Original subtitles

[Sombre instrumental music]

[Announcer at railway station chattering over P.A. system]

NARRATOR: [Voiceover] Sitting comfortably, I opened my copy...

of The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Reality, as it evolves, sweeps me with it.

I'm struck by everything, and though not everything strikes me in the same way...

I'm always struck by the same basic contradiction:

although I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it...

in practically every case, there is nothing I can really do.

Everything is changed into something else in my imagination.

Then the dead weight of things changes it back into what it was in the first place.

A bridge between imagination and reality must be built.

[Sombre instrumental music continues]

After Robinson published the results of his study of London...

I didn't see him again for a long time...

but I heard that he'd been dismissed from his university position.

And after a period in which he sank into a deep depression...

had taken a part-time job teaching English in a language school in Reading...

where he was now living.

He wrote to me in the spring of 1995...

suggesting that I should come down to Reading on a visit.

I was struck by the improvement in his mood...

and arranged to spend a few days with him.

Robinson met me at the station, and took me immediately to Kings Road...

where he had identified the building which had been the coaching establishment...

where Rimbaud was employed as a teacher of French in 1874.

He was very excited by this and the other literary associations of the town...

which he praised with the euphoria reminiscent of that of Nietzsche for Turin.

So much so, that I was concerned for his well-being...

and the extent of his commitment to the derangement of the senses.

The Maiwand Lion commemorates the battle...

after which Dr. John Watson was invalided out of the army...

and into his acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes.

Jane Austen was educated in two rooms above the abbey gateway...

which is next to the jail where Oscar Wilde was imprisoned...

for the last years of his sentence.

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

I did not think that Robinson's move to Reading was a good one.

Despite his vision that other people could become fellows and neighbours...

the fact is, as Lefebvre says:

"The space which contains the realised preconditions of another life...

"is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible.'

He had been living in a single room in a house in the northern suburbs.

His job was poorly paid and insecure.

He did not eat well, he seemed to know no one in the town...

and he had no telephone.

His only reassurance was the presence...

of 18 undeniably utopian Routemaster buses...

operated by enthusiasts in a deregulated market.

He could not keep up the effort of his euphoria...

nor hide his vulnerability, his fear of provincial England.

He had been taunted by groups of homophobic youths...

when he ventured into town in the evening.

He had once told me that he wished to become a spy...

but was not sure who to approach.

In the afternoon, he took me to the Chatham Street car park...

overlooking the Ramada Hotel, where it turned out he was now living.

He told me that some weeks before, he had received a letter...

from a representative of a well-known international advertising agency...

inviting him to a meeting at the hotel.

These people had heard of his study of London...

and wished to commission him to undertake a peripatetic study...

of the problem of England.

He had accepted this offer with alacrity...

and insisted that I join him as researcher.

Our first outing was to a record shop in Friar Street...

where Adam Ant was making a personal appearance.

The music industry is one of the UK's most successful...

and brings in more money from abroad than motor manufacturing...

its products often characterised by sexual ambivalence...

and a traditional English contempt for petty bourgeois England.

Robinson had once taught at the art school where Adam Ant was a student.

The next day, we visited the house at West Green...

built by General Henry 'Hangman' Hawley who commanded the cavalry at Culloden...

the former home of Allistair Lord McAlpine...

treasurer of the Conservative Party between 1975 and 1990.

The recent gateposts and the obelisk are by the architect Quinlan Terry.

The obelisk bears an inscription in Latin.

This monument was built with a large sum of money...

which would have otherwise fallen, sooner or later...

into the hands of the tax gatherers.

"It is my belief, Watson," said Holmes...

"founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London...

"do not present a more dreadful record of sin...

"than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

The Winnersh Triangle Business and Distribution Park...

is in the Wokingham constituency of John Redwood...

admired by Gingrich Republicans in the United States...

as the leader of the revolutionary wing of Great Britain's Conservative Party.

On Easter Monday, Greenpeace activists blocked the outfall...

from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.

Robinson had read that the growth of high technology industry...

in the M4 corridor was triggered...

by the number of government research establishments in the Reading area.

On the centenary of the Martian landing on Horsell Common near Woking...

which was so vividly described by H.G. Wells...

Robinson took me to see the crater.

He told me that there were more than 100 patents in microelectronics...

nanotechnology and other fields for uses of Buckminsterfullerenes...

the large, spherical carbon molecules...

discovered in cosmic dust by British and other scientists...

but they are all held abroad.

[Solemn instrumental music]

The Martians destroyed most of Surrey.

500 tons of Mars is estimated to land on Earth each year.

[Birds chirping]

On St George's Day...

a group of campaigners occupied land at Wesley, near St George's Hill...

the private estate developed in 1911 on former common land...

where the diggers had set up camp in 1649.

"We are challenging the government's whole philosophy...

"about the pre-eminence of property rights," said their spokesman...

an Oxford University Fellow.

Robinson had not found any Buckminsterfullerenes...

in the crater at Horsell Common, but he was impressed...

by the technology of the latter-day levellers.

