How The Victorians Built Britain's Greatest Bridges

In the long reign of a single queen, Britain changed the world and was itself utterly transformed. Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. By the time she died in 1901, we had made the modern world. It was a time of brilliant engineering, pioneering innovation. All of it driven by fearless men and women who dreamt big and shaped the country we live in today. Fast and effective new transport systems shrink the world. You travel further, faster, the railways compress space and time. Startling innovations above and below ground saved lives. We've grabbed a saw like this. It's more like carpentry than surgery. Groundbreaking ideas nurtured our minds and souls. It was feeling like you were dancing in one of the great European palaces. And a revolution in law and order set us on course for the freedoms we take for granted today. You're brought from the darkness of the prisons into this glory. It's fantastic, isn't it? It is. This is the story of how the Victorians built Britain. The Romans gave us timber arches. Medieval Britain, stone bridges. But as Queen Victoria came to the throne, a different material, iron, gave engineers the chance to tear up the rule book. It's the scale of it, isn't it, when you go underneath it? And build the impossible. God, that's like a cathedral. The scene was set for those masters of Victorian engineering to build some of the greatest bridges in the world. When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the Industrial Revolution was well under way. It was based on the nation's huge reserves of coal and iron ore. From coal came coke, a material used to smelt iron ore to produce iron. It would be used to create the world's first iron bridge in 1779, which still stands over the River Severn in Shropshire. The iron bridge marked a new era. By 1875, Britain had conquered iron and was producing nearly half the world's output. This new iron age coincided with an explosion of the road and rail network. The race was on to connect the furthest reaches of the country. The Victorians would need a new generation of bridges to take road and rail where they'd never been before. Some of the greatest engineers who've ever lived used iron to create the modern world. Telford, Stephenson, Brunel, always pushing at the boundaries of the possible. And nowhere more so than in this spectacular symbol of Victorian ambition and ingenuity, the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Spanning the Avon Gorge in Bristol, the epic Clifton Suspension Bridge stretches over 400 metres. When it was built, it was the highest bridge in Britain. Riding high on the nation's iron boom, this beauty is the creation of the engineering legend, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Civil engineer Dr Bill Harvey is a world expert on bridges, who knows the remarkable story behind this amazing structure. It's a wonderful bridge, but why ever did they build it here? Well, because the rich people who had townhouses in Clifton wanted to get across the gorge. And it's a long way down and a long way back up the other side. But it's a huge project. It is a massive project. Just so as the rich people of Clifton could cross the river and walk in the woods. They were really quite rich. Bristol had grown rich on the back of the slave trade. Local merchants had shipped more than half a million African slaves before the Emancipation Act freed them in 1833. When it abolished slavery, the government gave Bristol slave owners half a million pounds in compensation, around 25 million today. The rich wanted their bridge, but the vast expanse of the Avon Gorge presented Brunel with a problem. A traditional stone arch bridge would be simply too heavy. Brunel's solution was a suspension bridge, which would be lighter and stronger than any other type of bridge over that distance. Nothing on this scale had ever been built before, but the young Brunel wasn't afraid of risk. How old was he then? Twenty-three. Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Just a boy. Give me some idea of what sort of engineering challenge it was to span this gap. To me, the biggest problem is the distance between the towers was too great. Brunel's bosses were concerned that even a suspension bridge would collapse over such a huge distance. He'd have to shorten the gap between the towers by moving them towards each other. His solution was a piece of engineering cleverness that still stands today. A massive brick foundation for the Lee Woods Tower, built in front of the cliff. He made the gap as narrow as he could, and that's a big piece of work. In 1831, work finally began on the 26-metre towers that would hold the bridge up, one perched proudly on its new foundation. But trouble lay round the corner. In October that year, the Bristol riots exploded onto the streets. In a city divided, the wealthy had the vote and the poor wanted change. The riots raged for three days. Angry mobs destroyed the jail and the bishop's palace. At least 12 people were killed and more than 80 injured. By the time the riots died down, investors had lost confidence in Bristol