BBC Four Collections - archive programmes chosen by experts.
For this Collection, Janet Street-Porter has selected
programmes about Post-War Architecture.
More programmes on this theme, and other BBC Four Collections,
are available on BBC iPlayer.
Leeds, the Settle and Carlisle railway
and its great viaduct at Ribblehead,
Carlisle, the border town of Hawick, Edinburgh.
Ian Nairn hardly took a direct route.
But he did take a route that allowed him to sound off,
and that's the important thing.
His films are not travel programmes, though they are films about travel.
This one is anecdotally strong.
It's also typically demonstrative of Nairn's desire to see the everyday
improved.
He believed, and it's an unfashionable belief today,
that better places might make better people
and that better places could only be achieved through necessity,
that is, through buildings, transport systems,
public spaces and so on which are part of the organism of a town
or village, and not plastered-on gestures.
Leeds, in midsummer 1972.
This is midsummer day, give or take a few inches of rain.
The last journey, by canal, ended only a few yards from here,
the back of Leeds City station.
This journey starts from the station, to look at a railway
and the landscape it goes through.
This is a jumping-off point for the Settle and Carlisle, which is
the most dramatic mainline in England.
It goes from Settle right up into the Pennines,
over the top, down to Kirby Stephen, then to Carlisle,
through the Eden Valley, which is marvellous countryside.
And then from there, from Carlisle to Edinburgh.
This time, the railway is gone, it went a few years ago,
a railway which used to be a lifeline to border towns like Hawick
and Galashiels.
The first part of the journey, as far as Skipton,
is in fact the canal journey in reverse, because both railway
and canal had to follow the Aire Valley,
it was the only way they could get through the hills.
HOOTER BLARES
The great thing about journeys in different modes of transport is that
each time you see a different place,
the same place on the ground,
but each time you see it you rediscover it in a different way.
Having come by canal down there, now going through it,
cleaving through it on the railway,
you could say that the canal was respecting the Aire Valley,
where the railway here is sort of using it, driving through it.
But, as soon as we get up on the Pennines, the situation is reversed.
The landscape is totally in charge.
Here, beyond Keighley,
we've just about run out of the industrial West Riding.
The landscape is already beginning to dominate
and the hills are turning up on either side of the Aire Valley.
The next port of call is Skipton.
It's only 20 miles out, but already, from Leeds,
you've got into a completely different landscape.
That's where I leave the train, though not the rail line itself.
The main reason is there aren't very many of them.
That was a service from Leeds to Morecambe.
But, you know, a fair number of those every day.
But that turns off from here and goes over to the other side of England,
the main line north, the actual Settle and Carlisle,
only has two trains each way every day,
and two of those in the middle of the night.
And anyway, this thing is not just about the railway, it's about
all the places on and near the railway,
and what the railway's done to them,
how their character has been changed by it, or not changed.
The first of those, the one that gave half the name to the line,
is Settle itself, which is 15 miles north of here,
sort of 15 miles deeper into the Dales.
It's a bit of Settle, and it's not quite what it seems, really.
This street here is in fact the balcony above the Shambles,
the old market hall. Four little houses on top. Why not?
It's a very reasonable way of doing it, uses the space twice,
and it's sort of typical of the quirkiness of the place.
It's very much its own, own person, Settle,
much more than Skipton down the road, which is not quite industrial,
not quite tourist, not quite market town.
This is the very end of market day
and you feel all the time that it's a local centre.
It's not really worried by tourists, although it does have tourists.
It's doing its own thing,
doing its own thing in the buildings, as well, the way they crowd together
and huddle up.
This isn't picturesqueness, so much as complete practicality, keeping
the wind out, because the wind can be diabolical here in winter.
And, in fact, in June.
It's very well looked after, apart from the main road traffic which
goes through here, which could be got rid of easily.
Everything else is well kept up, but not too well kept up,
it's just healthy and going on happily.
There's a new public library and some flats just at the back, for example.
Nothing special, but just that bit more care,
not leaving the site just as a vacant hole in the middle of the town.
Everything's trim here.
And opposite that library,
there's a typical bit of Settle or Dales bloody-mindedness.
It's the most elaborate house in Settle.
It's been called a folly, and with good reason.
The designer, whoever he was, really did mix it.
He mixed classical and Tudor
and stirred the whole lot up into a colossal goulash.
The railway?
Well, it's just over at the back of the houses there.
But it hardly affects the town at all. There's no railway suburb.