On the 28th, the eve of World No Golf Day...

they occupied the golf course at St George's Hill.

May the 4th was the day of the local elections.

Despite the poor air quality, we set out for a walk...

in the Bluebell Woods towards Henley...

and came across a group of satellite dishes...

at a location we've been asked not to name...

which are the television receivers for the BBC's World Monitoring Service...

a few miles away at Caversham Park, established during World War ll.

With the coincidence of the Tory election defeat and the V-E Day anniversary...

there was a lot of talk about the 1945 election...

and how laissez-faire had been kept off the political agenda...

until those who participated in the war at decision-making level...

had departed from the scone.

Robinson says that unless Labour wins a landslide victory in the general election...

there is always a Conservative majority in England.

Henley is the constituency of Michael Heseltine...

then the president of the Board of Trade.

It was twinned with Baroma, Somalia in 1981.

As we walked back to Reading...

we passed the preparations for a celebration bonfire.

Robinson told me that he'd received instructions from our employer...

and that the next day, we would begin the first of seven journeys...

that were to be the basis of our project.

This method had been suggested by his reading...

Daniel Defoe's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain...

which is based on Defoe's travels as a spy for Robert Harley...

the government minister in the reign of Queen Anne.

The narrative of Britain since Defoe's time...

is the result of a particularly English kind of capitalism.

With our contracts and expense account agreed...

we set out to follow the Thames downstream to the sea.

Passing Fawley Court, a work of Sir Christopher Wren...

and the nearby tunnels that allow toads to cross the road...

we came to the Henley Management College and Research Centre at Greenlands...

which offers degree and NVQ courses for individuals and corporate groups.

The village of Medmenham is near the abbey ruins...

where the Hellfire Club held their nocturnal revels.

The Shelleys moved to Albion House in Marlow In 1817...

where she transcribed his Revolt of Islam...

and prepared Frankenstein for publication.

Marlow is also home to the UK headquarters...

of Volvo, Saab and Rank Xerox.

And at Cookham, near the home of Stanley Spencer...

is the headquarters of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

The Fountain of Love at Cliveden was bought in Rome by William Waldorf...

the first Lord Astor, In 1897.

It was at Cliveden that John Profumo first met Christine Keeler...

who was staying at a cottage in the grounds.

She was naked beside the swimming pool.

The Astor's pro-appeasement stance...

and their entertainment of von Ribbentrop and Oswald Mosley...

led to belief in the existence of the Cliveden Set...

a conspiracy giving tacit support to Hitler's conquest of Europe.

Cliveden's prominence has always rested...

on its proximity to London and its views.

The present house is the work of Sir Charles Barry...

the architect of the Palace of Westminster.

And the view along the river was compared by Garibaldi...

with the mighty river prospects of South America.

At Maidenhead, we passed beneath Brunel's Bridge of 1837...

the longest-spanning brickbuilt arches in Europe...

and the scene of Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed.

In a letter from Ethiopia...

Rimbaud imagined a son who would become a famous engineer...

a man rich and powerful through science.

With the departure of Douglas Hurd for the NatWest...

there remained three Old Etonians in a Cabinet of 23.

About an eighth.

Between 1868 and 1955...

of the 294 Cabinet ministers who held office...

over a quarter attended Eton...

so, either Eton is no longer what it was, or more likely...

government is no longer an occupation that is so necessary...

for Etonians to be concerned with.

We left the river bank at Windsor...

where the 180 mile riverside park is blocked because it passes through the Royal Estate.

The riverbank was enclosed by Queen Victoria...

with an Act of Parliament in 1860...

despite the prohibition of the Magna Carta...

which is displayed at the memorial at Runnymede...

erected by the American Bar Association in 1930.

Nearing Heathrow, we came across a factory...

the first we'd seen since leaving Reading.

All the more unusual, since most toys are made in China.

Bendy products are made in natural rubber.

Heathrow Airport, where the first commercial flight took off in 1946...

is the busiest international airport in the world.

Robinson didn't like to continue into London...

fearing reprisals for his earlier study.

So, after a journey on the Underground and many hours wandering lost in tunnels...

we emerged from the workings of the Jubilee Line Extension...

near the site subsequently chosen for the Millennium Exhibition...

and didn't stop until we reached Becton.

East Ham Churchyard, opposite the Becton ski slope...

is the largest churchyard in England.

Robinson was hoping to find some trace of the opium den...

frequented by Dorian Gray by following the route described in the story...

but he couldn't find anyone to ask.

Coming soon on this site...

a Warner Brothers nine screen multiplex cinema...

opening Easter, 1996.

We had read that Ford was seeking government aid...

to build a new small car for Mazda...

but that their Dagenham plant was facing competition from Valencia in Spain.

The development of Rainham Marshes was, for the time being, unlikely...

as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Terminal...

had been confirmed at Ebbsfleet on the south side of the estuary.

Robinson thought he'd discovered Dracula's house, Carfax at Purfleet...

until I pointed out that we were still in Rainham.

When we reached Purfleet...

he was surprised to find the view of London unchanged since he had left...

despite both his predictions of imminent ruin...

and various attempts to link the Channel Tunnel...

with the regeneration of the estuary, balancing the pull of Heathrow in the west.