and the future of Brunel's bridge hung in the balance. For a long time the bridge wasn't built at all, there was two pillars just standing there. That's right and the engineers saw it as a monument to failure. Ever the opportunist, Brunel turned the disaster to his advantage by creating a thrilling ride across the gorge. They built a temporary cable bridge from a whole strip of iron bars welded together and pulled across the river and they had a little basket underneath it with a pulley and a rope to pull people backwards and forwards on. Quite an exciting ride I would think. The contraption, which Brunel called the suspended traveller, was originally used to get builders across the gorge. The public were nervous at the thought of taking a ride in what was effectively an early cable car. So the man himself volunteered to be first across. A rather dangerous ride, wouldn't it be? It got stuck once or twice. What, people hanging off a basket in the middle there? Yeah, and when it happened to Brunel, he clambered up and freed the pulley and they pulled him back. But what happened to other people, I don't really know. The basket ride became a popular tourist attraction, with passengers paying a shilling to wobble their way across the Avon Gorge. It raised around £164, or £10,000 today, towards the bridge, but it was nowhere near enough to get it built. The only signs of Brunel's Bridge were its two lonely towers, one of them standing on that vast foundation that would hold a secret for nearly 140 years. The Victorian era saw the birth of a new Iron Age. It enabled great engineers to build the biggest, strongest, longest bridges that the nation and the world had ever seen. One of the most majestic was Isambard Kingdom Brunel's masterpiece, the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Such a spectacular place, isn't it? For over a century, people thought they knew everything there was to know about Brunel's so-called first love. But nearly 140 years after this icon of engineering was built... And through here. ...routine maintenance unearthed Brunel's engineering secrets. Go on, Bill, after you. Deep in the enormous foundations beneath the Leigh Woods Tower. And then if you come through here... A cathedral, isn't it? I mean, it's that kind of shape. Those have got a very, very thin stalactites, haven't they? Yeah. Yeah, they're about pencil thickness and just a thin skin of stone. It's an eerie place though, isn't it? It's an eerie place, yeah. Amazing thing is, nobody knew this space existed. How many of these vaults are there? Twelve. This is the biggest, is it? This is the biggest. How was it discovered that this was actually hollow? By resurfacing on the footpath upstairs. There was a manhole which had been paved over, and when they lifted it, they found a way in. Just completely by accident? Just completely by accident. Why did Brunel build it alarmingly, to me, hollow? Common sense tells you it's got to be much less solid and strong than something that's been packed. If this was all solid, then the towers would be standing on the stone, whereas built like this, the towers are standing on the skin, so they're okay. Solid walls or skins provide a firm foundation. These walls are up to 13 metres thick in places, so they're not going anywhere. Brunel knew that hollow foundations can be safer than solid ones as they reduce the overall weight of the entire structure bearing down. So you're actually saying that it's stronger being hollow than it would be if it was solid? Solid? Solid, yes. That rather defies common sense. It does, but that's what engineering is, it's defying common sense all too often. If Brunel defied common sense, it was only when he'd calculated that he could. Brunel didn't have the benefits of modern day computers to rely on. Instead, he used his brilliantly mathematical mind. He was one of the first really calculating civil engineers. So yes, he did do the sums. He didn't just put his finger in his ear and say, build it. He did work out what the tension was going to be and how much the cables would sag, how much they would move. And he was certainly clever enough to work that out, which isn't trivial calculations. Sadly, Brunel would die before his bridge could be built. But thanks to the enduring brilliance of his calculations, Victorian innovators William Barlow and John Hawkshaw could continue Brunel's legacy. They promised to complete the Clifton Suspension Bridge as a memorial to Brunel. The fact that Barlow and Hawkshaw took it on at the end and finished it, and they were two real towers of late Victorian engineering. It clearly meant that, to them, it was something very special. What does it tell us about the Victorians? Just that they were brave. To me, yeah, we can do this. Let's make it happen. When Brunel's Bridge finally opened in 1864, it was the longest single-span chain bridge in Victoria's empire. For the Clifton elites, it was the ultimate symbol of status and power. Victorian engineers like Brunel, Thomas Telford, Robert Stephenson were constantly pushing each other to test iron to its limits. In 1826, Telford made waves with his Menai Suspension