways where I went and cannot come again. As a boy, Haussmann lived near the Black country, but the industrial landscape to the north never captured his imagination. He used to climb up to a spot from which he could gaze longingly to the west, towards Shropshire, a county which, because it was just over the. Next Next hill, seemed particularly seductive. Houseman Shropshire was a fantasy. He never lived There barely visited it. And yet his poetry is haunted by its landscapes. My journey is nearly complete. I've reached The Malvern Hills, 20 peaks that rise up dramatically out of the Worcestershire plain. This one, the landscape which inspired Britain's greatest composer of romantic music, Edward Elgar. Elgar was born in 1857 in the village of Broadheath, overlooking the hills, and they would always have a special place in his heart. Elgar saw his music as a tribute. To To the landscape that he loved. One of his very first compositions, for instance, Caractacus, written about the British chieftain who, according to legend, was defeated right up on these hills by the Romans. And that had a libretto written curiously by a great friend of his, a retired civil servant, Harry Ackworth, who happened also to be the secretary of the Malvern Golf Club. Elgar was a passionate golfer. He loved outdoor activities. He thought nothing of cycling 50 miles a day through the Worcestershire lanes. And he loved walking here at Birchwood, where he used to live. And as he played golf or cycled or walked, he conjured up melodies in his head. But Elgar was ambitious. He knew he'd have to go to London if he was to make a name for himself. He found it hard to get work at first, but life at the heart of the greatest empire the world had ever seen soon proved to be a new source of inspiration. In 1901, Elgar wrote a piece of music that would change his life forever. And he knew it. I've got a tune, he said, that will knock em flat. Knock em flat. A tune like that only comes once in a lifetime. He called it Pomp and Circumstance Number one. But within a year, he used the. Music Music for that stirring hymn to Britain's imperial power, Land of Hope and Glory. Britain was reaping the benefits of its industrial revolution. As the Victorian era came to an end, there was still a huge popular appetite for celebrating commerce and industry. The engine of empire, Land of hope and Glory is Elgar's picture of Britain as a great world power. Sam. It's the tune Elgar will always be remembered for. But as time went by, he felt increasingly uneasy about the flag waving that it seemed to inspire. Towards the end of his life, he realized that what meant most to him was something nearer to home. As a boy, he'd wandered beside the River Severn and listened to the sounds around him the wind in the trees, the birdsong, and tried to imagine them as music. He wrote I'm still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side With a sheet of paper, trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great. In the end, the picture of Britain that was closest to Elgar's heart was the landscape of his childhood. And perhaps that's something that everyone can understand. One day, during his final illness, he was visited by a friend and Elgar, rather feebly, whistled to him the theme from one of his most popular works, the Cello Concerto, and said, if ever you're walking on the Malvern Hills and hear this, it's only me. Don't be frightened.