Robinson had purchased a copy of Port Statistics...

a publication of the Government Statistical Service...

and every night, he pored over it with a calculator...

emerging from time to time with some new revelation.

Port traffic continues to increase...

exports have increased fivefold since 1965...

most rapidly in the late '70s, when North Sea oil was first exploited.

Imports have fluctuated, but overall, have risen by more than a fifth.

The Thames estuary from Teddington to Foulness...

is still the leading port in the UK...

though, in foreign traffic...

the Humber ports outrank the total for London and the Medway.

The docks at Tilbury, sold to its employees in 1992 for £32 million...

was bought recently by Forth Ports PLC for £132 million.

There is a house nearby where Daniel Defoe wrote part of Robinson Crusoe.

Having spent the night at Tilbury in the manner of the pilgrims...

we spent the morning at the Lakeside Shopping Centre at Thurrock...

before crossing the river to Dartford.

Robinson was anxious to see the town which is the birthplace...

of both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones.

It was Environment Week in Dartford.

We visited the landfill at Ebbsfleet...

where Blue Circle proposed to build a new town...

alongside the Channel Tunnel Station...

and Donald Trump is rumoured to be planning casinos.

Marlowe, the narrator of Conrad's Heart of Darkness...

tells his story on a ship lying off Gravesend.

On the following evening, we reached the Isle of Sheppey.

The fully-automated plant at Windham...

produces 120 square metres of plasterboard per minute...

the fastest-running production line in Europe.

Coast Steel Sheerness recycles scrap into steel rod and bar.

The Canadian company evangelises total team culture...

in which overtime is unpaid and union members fear identification.

The Port of Sheerness...

where 300 dockers lost massive share profits...

through being made redundant when they refused a pay cut...

is now owned by the Mersey Dock and Harbour Company.

This was the end of our first journey.

The next day, we returned to Reading.

Two weeks later, we set off again by the packhorse road...

over the hills towards Oxford.

The Oratory is an independent, selective secondary school for boys.

We were pleased to have an opportunity...

to study the authorship of appearances in the English countryside.

As we began our descent, we could see the power station at Didcot...

which generates about 5% of peak demand in England.

Near the river, we came across a break in the hedge...

where an excavation crossed the road.

From Wittenham clumps, we could see that it led to Didcot...

a gas pipeline to supply a new power nation...

being built next to the existing one, which runs on coal.

Didcot is operated by National Power.

[Birds chirping]

[Machinery humming in the distance]

The Wittenham Clumps were the magic landscape of the painter Paul Nsah...

but we had to press on, following the Thames upstream...

deeper into the interior of the country.

[Upbeat instrumental music]

On the evening of the 12th of June, we arrived in Oxford...

the King's headquarters in the Civil War...

and Hitler's preferred capital had he occupied England.

Most of what was once the Morris Motor Works at Cowley...

was demolished in 1993...

and the site is now a business perk owned by British Aerospace...

who sold the Rover Group to BMW in 1994.

There's been little made of the fact...

that Bernd Pischetsrieder, the chairman of BMW...

is the great-nephew of the late Alec Issigonis...

whose innovative designs for Morris and its successors...

could probably have given the company a 10-year lead over Volkswagen...

in the European mass market.

At Magdalene, pronounced "maudlin," College...

we visited the rooms once occupied by Oscar Wilde...

who apparently enjoyed Oxford...

though its atmosphere of stifled sexuality...

must have been even more striking than than it is today.

The Fellows were not allowed to marry until 1877...

and despite, or perhaps because of the small numbers of women...

open homoeroticism is still most unusual.

The President showed us the new buildings by Demetri Porphyrios...

which he described as examples of the architecture of the future.

Our employer has suggested we should buy a car.

While I was impressed by the favourable reports of the current local product...

Robinson preferred the older 1100 we'd seen earlier.

I was sent to make the purchase, and he went off to the Bodleian.

We visited Christ Church, where as librarian...

Robert Burton lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life.

The Anatomy of Melancholy appeared In 1621...

under the pseudonym Democritus, Junior.

"The Jacobean melancholy, like our own," said Robinson...

"was the result of a disorientation.

"You and I are deeply disillusioned people."

Burton was vicar of St Thomas the Martyr...

between 1616 and his death in 1639.

The porch is his addition.

I think we were never so happy as on the day of our pilgrimage...

to the memorials of Robert Burton.

The car was fitted with a radio.

It turned out that it had belonged to a member...

of a successful Oxford pop group.

[Aeroplane engine humming]

Opposite the airport is Campsfield House...

the privately-run detention centre where up to 200 asylum seekers...

are held in prison-like conditions.

In April, the inexperience of its management and staff...

had been severely criticised by the Chief Inspector of Prisons.

Campsfield House is run by Group 4 Security.

[Rock music]

"Whatever is fitted in any sort...

"to excite the idea of pain and danger...

"that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible," says Burke...

"is a source of the sublime."