Bridge, a wrought iron road bridge linking the island of Anglesey and the mainland of Wales. Not to be outdone, in 1849 Stephenson unveiled his High Level Bridge. It was a combined road and rail bridge spanning the River Tyne. In it, he used 5,000 tonnes of iron. The metal was fuelling a railway and bridge-building mania. In 1846, there were more than 200 Acts of Parliament for proposed railway lines to connect the nation. This was the Victorian dot-com boom. Iron had seemed to be the perfect bridge-building material, but for a celebrated Victorian engineer, one project proved to be literally a bridge too far. Civil engineer Thomas Bouch had risen to fame with his light and low-cost viaducts, but he dreamt of walking amongst the Brunels and the Telfords. Bouch had a reputation for quick and cheap bridges, and in Scotland he'd been chosen to build a bridge over the River Tay. The Tay bridge broke all the records. It used 10 million bricks, 7,000 tons of iron, and 2 million rivets. It was by far the longest bridge in the world. At nearly two miles long, Bouch needed his single track bridge to be light and cheap. He chose a lightweight lattice design which would help to keep the cost down. For the thin columns, he used cast iron, which is melted, cooled and poured into a mould, making it cheaper and quicker than its stronger cousin, wrought iron. The Tay Bridge opened in May 1878 to great excitement. The railways got their profits, and Queen Victoria knighted Bouch for his achievements. On the night of 28 December 1879, fierce winter gales battered the Firth and the Tay Bridge. As a passenger train sped over the high girders, the central spans of the bridge gave way. Eyewitnesses said they saw sparks fly from the wheels. The bridge collapsed, plunging the engine, all six carriages, and everyone on board into the icy waters below. It's thought 59 people died that day. Among the victims were Bouch's own son-in-law. In less than a year, Bouch fell from fated knight to disgraced engineer. Technology consultant Mick Steeper knows what went wrong that night. Mick, what caused the Tay Bridge disaster? The brittleness of the iron from which it was built, particularly the cast-iron columns, and they were the eventual site of the failure that brought the bridge down. And they just broke? They broke because the bridge was flexing too much. If you repeatedly bend iron, it will eventually break, and that's what happened to the Tay Bridge. The Tay Bridge had been stretched to breaking point by the gale force winds and the weight of overhead trains. A devastating passenger death toll taught Queen Victoria's engineers that they'd finally pushed iron too far. In the wake of the Tay Bridge disaster, the nation must have been in shock. So what was the answer? We needed a material for large scale engineering that didn't have that brittle character, that was more flexible, less prone to fatigue, and the modern material that we know is steel. And of course the Tay Bridge disaster was probably the single event that accelerated the transition from iron to steel in the minds of civil engineers. Steel is iron that's been mixed with carbon and other metals. It's harder, stronger and more flexible than iron. Just over 300 miles away from the Tay, Sheffield was the hub of the Victorian steel industry, its workshops making the engineering tools that were building the nation. But there was one flaw in this marvellous metal. It could only be made in small batches and therefore make small things, hopeless for big projects like bridges. Who came up with the answer? Well, there was quite a race to develop the technology and it was Bessemer in Britain that won. In 1856, Henry Bessemer unveiled the Bessemer converter, allowed air to be blown through the molten iron to remove impurities. A game changer like this would soon convert 25 tons of iron into steel in just half an hour. For the first time in world history, steel could be cheaply mass produced right here in Sheffield. So Bessemer's process, his invention, what impact did it have on the design and the building and the construction of bridges in particular? Well it was massive because as soon as steel starts coming into bridges you've got new design techniques and they become much more efficient and the prospects of building bridges across wider stretches of water becomes possible too. In this new Victorian era of cheap and plentiful steel, there were winners all round. Bessemer was knighted. His inventions brought him wealth and a fine London mansion. Less than 20 years after Bessemer's converter arrived in Sheffield, as much as a third of the city's steel output was being exported across the Atlantic to build American railroads. Closer to home, the Victorians would be testing steel's metal in their biggest bridge yet. As the railways expanded, so did the demand for longer, stronger bridges and the metal to build them. But with high rewards came great risks, and the Tay Bridge disaster had brought iron down to earth with a bump. Now, Victorian steel was about to be put to the test in the biggest bridge the world had ever seen. In 1883, work began on the Forth Bridge, a