Archived 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.
MUSIC: "Wade In The Water" by Ramsey Lewis
I want to see the industrial North from the inside
by exploring one of the lifelines that made the whole thing possible,
so it's a canal journey,
the journey from Manchester to Leeds
and, since the direct routes are not now navigable,
it takes you a bit further out of your way than you might think,
because it...
starts by having to go west from Manchester,
where Leeds is north-east.
You have to turn north to go through Wigan, Blackburn, Burnley,
right up to Skipton, right up to the edge of the Yorkshire Dales,
and then slide back into the industrial North
through Keighley, Bingley, to the centre of Leeds.
We are starting here at Worsley basin,
which is a few miles west of Manchester.
Very appropriate because this is really to canals
what the Stockton and Darlington was to railways.
It's where the thing all started, basically,
because this is the start of the Bridgewater Canal.
It took coal from the mines along an underground system,
several miles of it, to this basin, then on, back into Manchester.
It's also a very pretty place, one of the prettiest near Manchester,
because it was a planned village, the Dukes of Bridgewater
gradually built it up, right up until almost the First World War.
It's a pointer to what could happen
along the rest of the canal system in the industrial North
because, from being one of the most heavily used traffic routes,
it became one of the quietest, one of the prettiest, too.
There are some astonishing landscapes on this particular journey.
Here, the water looks a bit alarming. It's not what you might think.
It is, in fact, iron oxide,
which I think has seeped in from the mines' workings just down there.
But all that clears up just round a corner.
First town on the canal is Leigh.
What a marvellous way to see it, sort of gliding through
the countryside into the town at just over walking pace.
It's a cotton town, so the already strange landscape
is enhanced by the foreground of water,
mill chimneys of the huge mills themselves,
brick and terracotta and bulbous copper domes.
There is...
something which is going to happen a lot more on the canal here, I think,
which is a new terrace of houses
and they are literally Queen Anne front and Mary Ann back.
The front has got a bit of show, it's near Georgian.
The back neglects the canal. It seems such a shame.
And look here, just how a blank wall and a cinder path...
Look at the geometry it sets up along the water and the chimney at the end.
It's not Venice, but it is an incredibly moving landscape.
MUSIC: "Schoolyard Song" by Harry Ogden
# Our school yards looked over the Brookside mill wall
# And up there I have to claim for to fetch back our ball
# Barbed wire won't stop me for climbing up there
# When you're brought up at shed roof
# What have you to fear?
# Holt's picker shops looked over the Spodden mill brook
# And down there at dinner time if you'll but chance to look
# Now you'll find us fishing for sticklebacks and bait
# And it's worth getting larruping for having wet feet
# Our cricket fields looked over the Dublin mill lodge
# And in tall grass round back of there
# Now we'll hide and we'll dodge
# And we'll chuck bricks in't water
# For it's fair greatly fun
# Just pretending that we're soldiers and we've got a big gun
# Well, I've never ever travelled far yet, but someday I will
# Far away from our house down in't shade of the mill
# To some foreign country far, far away
# But however far I travel, I'm sure I shan't stay. #
I'm taking the chance to stretch my legs a bit
because there are 21 of these locks at Wigan
and it takes something like three hours to lock through them.
Altogether, they raise the canal 250 feet in one go,
which I think is the biggest single engineering achievement
on the canals that are still navigable now.
So, down there is the whole of Wigan, and up here
there's some marvellous sights really going to waste
because, as before, people aren't really using the canal,
they're turning their back on it all the time.
Where I am now is derelict down the one side
and factories are making tiles over there,
and the usual thing of a barbed-wire fence
and no realisation that this is a really marvellous place.
And down in Wigan, there is some pretty good
new housing going up at Scholes,
which is a collection of courtyards with link bridges at, I think,
second-floor level, quite low housing, nice scale,
which might not work perfectly
because they may be trying to cram too much on a small site.
But think of how that could be up here where you've got space to spare.
If you had the courtyard three-sided, the fourth side the canal,
and a matching courtyard, maybe, on the other side.
What I'm asking for, really, is a complete new set
of canal-side villages all over the industrial North,
all along the Leeds and Liverpool.
That now is the end of the Lancashire plain.
From here on in, the canal will be winding along
what is really the foothills of the Pennines.
The top end of Johnson's Hillock Locks, just north of Chorley,
one of the standard Waterways Board's conveniences.