[Rock music continues]

We had arranged to visit the new Aston Martin works at Bloxham.

The literary stereotype of the sadistic Englishmen...

endures in the drug excesses of contemporary aristocrats...

and as James Bond.

Robinson had never paid much attention to James Bond...

but he wondered if we shouldn't have bought a faster car.

We passed the United States Air Force's 603 Communications Squadron...

at RAF Croughton...

and the Defence Clothing and Textile Agency at Bicester.

In the afternoon, we came to Stowe...

described by the National Trust as "Britain's largest work of art."

The house has been a public school since 1923.

In the landscaped gardens...

based on Milton's description in Paradise Lost...

is Kent's Temple of British Worthies...

where we paid our respects to Milton for Pandemonium...

Shakespeare for Yorick...

and Locke for Duration and its Simple Modes...

and the Succession of Ideas.

"For whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds...

"we know that we do exist...

"and so we animate the existence...

"or the continuation of the existence of ourselves."

At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing built the machine...

that cracked the Enigma naval codes In 1942.

On June the 10th, we arrived in Milton Keynes...

visiting the multi-denominational cathedral in Silbury Boulevard...

opposite the shopping centre.

We stayed in Milton Keynes for a fortnight, leaving on July the second.

We couldn't find the site where the Wiccans worship, which we'd read about...

but there is a holy wall at Stevington which was easy to find.

That night, we slept in a shed.

It was never easy to find a decent place to stay...

but we generally took whet was offered, imagining that...

the problem of hotels in England would be of interest to our employer.

We woke up outside what we thought must be the biggest...

and is, apparently, the busiest landfill in the country:

one of several sites which had previously been exploited...

by the London Brick Company.

The next day's pilgrimages were to the airship hangers...

at Carlington, and to Bedford.

[Bell tolling in the distance]

At a garage near St Neots...

as we were thinking of trading in the 1100...

for an old Volvo full of second-hand books...

we heard on the radio that John Major had been re-elected...

leader of the Tory Party.

That evening, we reached Cambridge...

which we had thought might be more congenial than Oxford.

Our employer had been unable to secure us an invitation to dine at Peterhouse...

the oldest, the nastiest college...

so we couldn't confirm its reputation for orgiastic revelry...

or gauge any lingering influence of Maurice Cowling...

the unusually right-wing historian who was Michael Portillo's tutor.

[Bell tolling]

In the morning, we had a look at Jesus College...

where Laurence Sterne was an undergraduate...

and where the patrons of architecture of the future...

were, in our opinion, at least better advised than those in Oxford.

After lunch and several games of table football...

we drove off towards Felixstowe.

The Devil's Dyke marks the boundary of Cambridge here in Suffolk...

soon after which we joined the newly renamed A14 trunk road...

European Route E28, which has cut journey time to the port.

St Edmundsbury is the town of all this part of England...

in proportion to its bigness, most thronged with gentry.

People of the best fashion and the most polite conversation...

of which other writers have talked very largely...

and perhaps a little too much.

Ipswich is still a considerable port, probably more so than in Defoe's time...

with large tonnages of cereals and animal feed.

But our destination was the Port of Felixstowe...

which is owned by Hutchinson Whampoa, tho Hong Kong group...

who, with British Aerospace own the Orange Mobile Telephone network.

Felixstowe handles half of all UK deep sea container traffic...

in which imports slightly outweigh exports.

It is the fourth largest container port in Europe, 15th in the world.

[Machine beeping]

We were booked on the 11:00 ferry to Zeebrugge...

Robinson said that he had to meet our employer at a conference in Lille.

I spent a few days resting...

then set off to walk along the coast of Calais where we had arranged to meet at the ferry.

I visited some friends I hadn't seen for several years...

and spent a weekend with Bray-Dunes, where I lived In the early 1970s.

Freight through Dover has increased tenfold since 1965.

Despite the tunnel, over half the UK's international goods vehicle traffic...

still runs through the port. One million vehicles per year.

Nationally, roll-on roll-off traffic is about equal to that in containers...

but the rate of increase has been much greater.

It's always difficult coming back to England.

But we were expected in Brighton, and soon forgot our bad thoughts.

The Victory, Nelson's flagship is preserved at Portsmouth...

and is the principal monument of the 18th century British Navy...

the largest industrial unlit of its day in the western world...

on whose supremacy was built the capitalism of land...

finance and commercial services centred on the city of London...

which dominates the economy of the south of England.

Those of us aesthetes

who view the passing of the visible industrial economy with regret...

and who longed for an authenticity of appearance...

based on manufacturing and innovative modern design...

are inclined to view this English culture...

as a bizarre and damaging anachronism.

But if so, it is not an unsuccessful one.

Our visit to Portsmouth coincided with that of a group of Sandhurst cadets.

In the afternoon, we visited Southampton, home port of the Titanic...

where the Spitfire was developed...

and the new dark fibre optic were invented at the University.

"A sea port ls a pleasant place for a soul...

"worn out with life's struggles," says Baudelaire.

"The wide expanse of the sky, the mobile clouds...

"the ever-changing colours of the sea..."