The station now is almost a period piece,
with gas lamps and what you might call Victoriana, you know, things
you'd see in antiques shops in the King's Road, which is very nice,
but I suspect the reason is that British Rail are slowly running
the line down.
They won't bother to replace anything,
they'll just leave it until it crumbles, which is sad.
15 miles further on on the Settle and Carlisle,
and 1,000 feet up, the Ribblehead Viaduct, which is
probably the most impressive engineering structure on the line.
A magnificent thing in magnificent scenery.
A real case of where man's building
and nature are completely complementary.
This valley is actually a wind funnel into the prevailing wind and there is
a story that a chap working on top had his hat taken off,
it got swirled under the arch, with the air currents,
came back the other side and back onto his head again.
But a lot of the stories aren't as funny as that.
In three years, 100 men died here building this viaduct.
Not all accidents, but an awful lot of them were, accidents and disease.
This was the last great railway work actually done by the navvies,
that is, simple straightforward sweat and no mechanical aids.
They travelled around and established shanty towns,
and one of them was just here. It was called Batty Green.
And when the line construction was at its peak, which was about 1870,
there were about 2,000 people working here.
And Batty Green was equipped not only with pubs but with a hospital
and a public library.
From here on, for about 15 miles now, we're stuck on or above 1,000 feet,
almost nothing, just the tracks and the hills
and very occasional wayside halts which now, alas, are closed.
I said there weren't many passenger trains on this line,
but there's an awful lot of freight.
It's a link still worth keeping between Scotland and Yorkshire.
This is Dent Station.
It is, or rather was, the highest mainline station in Britain.
1,150 feet up.
And even though it is something like three miles
from the village down there, something like 500 feet down,
on one hell of a road, it is still a link, or could be.
Now the station is closed, the buildings are used as a kind
of adventure centre for a school in Burnley, which is good in itself.
But meanwhile, especially in the winter,
you just can't get out of Dent except by road.
And there are times when that's impossible.
They're not joking when they put snow fences up here.
And Dent itself is a quite remarkable place.
They've absolutely packed the houses together here.
Just at this point, the village street is not much wider than I am.
And it's all common sense, huddling together against the wind
and the weather.
And it's common sense that's still relevant today, you know,
in places in Britain that have this kind of winter weather,
Scotsnewdowns, for example,
because it can surely blow pretty hard up there.
And, although it's a very pretty village,
you might say a kind of Clovelly, it is also a working village.
There's one or two souvenir shops, inevitably,
but nothing overwhelming, the place is in balance.
It's still a real community, and still in a real Yorkshire Dale,
we're still in the West Riding here,
although it's only a few miles to Kendal and Westmorland.
And what I'd like to see, even in what is a national park,
the Dales National Park here, is just a bit more employment,
you know, a small factory, to keep the spirit of the place alive,
to stop mass immigration and all the houses fill up with weekenders
or second homes.
The place is bigger and stronger than that.
It could be done. It could be done carefully, and they are careful here.
Careful, for example, not to have asphalted this lot over.
Careful in the car park, where instead, again, of mass asphalt,
there's going to be a concrete framework, soil on that,
grass on top of that. You can do it.
And, with a bit of luck, just a tiny bypass,
because it's quiet enough now, but when traffic comes through,
and it has to because there are through roads through Dent,
it gets a bit cramped up there.
But what really hits me is the absolute need for the place to be
just like this just here,
with the hills behind the church and everything huddling in.
You know, so many places now are built without any need at all,
just for lowest common denominator materialism.
Appleby is the only passenger stop between Settle and Carlisle.
And it's certainly a place worth stopping off for.
It was, in fact, a medieval new town.
It didn't grow up accidentally at a ford in the river or
anything like that.
The whole town was laid out at one go, though the buildings, of course,
have changed.
There's a castle at the top of the hill here,
a church down at the bottom, most of the town's shops in-between.
It's... It's a very solid, nice plan, that.
The kind of thing that's just as valid today, really.
But as well as that, there's all the taste of Appleby.
Over the centuries,
they've embellished it in all sorts of little ways.
Like the obelisk here, which they think was put up to commemorate
Charles II's restoration, because Appleby was a staunch Royalist place.
This sort of defines this end of the town.
Not only that, there's another one, it's a sort of twin,
down at the low end of the town,
so that, wherever you are in this high street, Boroughgate, you can
relate yourself exactly by looking at the two obelisks.
Nearer to this one, further from that one.
And the church itself has a little screen in front of it.
Super idea, this, because from the top end of town you see screen
and church as one building, you think it's an extra aisle.