It's not the most beautiful building in the world,
but much more important than that, it's got no style.
It's so sad because the original canal theme,
the discipline of black and white, suits almost every structure.
This is the first place that the pleasure boats
have really appeared in numbers,
though, alas, all moored rather than on the canal.
But even so, with this immense line, you can get a good idea
of the colossal potential for enjoyment of this stretch of water.
Just sliding in gently at quite high level
into the very middle of Blackburn.
There's a point here where the canal is on an aqueduct
high over the road, which itself is just above the River Darwen,
all the levels going on at once.
It's amazing how, in spite of the factories on either side,
the actual canal banks still seem wild.
It's as if the canal was sort of
something insulated from the industrial hubbub around.
And yet, of course, it was the canal
that basically created the industry in the first place.
Blackburn town centre is a very interesting place because
Blackburn was the first town to go in for comprehensive redevelopment,
a plan for redoing the whole town centre, way back before 1960.
The first bits, like the market hall, look pretty shabby now,
but later on, things improved, both in the buildings here,
designed, I'm glad to say, by a Lancashire firm,
a building design partnership at Preston.
It was a change from the great, anonymous London concerns.
But most of all in the details. Details like the simple seats here.
Simple stuff, just fixed on the wall, and that wall
is patterned brickwork, which flows up easily and over
and becomes the retaining wall of a pool.
The pool has fountains that are just straight jets of water,
not half-cut dolphins and wishy-washy water maidens.
And above it all, dominating, is the town hall.
This is really a town centre and all these details at ground level
seem, to me, to have very great style.
I was talking about the lack of style earlier on.
This really is a kind of canal style, and industrial North canal style.
But...
..these town centres are going wrong, I think, in two ways.
One is a bit further away, the other near at hand.
It's the fact that there's going to be too much of it,
they don't know when to stop.
Blackburn has already lost its open marketplace
in the first part of the redevelopment
and although it's got a market hall,
it's not quite the same thing. You need both.
And now... The...
thing is crossing the street at a rate of knots,
and this wasn't rubbish.
It's rubbish now, look at it.
This was solid Victorian stuff.
It included an arcade and the gold lettering on the tobacconists
in that arcade would be a candidate
for any local museum in ten years' time.
By then, it's too late and you'll be sorry.
The thing now is to make sure that this is the end of it,
that it doesn't creep over from here.
Obviously, it's not going to creep over to demolish the cathedral,
but all these little buildings, Georgian, Victorian onwards,
Blackburn must keep a balance of old and new,
not simply scrap the whole thing.
And yet, there are so many sites where redevelopment could happen
happily and not hurt anything.
The next town down the road has something of the same problem.
You get the real power of this canal here,
on the embankment, sailing serenely high above Burnley.
Burnley town centre? Well...
Over there, the Kirby hotel, which is a sort of Burnley showpiece,
it's a kind of equivalent of a Victorian town hall.
Beyond that, there is another precinct.
The details in Burnley's precinct are...not bad.
Same sort of tough feeling as Blackburn,
but there is a desperate difference because they look as though they have
been put together as a committee decision
rather than being unmistakably one man's work.
And the buildings around are pathetic.
Patterns just slapped on, wide-open, platitudinous fronts.
Burnley is the last to really be suitable
for that kind of wide-open treatment
because it is a very strange character.
Its character, much more introverted
than the rest of the Lancashire towns,
looking in on itself, just as the hills look down in on Burnley.
Sort of narrow, twisting streets, what's left of them - not much.
They should have built a maze rather than a wide-open yawn
in the centre of Burnley, there.
You can see it most of all in the way that Burnley uses, or rather ignores,
its rivers because there are two and they run right through
the centre of town and meet in the centre of the town -
the Brun and the Calder.
They are in a strange, private landscape of their own with...
It's very effective. It grows on you, this feeling.
And...
I see in the town plan that they are, with the best of intentions,
proposing to landscape these river banks
when the city centre is all complete
and I bet you they'll open it all out
just like they did with the marketplace.
MUSIC: "Push Boys Push (Dudley Canal Tunnel Song)"
One of the oddest experiences of my whole life.
In the middle of the Foulridge Tunnel, which is nearly a mile long.
This is the summit of the canal and, oddly enough,
although it is crossing the Pennines,
this is only just over 500 feet above ground level.