A ship like the P&O's Colombo Bay has a crew of 20...

and carries up to 4,200 containers...

each one of which may be the full load of an articulated lorry.

The M3 at Twyford Down had opened in the previous October.

At Newbury, the bypass had been confirmed...

a few days after the Tory leadership election...

and people were already living in the trees.

Towards Dorchester, we passed Charborough Park.

Col Henry Drax left Yorkshire after the Civil War and settled in Barbados...

where, in a few years, from £300 in sugar plantations...

he acquired an estate of £8,000 to £9,000 a year.

His successor married the heiress of the Earls of Charborough.

Following the Enclosure Acts...

agricultural wages in Dorset had dropped to nine shillings a week.

George Loveless and others tried to get the wages increased...

but they were lowered to six shillings.

"We have injured no man's reputation, character, person or property.

'"We were uniting together to protect ourselves, our wives and our children...

"from utter degradation and starvation."

In England, 1.1% of employees work in agriculture.

A coffee shop assistant at Tesco eans £3.53 an hour.

We very often ate in supermarkets.

For the provincial spy or anyone in a hurry...

who needs petrol, parking, telephone, postal services...

clean toilets and palatable food, there's really no practical alternative.

On the other side of Dorchester is Poundbury...

the project of the Prince of Wales...

which with the magazine Perspectives and the Institute of Architecture...

is the outcome of his 10-year opposition to contemporary architecture.

The project was planned, apparently with some difficulties...

by the architect Leon Krier...

and has been executed by the Percy Thomas Partnership of Cardiff.

Our arrival in Yeovil coincided with that of Tim Eggar...

the Trade and Industry minister, who was to announce that...

Westland had been awarded a £25 billion order...

to build American attack helicopters for the Army...

in preference to the domestic options offered by British Aerospace and GEC.

Westland is new owned by GKN.

For the rest of the day, we looked at some non-agricultural land uses.

We knew of six Jane Austen film or television adaptations underway...

all involving country houses, mostly in the west of England.

Sense and Sensibility was made at Montacute.

We called at Worthy Farm near Glastonbury where the festival site was being cleared...

and Halecombe Quarry at Leigh-on-Mendip.

The DOE believes that the demand for aggregates...

could more than double in the next 20 years.

On the 14th July, we reached the Bristol Channel.

We were expected at the Portbury Dock.

Bristol imports more cars than any other port in the UK...

and had the best PR of any port we visited.

Bristol is closer to the enormous markets of the Americas, Australia...

and the Pacific rim than any other port in the UK.

The port of Bristol is the only major UK port to employ a permanent workforce.

There were 60,000 cars at Portbury...

ready for the new registration year on August 1st...

including many Daewoos from South Korea, new on the UK market.

Two weeks later, we came back again to visit the automated plasterboard factory...

on the coal stockyard to which material: are conveyed directly from the ships.

The coal is mostly from Richard's Bay in South Africa...

and is carried to power stations by train.

In Bristol, we visited the LLandoger Trow...

where Defoe is supposed to have met Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe.

LLandoger Trow was a boat that carried coal to Bristol from South Wales

In Richard Jeffries' After London...

the red rocks of Bristol are the western extremity...

of the lake that has covered most of southern England...

and the Severn is silted up.

Robinson had been most affected by the book...

which we'd heard one night being read on the radio...

and had mistaken for a documentary.

Although it was then the hottest day of the year, we walked out onto the bridge.

In the afternoon, we visited Filton.

Our employer had given Robinson a copy...

of Capitalism, Culture and Decline In Britain, 1750-1990...

by W.D. Rubinstein...

who notes the close and harmonious connection before 1832...

between city finance, land, the professions and the government...

as contractor, loan agent and originator of old corruption...

the extraordinary system of lucrative perquisites...

which came to fortunate aristocrats, government employees and their relatives.

The British government itself acted as the central matrix of this system...

directly through contracts and perquisite, indirectly by maintaining...

British control of the seas, the Empire and the balance of power.

"Britain's role as the world's fifth largest trading nation...

"is essential for its economic well-being," said Lord Mackey, the Lord Chancellor...

during the first reading of the Intelligence Services Bill in 1993.

It was very hot.

The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency at Malvern...

is a world centre for liquid crystal and semiconductor research.

"They talk much of mines of gold and silver," said Defoe...

"which are certainly to be found here, if they were but looked for...

"and that Malvern would outdo Potosi."

It was the driest summer since records began.

We wanted to have a look at Blakenhurst Prison near Redditch...

run by UK Detention Services...

one of six Bullingdon type prisons based on an original design...

by Building Design Partnership.

Merry Hill near Dudley is the largest shopping centre in Europe.

More than four and a half million people are within 65 minutes drlve.

It is connected to the nearby waterfront development by a monorail...

though this was not operating on the day of our visit.

At the top of the hill are the offices of the Child Support Agency.

The waterfront and Merry Hill were built on the site...

of the former Round Oak Steel Works.

Merry Hill attracts 25 million shopping visits a year...

and its effects are felt in towns 200 miles away.