Lower down, you suddenly realise that it isn't, it's a thing in front,
separate building, which you have to go through to get to the church,
under an arch.
Things like that crystallise a town, make it absolutely unique.
And, overall, it's such a solid, sane uniqueness in Appleby.
It's not loaded with international tourism and gimmicks.
It's just going on with its business, quietly, naturally, it's there to
look at if you want to, it's not thrusting it down your throat.
From here on in, slow diminuendo down to the Solway Firth,
the hills gradually fading away, you know, hanging on as long as they can,
but then, flat land and Carlisle.
Well, that's it.
The end of the Settle and Carlisle line, with one of the two expresses
being held up, alas, a few yards away from Carlisle Citadel Station.
This is the mainline on the left,
the one that comes up from Euston through Crewe.
I reckon meself it ought to be given right of way because
the Settle and Carlisle deserves it.
It must not go!
British Rail have just started to reopen one or two lines,
rather timid ones, really, to preserved steam locomotives.
The whole of the Settle and Carlisle is ready-made for this.
I was lucky enough just once to see one of those things panting up over
the Ribblesdale viaduct.
It's something I won't forget.
And just beyond, when they eventually let it into the station,
is Carlisle itself, which I'd like to have a look at.
Almost everywhere between Settle
and Carlisle has a very strong sense of identity.
Carlisle itself, to me, seems to have none at all. It's got addled.
It's as if all the border people that have come through it have somehow
rubbed out the town altogether. This isn't only my opinion.
Almost everyone I've spoken to has had the same feeling about the place.
It goes back a long way.
In 1830, a local newspaper was saying that they were neither Scots
nor Irish nor English, but a mongrel breed of all three...
..which is puzzling when you think of Berwick-upon-Tweed
on the other side of the country,
which is so terribly strong and its own place.
This is all reflected visually.
In the marketplace in Carlisle,
I'm leaning on an Art Nouveau ladies' lavatory, which is about the last
decent thing that's been put up here - it's all cacophony. It's a mess.
The traffic's a mess.
The...flowerbeds...they're nice flowers
but they don't belong in a marketplace.
The lamp standards are thick and ugly.
It's all getting in the way of the shape of the town.
You just can't see the wood for the trees here.
It really does need its own head shrinker -
what I mean by a town planner, or what he ought to be.
And if I was trying to plan Carlisle, I might say, well, all right, it is
such a mess, let's simply leave it as it is.
But one or two things make me
think the situation isn't as hopeless as that.
One is that this place, like everywhere else, has
something from the past that you can hang on to and develop and expand.
And here, a collection of alleyways, about a dozen of them,
very close together indeed.
Some of them are still used for shopping now and they're not pretty
but they are a working part of the town.
Others are left derelict or blocked or car parks.
That's not the way to get a sense of identity.
And the other thing, which, perhaps, is more important,
is that this marketplace didn't always look like this.
What has grown up here, this lack of identity,
has happened in the last 30 or 40 years.
From a photograph of 1898 you can see that it had a complete unity
and it allowed the important parts of the town, like the statue
and Carlisle Cross, the market cross there,
the building behind it, to speak,
to provide a real heart to the place, not, as I said before, this mess.
Because now, look at it.
County town of Cumberland?
All the places in Cumberland
and the centre can be no more guts to it than you see here? It's not on.
That, for me, is about enough of an addled place.
I'd rather get on a bit further up the line towards Edinburgh.
I'm sorry, I'm about three-and-a-half years late for the train to
Edinburgh from Longtown.
Expresses used to run through here all the way from St Pancras, up over
the Settle and Carlisle, and then Carlisle to Edinburgh, on this route.
The line was closed in 1969.
There was a chance at one time it was going to be reopened privately,
not done as an enthusiasts' railway, but as a proper commercial concern,
quite independent of British Rail.
They couldn't get the money in time, and now the track's been taken up.
I don't really give it much chance. Pity, though. What a waste.
What a waste here. This stuff is good machinery.
Not to be left lying around derelict like this.
At the very least now,
this could become a different sort of indoor adventure playground.
It could become a house, I wouldn't mind living in this.
Keep all the stuff, and convert these to beer pumps.
Longtown itself is only, what, eight miles from Carlisle.
So, closing the railway hasn't meant an enormous problem.
Eight-mile bus journey is not too bad.
But that's not at all true of the places further up there,
into the hills.
This is one of the wildest parts of the border, between Carlisle
and Hawick. There's just greenery, me, and a railway junction.
