How Britain Worked Season 1 Episodes

Episode 1

Train

Guy helps to overhaul a steam locomotive used on the popular Severn Valley Railway, a 16-mile stretch of track in Shropshire preserved to look just as it did in the 19th century. He joins a team of volunteers, some as young as 17, to help repair its boiler, safety valves and one of its two-tonne wheels. He also lays some track using exactly the same methods as the notorious 'navvies' - the hard-drinking, hard-living labourers who laid Britain's railway infrastructure by hand. Guy learns the dying arts of the Victorian blacksmith to make a coal shovel out of wrought iron, and repairs a century-old train driver's pocket watch using washers just 1mm wide. If everything can be made to work then Guy will get the chance to try his hand at every young boy's dream job: steam train driver.

Episode 2

Mill

45 mins

Engineering enthusiast Guy Martin and the team repair the water turbine needed to power an old saw mill in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire. He then ropes in a carpenter friend to help fell a tree and transport it to the building on a steam traction engine, before using the cut wood to make a replica of the first pedal-powered bicycle. Along the way, Guy learns about the lives of factory workers during the Industrial Revolution and how child apprentices were often little more than slave labour.

Episode 3

Seaside

46 mins

Guy Martin visits Llandudno in north Wales to try to return the seaside resort to its former Victorian glory. Over the course of the winter, Guy gets stuck into restoration work on the town's pier, rebuilds an original helter-skelter and services the town's funicular tramway. He learns how the appetite for sea-bathing began when word spread that it was good for the glands and finds out how engineering developments in factories also led to a revolution in musical instruments.

Episode 4

Mine

46 mins

Guy Martin works on a machine that can be credited with helping to kick-start the Industrial Revolution. Joining a team from the Black Country Living Museum, he helps to restore a Newcomen engine - an 18th-century steam-powered device used principally to pump water out of mines. As the rotting timber structure is replaced, worn parts repaired, the boiler cleaned and crumbling brickwork rebuilt, the presenter also learns about the lives of the men, women and children who mined coal.

Episode 5

Trawler

46 mins

Guy helps restore the oldest surviving Brixham sailing trawler, the boat that launched the modern fishing industry and transformed the way a nation ate. Guy learns how the trawler's radical design saw off the competition, tries his hand at the precision joinery that made that design possible, tests his own version of an Industrial Revolution life jacket by jumping into the sea, and makes rope using the original machines that wove the ropes for Nelson's HMS Victory. He experiences deep sea trawling - said to be the most dangerous job of the 19th century - for himself, and discovers how Britain acquired its taste for fish and chips.

Episode 6

Garden

Birmingham Botanical Gardens may seem an unlikely place to explore the wonders of the Industrial Revolution, but hidden behind its fragrant borders Guy Martin finds a hidden world of hi-tech Victorian engineering, show-off architecture, intrepid plant-hunters scouring the furthest corners of the Empire, and city fathers terrified of the 'degenerate' urban poor.