Robinson wanted to visit Halesowen...

to see the factory where the supergun parts have been produced.

We were both ill from the cumulative effects...

of months of bad food and living in hotels...

and were becoming seriously worried about the weather.

Robinson imagined the entire landscape occupied...

in manufacturing goods for export to the Middle East.

The West Midlands are traditionally the region where elections are decided.

In the Dudley West by-election the previous December...

Labour's winning share of the vote had been their biggest in any by-election...

in a Tory seat since 1933.

On August 11th, we reached West Bromwich...

where we had come to see the headquarters of Hyundai, UK...

which is part-owned by a company called International Motors.

Their Phoenix International Industrial Estate...

is next to the factory of Phoenix Drawn Tube.

In an essay by the geographer Doreen Massey, we had read:

"Amid the Ridley Scott visions of world cities...

"the writing about skyscraper fortresses, Baudrillard visions of hyperspace...

"most people still live in places like Halston or West Bromwich."

Across the road is a chemical manufacturing company called Robinson Brothers.

Robinson introduced himself to the managing director and explained our project.

We were very generously looked after for the next two weeks while we convalesced.

"Much of life, for many people," read Robinson...

"even in the heart of the first world...

"consists of waiting in a bus shelter with your shopping...

"for a bus that never comes."

The bus shelter was opposite the promises of Smallmen Lubricants.

When the bus finally arrived, Robinson had disappeared...

to a sexual encounter with a stranger he contacted through the internet...

while we were waiting at the bus stop.

Our employer had equipped us with a notebook computer and a mobile phone.

We walked over to the Hiatt Works in Great Barr.

Hiatt is one of the oldest firms in Birmingham.

Established In 1780 in the era of the slave trade...

who make handcuffs and other items...

and whose name recently still appeared on leg irons used in Saudi prisons.

Robinson went in and bought a pair of handcuffs.

Beneath Spaghetti Junction, we met a man with a dog...

who said he'd been paid for denouncing illegal immigrants...

who'd been working on repairs to the structure.

We were very relieved to reach the Jaguar body plant at Castle Bromwich...

where Ford had secured government investment for X-200 small saloon.

This is the factory where thousands of Spitfires were built during World War ll.

The next day, we left Birmingham.

Neither of us knows anything about Johnson...

except that The Anatomy of Melancholy was the only book that ever took him out of bed...

two hours earlier than he wanted to rise.

We crossed the River Trent to Burton where we stayed the night and woke up very early.

[Fast-paced instrumental music]

The day we arrived in Derby...

Rolls Royce announced half year profits up 43% to £70 million...

though the chairman would not rule out more job losses...

and the shares fell 8%.

"The English are acknowledged world leaders in fetishism and S&M"'...

Robinson road in the paper.

The only company in the world that makes latex sheeting suitable for fetish wear...

is based in Derbyshire.

We wanted to visit Robin Hood's Well, near Eastwood...

but the Wood had been fenced off by the owner.

We did not go any further in this direction.

We turned towards the northwest...

and the next morning set off towards Liverpool, following the Derwent Valley.

[Fast-paced instrumental music resumes]

[Birds calling]

Tesco is still expanding in the north of England.

The distribution centre at Middlewich holds 43 million cases...

about 9 days' stock for 120 stores...

and delivers as far away as Gateshead.

Six more superstores are scheduled to open in the north by May 1997.

[Fast-paced instrumental music resumes]

On September 4th, we arrived in Liverpool.

In the statistics for 1993...

the Mersey Dock and Harbour Company wee the most profitable...

of any port authority listed.

In the last 30 years, Liverpool's traffic has fluctuated...

more than that of any other UK port.

It is now about the same as in 1965...

three times more than in the early '80s...

and Liverpool is one of the biggest ports in England.

Liverpool imports coal for Powergen from the USA and Columbia...

and exports enormous tonnages of scrap...

mostly to the Far East and Spain.

The company did not want us to photograph the scrap.

Not long after our visit, they sacked 329 dock workers...

for refusing to cross a picket line.

When dockers in New York began secondary protests...

the ACL container line...

said it would leave Liverpool unless the lock-out there was ended.

And the Mersey Company's share value dropped by £70 million.

The biggest shareholder in the Mersey Dock and Harbour Company...

is the Treasury.

Our next appointments were in Warrington.

The Thorn Cross Young Offender institution...

which had been chosen to become the first US-style boot camp...

and the KinderCare Nursery, the first to open in the UK.

KinderCare runs over a thousand centres in 38 American states.

Warrington is near the crossing point of two motorways...

and has attracted many large distribution centres.

We stayed the night in a Whitbread Travel Inn near Wigan...

that had opened the previous week.

Our rooms were quite new.

No one had ever stayed in them before.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened on September 18th, 1830.

Robinson took me to see the memorial to William Huskisson...

the Cabinet Minister who was knocked down by the rocket...

as it passed the dignitaries gathered for the occasion.

British Coal closed Parkside Colliery in 1993...

and cleared the site after an 18-month-long women's protest vigil.

They proposed a massive distribution centre for Morrison's Supermarket...

with 5,000 vehicle movements daily.