This is Riccarton, and it really was a junction
because not only does the Carlisle Edinburgh come through here, but also
a line which went down to Bellingham, down the Tyne Valley to Hexham.
So, you could, quite literally, go from here to both King's Cross
and St Pancras. Now gone, all gone.
It was very odd in another way
because for almost 100 years there was absolutely no road access to
this place, you just had to get in by rail,
it was the only way you could do it.
I can't visualise this half-mile of platform packed with
Newcastle supporters or something, going to a Glasgow football match,
but something like that could have happened.
There's a road now, and it's rather sad, in a way,
because it's a forestry road.
In other words, little green fir trees are coming here by the million.
It's a great pity to swamp these huge, rolling hills
just for the sake of a bit more timber.
Ah, get off.
Hawick is the next town on the route,
and it's the one which has suffered most from the closure of the railway,
it's the one which is furthest from any railhead.
Hawick Station. The station's open.
The only thing is there don't happen to be any railway tracks running
through it.
The reason it's open is that British Rail operate a service here where
the goods come in, collected, taken out in British Rail vans
to either Carlisle or Edinburgh.
It begins to look as though someone is trying really hard to invent
the railway.
And the reason why this is still going is that Hawick is an industrial
town, it's not just a small, local centre.
It's that as well, but, basically, it lives on textiles,
particularly tweeds.
You could almost be back in the West Riding here, same dark brown stone,
the same mills crowding the river,
the same hills coming in very close on all sides.
And this industrial character is not conventionally beautiful,
but very nice.
It has a very strong sense of identity after Carlisle,
which has very little.
And the main street has a very strong character.
It's fairly narrow, tall buildings, so you really know you're there.
Occasional outcrops on the skyline, like the Victorian town hall.
And a set of, for a town of this size, colossal banks.
Like Florentine palaces. All this is almost on an Edinburgh scale.
Without having any dramatically beautiful buildings it's still
a very worthwhile place.
And if you do go anywhere by bus you're a bit stuck
because there is no bus station.
There is a bus turn-round place,
I mean, you just pick it up at a bus stop.
But when you compare that,
standing out in the open entirely with no facilities,
with the facilities that were, well, still are provided here in name
though not in fact - you know, waiting rooms and ladies' and gents'
and that, probably a buffet, bookstall,
that's still there - it seems we're making a bad exchange.
There's a sort of Marie Celeste feeling about this because, as I say,
the parcels office is still going, so it's still inhabited,
but nothing is happening this side of the station buildings.
And the same thing will be true all the way up to Edinburgh now.
Hawick I just wanted to show because it was representative.
The point of this part of the journey, basically,
is to make very sure that this kind of useless dereliction - you know,
parts of the tracks are going to be a cemetery in the end. Eugh! -
this kind of dereliction doesn't happen to the Settle and Carlisle.
We're on a real railway again.
We're also back to something pretty much like a British summer.
But in terms of Edinburgh, it's not a bad thing
because it's one hell of an atmospheric city.
It just gives it an extra punch, whether it's to the castle,
or to the long, straight avenue of Princes Street.
Or even to the new shopping precinct which is not living up to Edinburgh's
past traditions.
We're up on the Calton Hill here, and some pretty odd things
are happening up here, as well as over there.
Like this, for example, which is a copy of the Parthenon.
It was meant to be a national monument, the sort of thing
they did in the French Revolution, these abstract conceptions.
But the money ran out, didn't it? So we've now only got about half of it.
And it's locally known not as a national monument but
the disgrace of Edinburgh.
For my money, I don't think it's a disgrace,
I think it's a marvellous thing to do. But they didn't stop there.
See, this is 1822,
and within a few years of that they went berserk on this hilltop.
It's not only this half-finished Parthenon.
There's a Royal Observatory with a dome,
there's a Doric temple to a mathematician.
There is a little rotunda to a philosopher.
And there is a very large,
telescopic Gothic tower to Nelson's achievements.
This is all nuts, it's all crazy and marvellous at the same time.
This place is a living proof of the fact that if God doesn't exist,
because none of these are religious buildings, we've got to invent him.
People have been building their cathedrals, that is
reaching up to the skies here, for something like a thousand years.
Right up till now, that is, right up till the inarticulate,
flat roofs of the modern office blocks.
If I had to sum up these journeys, I suppose very simply,
the land surface is sacred. Means of transport are sacred.
Each has its own ethos and each is useful for
a different pace of journey, a different kind of journey.
And, finally, I suppose, that all the time, now, 1972,
for as long as we've got left, we must just go on building cathedrals.