So, this extraordinary construction
is about the same height as the highest bit
of Birmingham city centre, it just doesn't make sense.
And it's also nearly 200 years old.
This was cut in 1792,
which was about the time that Louis XVI
was in a bit of trouble with his subjects.
You know, when you think of the length of time it's been here,
the scale of the engineering works needed to do it then
without anything really more than manpower,
it does make you wonder about technological progress.
# Oh, push, boys, push
# And now we are coming nigh
# Push, boys, push
# Can't you see the sky?
# Push, boys, push
# We'll have a celebration
# Now we've sung it to the nation
# So push, boys, push
# Oh, push, boys, push!
# Yes, push, boys, push... #
North of Barnswick, in what is reckoned to be the prettiest stretch
on the whole canal. I wouldn't doubt that.
You just...lose yourself in the continual curves.
Curves of the hillside one way, curves of the canal the other.
The width of the canal and this four-mile-an-hour
steady pursuit towards Leeds.
The whole lot fit together in close harmony, if that wasn't such a...
..unfortunate phrase.
We've not only changed landscapes -
because this is quite different from the normal Pennine thing
of big hills and one single valley, this is in and out -
we've changed building stones.
The walls, where you can see them over there,
have changed from brown to grey.
You've left the Millstone Grit.
You're back on grey limestone. We have, in fact, passed a summit.
We're still going north by north-east.
Another three or four miles to Gargrave
and that's a turning point.
You're back, then, south-east into Leeds.
Skipton, the gateway to the Dales and a very busy tourist place,
on the roads, that is.
What I want to see is, as the canal runs right through the middle -
it's literally at the back of the High Street -
whether any attempt has been made to match the road amenities
with canal-side amenities.
There's certainly, clearly, here, a lot of boats moored,
but is there anything else?
So far, it just seems a bust, wasted opportunity
and the opportunity is bust here, too,
because this basin is quite large.
The underused land around it is large, as well,
and it is just a few yards away from Skipton's High Street.
Think what could happen here.
A beer garden over there, perhaps.
There is also...an art shop.
You could have an open-air art gallery there.
The biggest site of all is down here, and that is a council depot,
just sheds and utility with a familiar sort of notice.
"Private property, keep out."
Apart from the fact that I think it's not quite private property -
I would say it might belong, collectively,
to the ratepayers of Skipton -
it is a criminal waste of a huge site,
just to use it for a few sheds which could be anywhere in the town.
You could put lots of things on there -
cafes, a complete town square.
In the street at the back, just over here,
they've built an old people's rest home.
Well, that just looks out on an ordinary street.
It might have been a bit more restful
if they could have looked out with a view over
this very restful scene of water and boats.
But with that, there is one hopeful sign
and that's an 18th-century warehouse,
that one being converted to a boating centre.
It looks as though it's going to be a very nice job.
JAUNTY FIDDLE MUSIC
There hasn't been a lock for the past 17 miles,
since the other side of Skipton.
So, to compensate, the Leeds and Liverpool
takes a colossal downward swoop into the countryside,
nearly 100 feet altogether.
This is the Bingley Five-Rise,
a linked staircase of five locks
and, unlike the ones at Wigan,
where there were pounds in between each lock,
here, the locks are locked, interlocked.
The back of one lock becomes the front of the next.
It's a remarkable technical achievement
and the list of instructions on how to operate it
reads a bit like a check list for a Boeing 747 before take off.
But as well as that, it's a remarkable decorative achievement
and that's this wonderful quality that the canal designers had
and the canal painters still have,
because all this functional machinery
is simply decorated in the simplest possible way,
in black and white - black and white paint.
And the combination of that and the stone surrounds
and the green surrounding that
is much more effective than the most elaborate styling could ever be.
Bingley itself, like the other towns on the canal,
grew up because of the canal, but it grew up unplanned, bit by bit.
Just beyond it there's, I think,
the only place on the canal that was planned deliberately around it.
Well, before we come to the piece of planning I mentioned,
another bit rather more recent has turned up by accident.
These new flats are on the edge of Bingley
and they're the first modern buildings I've seen in the whole trip
that, sort of, take account of the canal in any way.
Here, at least, there is a lawn in front,
which runs right down to the canal.
There is no barbed wire fence between them and us.
Three blocks, by themselves, not too high.