The coal used to go by train to Fiddler's' Ferry Power Station...

which is now supplied from the terminal we'd seen in Liverpool Docks.

We had lunch in a brand new Marks and Spencer...

on the edge of Warrington.

Robinson told me he had a relative...

who emigrated to Canada from Warrington in 1935.

He walked to the locks at Latchford and boarded one of the Manchester liners...

that sailed to the Great Lakes until the late '70s.

We arrived in Manchester on September 19th.

In 1937...

Turing published his paper on computable numbers.

Two years later, he joined the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park...

in the team that cracked the German Navy's Enigma Code...

so that convoys could dodge U-boats in the North Atlantic.

He continued his computer work at Manchester University...

becoming Director of the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine.

In 1954...

a police investigation of a burglary at his home...

led to his being charged with gross indecency.

He pleaded guilty and was put on probation...

on condition that he submitted to hormone treatment.

Shortly afterwards, he killed himself...

by eating en apple impregnated with cyanide.

He was 42.

[Solemn instrumental music]

Murray's Mill in Ancoats was built in 1798.

It is the world's oldest steam-driven mill...

and as such, is described as the first factory.

Engels visited Ancoats frequently in 1842...

when working for the firm of Erman and Engels in Manchester.

His Condition of the Working Class in England...

was published in 1845 in Leipzig...

but not in Britain until 1892.

We stayed in another Travel Inn at Milnrow, near Rochdale...

which had been open for about a month.

These places always seem to be hosting conferences for their own executives.

John Milne was a civil engineer with a passion for volcanoes.

He travelled overland to Tokyo...

where he was Professor of Geology and Mining...

and developed the seismograph.

He wrote many books, including some science fiction.

We had ascended the Pennines at Blackstone Edge...

by the route of Daniel Defoe.

When we arrived at Yorkshire Waters Reservoir near Ripponden...

there were 24 tankers waiting to load water to be taken into Halifax.

At the time, there were altogether 40 lorries...

working from this reservoir, 24 hours a day.

Later in the year, there were as many as 1,000 tankers...

moving water in West Yorkshire.

Near the treatment works in Halifax...

someone told us where they'd just seen another leak.

So we went and had a look.

We had an appointment at the wind farm...

on Oxenhope Moor, above the town.

We're both very fond of Halifax.

It was the first place we'd had a decent cup of coffee in months.

At Saltaire, north of Bradford...

Pace Microtechnology make digital television equipment for export...

to the Far East and Australasia.

The V&A never managed to move their South Indian collection...

to the Lister Mill in Bradford, but the police station is new.

In Leeds, the site of the famous Quarry Hill flats...

is now occupied by the Dept of Social Security.

Junction 27 is a leisure park...

Wakefield 41 is a distribution estate where Morrison have their depots.

"On the threshold of our century," Henri Bergson wrote...

"If realty could immediately reach our senses and our consciousness...

"if we could come into direct contact with things and with each other...

"probably art would be useless, or rather, we should all be artists."

While we were in Wakefield, Robinson met someone who told him that...

Bergson's mother came from Doncaster.

There are three prisons in Doncaster.

The largest is run by a subsidiary of the American Wackhut Corporation.

It has the cheapest cost per prisoner in the UK...

a non-union staff, and a record of violence and chaos.

Doncaster prison was designed by Seifert Limited.

Bentley used to be one of the most left-wing pits in Yorkshire.

When it closed, it was producing the UK's cheapest coal...

undercutting oven Columbian imports.

There were 600,000 tonnes stock piled at the pit.

RJB owned 17 of the 31 surviving pits and have contracts...

with the power generators until 1998.

There are 1,000 miners still working in the industry...

1% of the number in 1946.

The advancement of Stella Remington, MI5's former director...

followed her role directing sabotage of the miners' strike.

And the amateur interventions of David Hart...

Old Etonian and former bankrupt...

began with his funding strike-breaking miners.

He is new unpaid advisor to Michael Portillo at the Ministry of Defence.

A third of all UK deep-mined coal is burnt at Drax.

Hugo Drax was James Bond's opponent in Monnraker.

On October 5th, we entered the network area...

of Kingston Communications on the north bank of the Humber.

Kingston Communications ls owned through the City Council...

by the citizens of Hull.

Robinson took me to the fish dock.

He had read how the Navy used to recruit trawler men as unpaid spies.

Daniel Defoe was happy to welcome William III to England.

This statue was erected in the year 1734...

to the memory of King William III, our great deliverer.

Robinson and I are proud to recollect our own experiences...

of the glorious revolution.

Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull on September 1st, 1651.

Kingston Communications has invented in a satellite...

and has a worker-director on its board.

William Wilberforce was born in Hull In 1759.

Hull is the eastern English port on the Dublin to Berlin motorway.

In the last century, the traffic was the other way...

as more than a million emigrants from Central and Eastern Europe...

passed through the port on their way to Liverpool in the new world.

Many settled in Yorkshire, including perhaps the Levisons...

whose daughter Catherine wee Henri Bergson's mother.