Victorian feat which would come to be known as the eighth wonder of the world. To witness its full glory, I'm sailing out on the Forth Estuary with Mona Arndt, a civil engineer who knows this marvel inside out. It's the scale of it, isn't it, when you go underneath it? It's absolutely incredible. It's the first major structure in the UK that was built from steel. I mean, it's a mile, isn't it? It's 2.5km in length, and even nowadays it's still the second longest. A single cantilever bridge in the world. Really? So it's incredible. The visionary engineers behind the huge structure were John Fowler and Benjamin Baker. They'd have to make sure the fourth bridge was strong and safe. In the back of everybody's mind must have been the other big bridge, the Tay Bridge. So it's safe to say that the public were very nervous, they had lost a lot of the confidence in tall big structures like this, so it was really important that now Fowler and Baker designed a really, really strong and sturdy bridge to kind of ease everyone's minds and to make them feel safe when they cross it. To not only be strong and safe... But to look strong and safe, was that important too? It was, definitely. They wanted people to see that massive skeleton of steel so people could look at it and think, yes, this is going to stand up for a long time. Baker and Fowler's monumental challenge was to span the massive estuary with a bridge that was strong and cost-effective. Their solution was a cantilever bridge, which would hold up its own weight as it was being built. Baker and Fowler found a creative way to demonstrate the principle to the world at the Royal Institution in London. They came up with what is called the human cantilever. They sat on chairs, stretched their arms out to basically represent the cantilever arms and then they were holding wooden sticks which show the bottom cantilever arms and then they had a plank of wood sitting between them with a third person on it. It was basically a practical way of showing people with their own bodies how the bridge is working. That third person swinging in the middle was construction foreman Kaichi Watanabe, one of the first ever Japanese students to train in Britain. His weight represented the trains and all the loading that goes over the bridge. And he could sit there really comfortably. There was not a problem at all. And they showed, look, this does work, which is fantastic. Their design worked in theory. But the bridge's opening day on the 24th of February 1890 was looming. Mindful of public fear, Fowler and Baker put the fourth rail bridge to the ultimate test. To put everyone at ease and to show that this can really work, they put two really, really heavy trains on it. They were over 100 meters long, 50 wagons each, filled to the brim, and they ran them in parallel along the bridge, and it was successful. It was a great test. It showed that the bridge is strong and sturdy. So overall, it was a massive success. And there we are. There we are. A train still going... Not 50 wagons, but still. No, no, a little one, a tiddly one. A little one. But, oh, my word. It's great to see the trains going across the mist. It is, yes it is. The Forth Bridge had passed its test, but building it had required multiple feats of engineering. The massive piers supporting it needed to be built under water, in an estuary deeper than the North Sea. The solution was in brave new technology. They built them with the caisson method so caissons are basically big round cylindrical watertight structures. They were built on the beaches in Queensferry and then floated out into the sea. They weighed them down until they sank to the seabed and then they pumped all the water out and filled them with compressed air and then you've got a nice working chamber for the men to be in. The caissons were monsters that captured the public imagination. It's thought they were the largest ever built in Britain. Inside them, deep underwater, men excavated mud in dark, damp conditions. They faced a danger unknown to Victorian medical science. So there's a thing called caisson disease, which is now more commonly referred to as decompression sickness or the bends even. And it is caused by a change in ambient pressure. Because people weren't aware of the dangers, they came back up to the surface too quickly and they didn't give their bodies time to adjust to the change in pressure. And that then causes small bubbles of gases that can build up in your body and it can lead to things like rashes and joint pain, but also a lot worse, even death. At least one man died from caisson disease and countless others were injured. Building this enormous bridge was a risky job, below and above the waves. The men working on the bridge were known as Briggers, from the Scottish word for bridge. More than 4,000 of them had come here for work. Jenny Meldrum is a historical researcher whose work to ensure the Briggers' stories are never forgotten. Jenny, tell me about the men who built this bridge. What sort of men were they? They ranged, the youngest were in their early teens, I think 12, 13, and the oldest ones were in their 60s, so a full