• 31
    watchers
  • 152
    plays
  • 58
    collected
  • 2007-06-03T20:00:00Z on BBC One
  • 1h
  • 6h (6 episodes)
  • United Kingdom
  • English
  • Documentary
How We Built Britain was a series of six television documentaries produced by the BBC in 2007 and repeated in 2008. The series was written and presented by broadcaster David Dimbleby. In the series Dimbleby visited some of Britain's great historic buildings and examined their impact on Britain's architectural and social history. The series was a follow-up to Dimbleby's 2005 BBC One series, A Picture of Britain, which celebrated British and Irish paintings, poetry, music, and landscapes.

6 episodes

Series Premiere

2007-06-03T20:00:00Z

1x01 The East: A New Dawn

Series Premiere

1x01 The East: A New Dawn

  • 2007-06-03T20:00:00Z1h

David Dimbleby starts his journey in Ely in the spectacular cathedral that dominates the Fens. He explores the world of medieval knights at Hedingham Castle, travels to Norwich to discover the workings of a great medieval city and visits Lavenham which grew fat on the cloth trade.

Join him on a pilgrimage to Little Walsingham and a visit to a rabbit warrener's lodge before finishing at Cambridge University, the jewel of East Anglia.

David Dimbleby looks at how England was transformed by the extraordinary flowering of architecture, ideas and exploration of the Elizabethan Renaissance.

Take a journey that tracks the newly rich to stately homes like Burghley House and follows those who hid, in fear of their lives, in the secret spaces in Harvington Hall.

Discover the bizarre secret codes of Triangular Lodge and the wonders of Chastleton House, one of Britain's most complete Jacobean houses.

1x03 Scotland: Towering Ambitions

  • 2007-06-20T20:00:00Z1h

David Dimbleby travels north of the border to find out how Scotland developed a style of building quite different from that in England.

Join him on a journey from the extraordinary visions of Stirling Castle to the Scottish baronial of Dunrobin; from the crofter's community of Gearrannan on the Isle of Lewis to Charles Rennie Mackintosh's masterpiece, The Glasgow School of Art; and ending up at the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh.

David Dimbleby encounters the grace and elegance of the Georgian terraces of Bath and Bristol, the magnificent country houses of Blenheim and the gardens of Stourhead.

He discovers where the seeds of the Industrial Revolution were sown, in the canals and locks of the West Country and the tin mines of Cornwall. He also travels across Wales to Thomas Telford's Menai Bridge and to Ireland to tell the story of Georgian Dublin.

1x05 The North: Full Steam Ahead

  • 2007-07-08T20:00:00Z1h

At the start of Victoria's reign, the north of England seemed out of control. Enormous industrial cities lacked basic amenities whilst many of their inhabitants lived in slums. David Dimbleby travels to Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, to tell the story of Britain's greatest construction boom. Find out how factories, town halls, sewers, churches, hospitals and dance halls were built in a dramatic attempt to deal with the rapidly expanding urban population.

1x06 The South: Dreams of Tomorrow

  • 2007-07-15T20:00:00Z1h

Twentieth Century was driven by the ideal of progress, and the heart of that movement was in London and the South East.

David Dimbleby embarks on a journey that explores how the idea evolved, from the commuter's dream of a house in the suburbs, to the modernist vision of streets in the sky, and the breathtaking scale and ambition of hi-tech building in the City of London.

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