Pleasantly designed. Plenty of space around, plenty of greenery.
Fine.
Saltaire ahead.
Created by Sir Titus Salt, from 1850 onwards,
when he moved his mills, lock, stock and barrel up from Bradford.
It's not quite the first of these, in effect, new towns
in the 19th century in England,
but it's certainly the most ambitious.
There were over 800 houses here by the 1870s.
And it's worth seeing.
The most impressive building at Saltaire, without any doubt,
is the congregational church,
which was done, like the whole of the rest of it,
by the Bradford firm of Lockwood and Mawson.
It's a pretty good achievement, that,
to do the whole thing in one architectural office.
And it's a very powerful situation here,
cos the church is at the end of an avenue,
with the salt mausoleum on one side of it.
Straight across the street is the main entrance to the mill.
So, God and Mammon are really staring each other in the face.
But nowhere's perfect and, as Nikolaus Pevsner so pithily put it,
Saltaire has "no pawn shops and no pubs."
Saltaire's housing has worn very well after 120 years.
Solidly built, decently designed,
little touches like the front gardens.
Compared with the monolithic tenements
going up in the name of philanthropy in London
at the same time, this is paradise.
And there may only be a back alley
but that in itself is a great improvement for 1850,
when the rest of the West Riding was still building back to backs.
It is, in fact, a complete unit, this.
Has an institute, a school...
Most remarkable of all,
across the canal, down at the end of this street,
it has a complete public park, laid out as part of the whole scheme.
If they could do that then, in 1850, why on earth can't we do it now?
Beyond now, we are here, two miles from the centre of Leeds!
It's ridiculous!
And it is so ironical because it was the canal that brought
urbanisation out into the countryside in the first place.
Now, the whole situation's reversed
and it's only around the canal that greenery penetrates into the town.
Which is one more reason for really using the canal.
This could be a proper linear park. I mean, it's green enough now.
I don't mean fill it up with kiddies swings and that.
I just mean, express it more than it is now.
And it needn't be a thick park, it needn't be wide
and open, like Wormwood Scrubs or Clapham Common.
Sort of 50 yards of intense greenery, like this,
is worth square miles of public open space.
You could gradually, year by year, with slum clearance,
you could push it further and further into the centre of Leeds.
The greenery hangs on and hangs on and all of a sudden,
through one more bridge, you see the whole of central Leeds ahead.
Here, you're less than one mile from Leeds City Hall.
It's an astonishing feeling, it's...
..taking the town by stealth.
Creeping in as silent invaders.
There's no traffic lights on this route, mate.
There's no sudden stop at the end of this,
this goes right to the middle of Leeds.
Just a few yards from Leeds City Station.
The journey's end, canal basin at Leeds.
Of all the opportunities on this whole trip,
this surely offers the biggest.
Cos the amount of disused and underused land here
is astonishing for somewhere right in the middle of a city.
And it is right in the middle.
That's the roof of the main station.
Immediately behind, office blocks of modern Leeds.
Yet, the Corporation have no plans for it.
Private developers have put up a scheme or two
but nothing has come out of it.
It's a great pity
because think what could happen here.
Something will, very soon, I think.
That tower crane over there is part of a new hotel,
which is just being built,
and that may give the impetus needed to revitalise the whole area.
The question is how it's done.
I think it wouldn't be a bad idea
if the Corporation start thinking about it now.
So, that they can produce a good scheme
before someone else produces a bad one.
One opportunity this, the biggest.
But when you think back over all the others -
the possibility of housing around the staircase locks in Wigan,
the possibility of incorporating the canal at Blackburn
into the redeveloped town centre,
the possibility of creating a completely new tourist dimension
in the middle of Skipton and many, many more -
remember that there are only two places on the whole journey
that really take account of the canal.
That is, apart from the canal machinery itself.
One is at Worsley basin, near Manchester, where we began
our journey with the Duke of Bridgewater's model village,
and the other one the Saltaire, where a complete industrial village
was deliberately planned around the canal.
When you think also of the fact that on the whole journey
there's only one place where modern architecture has taken
any account of the canal at all, that's the flats at Bingley.
Surely, we can do better than this.
If we did, if we took all these opportunities, it would
revitalise a complete slice of the industrial North.
It would gain a completely new dimension.
MUSIC: "Toddlin' Whoam" by Larry Kearns