age range. But paint me a picture of what it must have been like to be working, you know, up there, in the middle of the Firth of Forth. I think one of the first things that you would notice was the noise. This was a huge construction site. It was a busy, noisy place. And then you factor in the weather. I mean, a storm can whip up pretty quickly here and you've got guys working at height, hanging on the ends of ropes, walking out on girders and things. No safety gear, no hard hats. Yeah, some place to work. By the end of 1887, 430 injuries had been recorded on the site. People were crushed in machinery. People had clothing caught in machinery. Obviously, people fell from heights. Is there only one case that stands out for you? One that always comes to mind is a young man called Michael. He was second-generation Irish immigrant stock. And Michael obviously fancied his chances of, you know, getting involved and working on the bridge. And sadly, he was only in his late teens when he fell from one of the cantilevers. Michael was just one of over 70 men who died while working on the fourth bridge. As the injuries piled up, the company behind its construction, William Arrell and Company, had to act. There was a sick and accident fund which asked for a contribution from the men's wages and that, I think, was an hour's pay per week that they paid into this. That must have been pretty groundbreaking, was it? It was. Had that been done before? Not as far as I know. I think this might have been the first construction site to have something like that. There were other welcome changes for the Briggers. Shelters providing hot food and tea protected them from getting drenched. They were given free waterproofs, woolen jackets and boots. You said they were your heroes. Yes. Why? Their legacy. First of all, this is a remarkable construction. There's nothing like it in the world and they were part of that. For me, I can't look at the bridge without thinking of the Briggers. If they stood as we are today and looked back on something like that, you've got to be proud of that. When it opened in 1890, the Forth Bridge blew its nearest rival out of the water. At just over a mile and a half, it was over a thousand feet longer than the Poughkeepsie Cantilever Bridge in America. The Forth was the longest and highest cantilever bridge in the world. An international symbol that the Victorians had reached the pinnacle of bridge building. Today, it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Forth Bridge provided the first continuous railway route from London to Aberdeen, opening up the north to trade and travel from the south. The bridge and railway boom continued hand in hand, and as the Great Western Railway spread into the west, Devon was connected with the rest of Britain. It became a holiday playground for wealthy Victorians who lapped up its balmy weather and stunning scenery. This was the English Riviera, but further west than that, there were people who needed a bridge more than ever before. Cornwall was cut off from Devon and the rest of Britain by the River Tamar. More than a thousand feet wide in places, the river was a major Victorian military hub. The estuary may have been vital for the navy, but it was getting in the way of trade and tourism. Cornwall hoped to be the next Victorian holiday hotspot. But to get there, passengers and goods were forced off the train and onto ferries when they reached the Tamar River. And that put people off. It was time to build a bridge and get over it. And this is the result. The magnificent Royal Albert Bridge. Brunel had triumphed with a superstructure that was over 33 meters high to allow the navy to sail under it. The suspension bridge has two sections with curved tubes, making it strong enough to span the turbulent Tamar. Its unique design was unlike anything else seen on the Victorian railway network. Local historian Bruce Hunt has researched the huge benefits that this bridge brought to the local community. Did Brunel get local people to do the work or were the special workers brought in? For the main construction professional navvies that would follow around the railway tracks as were being built and moved over the country. A lot of the local people ended up doing the work on on the building the piers themselves and the brickwork and that type of thing. As well as much needed local employment there were other benefits for this once sleepy community. It was a complete tourist attraction at the time and for many years afterwards when they were actually floating out the spans people came from all over the southwest and further afield to watch it not just by boat and river but into the fields around and they would line the hills along the bank and it was a big day out more than 20 000 people came to watch the first section of the Royal Albert Bridge being put into place. Enterprising locals saw a chance to cash in. One of the farmers rented out part of his field or allowed people in for a small fee. So people were making money out of it around the side. Marquises along the quay. It was a big tourist draw. The Royal Albert Bridge was opened in 1859 by Prince Albert