We crossed the estuary to Immingham.

To materialists like us, lmmingham is the second largest port in the UK.

And yet, there are few ships and we saw no seafarers.

Ships come in and out on a single tide, no one has time to get off.

Volvo, Saab and BMW import cars...

but most of the traffic is in bulk fuel and iron ore...

which involves very little labour.

Three million tonnes of coal a year are imported through Immingham.

Hull's biggest private sector employer is British Aerospace at Brough...

where it builds Hawks for export to Indonesia.

We visited Scarborough to confirm the details of Rimbaud's promontory palace.

Rimbaud was in Java in 1876.

In the afternoon, we sat on a bench outside St Mary's Church, Whitby.

It is about 100 years since the Demeter arrived in Whitby Harbour...

It's 50 great wooden boxes of earth were consigned to Mr. Samuel Billington...

a Whitby solicitor, who had them sent on to Purfleet by train.

Capt. James Cook began his career as ship's boy on the Freelove.

On the evening of the 11th of October, we arrived in Redcar.

British Steel's plant at Redcar is one of the four major steel works in the country.

It produces 70,000 tonnes of steel a week...

70% of which is exported, much of it to the Far East...

and employs hardly any people.

The steel industry's current export surplus...

is about three quarters of a billion pounds.

Wilton is one the biggest chemical production sites in Europe.

It produces about 40 intermediate products.

The chemical industry's export surplus is about £4 billion.

The service sector's share of exports has declined since 1960

as a result of the mere extinction of the merchant shipping fleet.

The Tees is the UK's biggest single port.

It imports iron ore and coal...

and exports oil and petroleum products.

Unemployment in Middlesbrough is 17%, the highest in the country...

which has the least regulated labour market in the industrialised world...

and the highest prison population of any country in Europe.

We stopped to watch the Queen arrive at the Samsung site at Wynyard Perk.

With £58 million of government aid...

Samsung have invested £450 million in a plant...

which employs between 500 and 600 people...

producing microwave ovens and computer monitors.

There was a small demonstration by their committee...

to defend socialism in South Korea.

Wynyard Park is the estate of Sir John Hall...

the developer of the Gateshead Metro Centre.

He bought it in 1981 for £3 million from the Marquis of Londonderry...

whose family were formerly coal owners...

and has developed golf courses, housing estates and a hotel...

which was not the one we stayed in.

In the morning, we travelled south to Shandy Hall.

Here dwelt Laurence Sterne, many years incumbent of Coxwold.

Here he wrote Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.

He died in London in 1768.

Near Harrogate, we passed...

the US National Security Agency's installation at Menwith Hill.

This is the largest signals intelligence base in the world...

and eavesdrops telephone and other communications.

Some of the most sensitive of which concern the exploitation...

of Buckminsterfullerenes.

Robinson is beginning to act strangely.

As we came down from the Pennines, we passed Samlesbury...

and he tried to get past the security.

In Preston, he went to another British Aerospace plant...

but it had been demolished.

He kept trying to tell me about David Hart...

and his attempts to get the MID to abandon the Tornado...

and lease second-hand F-16s...

about Gothic cathedrals...

and that Hollywood had overtaken aerospace as the leading US export.

On the evening of 23rd of October...

he told me he was going out to steal a piece of equipment...

from one of the Saudi Arabian Tornadoes.

Blackpool is Robinson's home town.

His parents used to have a nursery...

which specialised in strains of giant vegetables.

He explained that life on earth evolved after the arrival...

of Buckminsterfullerenes in meteorites.

He showed me where the Wellington Bomber was built with the geodetic structure...

invented by Barnes Wallis.

We arrived in Blackpool on the second day of Diwali...

and the last week of the illuminations.

Robinson says that Blackpool holds the key to his Utopia.

He often repeated Chamfort's favourite saying:

"In each man's life, there comes the moment...

"when his heart must either burst or turn to stone."

Blackpool stands between us and revolution.

Radiation levels in the Irish Sea are higher...

than in any sea, anywhere in the world.

We cross the lrish Sea to Barrow...

where the third Trident submarine was nearing completion.

Robinson said he had to be in Newcastle by the end of the week.

Then he said he needed a day off to visit a relation.

He took me to the dump at Drigg where radioactive waste...

is stored in deteriorating conditions...

and to the site whore Nirex is proposing to build...

an underground repository for plutonium and other high-level waste.

At Sellafield, the 1963 reactors' heat exchangers...

were being removed as the first stage of dismantling the reactor.

The Thorpe reprocessing plant had finally started up...

In February 1995.

He said it was unlikely ever to be even an economic proposition.

He told me that the plutonium aftermath of the nuclear industry...

will remain lethal for quarter of a million years.

At Wordsworth's birthplace...

I thought he was going to go in and register a complaint.

On the 30th of October, without warning...

we were told our contracts had been terminated...

and we heard on the car radio that a Tornado had crashed in the North Sea.

I cannot tell you where Robinson finally found his Utopia.

[Birds chirping]

[Solemn instrumental music]

[Music intensifies]

[Solemn instrumental music continues]