himself. Brunel was too ill to attend the grand opening ceremony. It was hoped the bridge would open up rail travel from Devon to Cornwall for the very same working class day trippers who had watched it being built. But the irony in this iron bridge was that it was not a bridge for all. Rail travel cost three pence a mile at the time, a big chunk of the average wage. The poor simply couldn't afford to cross it. The railways did not see a lot of profit in moving people cheaply, so they concentrated on the upper classes and they would take their entourage with them and the maids and possibly the horses as well. To get to Cornwall, the working class is stuck with the ferry at just a halfpenny a ride, or took their chances sneaking across the bridge when the stationmaster wasn't looking. The bridge was an engineering marvel, but it would also be Brunel's swan song. So did he ever get to see it properly and cross it? I think once, but Brunel was not a well man then. He came down not long after it had been opened and he was wheeled across on a flatbed trolley. And to examine the bridge and six weeks later he died. And that's when they decided that they would put his name on the end of the pillars. It's hard to imagine what Brunel must have thought as he gazed up at his masterpiece. Albert Bridge helped to slash journey times between London and Penzance from two days to just 12 hours. West coast fish, fruit and veg was still fresh when it reached London. And heading the other way, millions of tourists poured into Newquay, one of the first towns to develop for visitor trade. During Queen Victoria's reign, thousands of bridges, large and small, took the railways to where they'd never been before. These impressive structures transported people and goods, created employment, built fortunes. In London, a new bridge-building challenge lay ahead, one which would require the Victorians to pull together everything they'd learned so far. Queen Victoria's bridge-builders were opening her realm to tourism and trade, Britain was at the top of its game. And in the south, its capital city was booming. London, 1860, heaving with humanity. Three million people call the capital home, and over the next 40 years, that number is going to double. The capital was the largest city in the world and the Thames the busiest river. And the Pool of London was heaving with ships full of exotic transatlantic cargo. The population was exploding on both sides of the Thames. And those people needed to cross the river. But a traditional bridge would cut off access for tall cargo ships. The Victorian solution was unveiled in 1894. Tower Bridge was the largest and most sophisticated moving bridge ever built. It catapulted the concept of the medieval drawbridge into the future. Chris Early is the bridge master. As the boss of Tower Bridge, no one knows more about its importance. What you see is a fairytale castle on the river but of course that's all stone cladding. What's actually beneath that makes Tower Bridge unique, it is three different types of bridge. There are the chain elements that we can see behind us which are the suspension bridge, there are the parts of the bridge that raise to allow the movement of river traffic and there's the girder section as well and it was all about showing off the Victorian ingenuity. And did it work from the outset? It did. It needed to work, especially on that opening day when the first bridge lifts took place, to huge ceremony on the river, to a huge flotilla of all sorts of vessels, the Prince of Wales officially opening it, so it had to work that day. Tower Bridge wasn't always going to be this way. Its designer, Horace Jones, had at first wanted to build every schoolboy's dream. Actually, as part of his original design, it would have been a drawbridge, so enormous chains coming from the front of the elements of the bridge that move that would have been pulled back into the towers. It was a nice idea, but a drawbridge wasn't powerful enough to lift two giant slabs of road weighing over 1,000 tonnes each. The Victorians needed another solution. It was only as the design progressed that we see the bascule system, which is based on balance rather than a drawbridge system. The only way to see what makes this bridge tick is to go to its very heart. It just looks wonderful, doesn't it? Deep inside, two steam engines pumped out 360 horsepower each, feeding the hydraulics that raise the bridge. The whole dance was controlled by just one piece of precision engineering. That's the steam governor you can see there moving in the middle. So what does it do? So it regulates the entire movement of all the pistons and everything comes from that one central system. Everything is revolving, but in a sense it's all revolving around that. Around that, exactly, exactly. When you look at it though, There's something about Victorian engineering, isn't there? You know, it's all beautiful brass and, you know, it's like the time machine in H.G. Wells. So how does it work? We call it a simple system, but we know it off by heart. So the whole idea is that the coal boilers, coal would have come in off the Thames, would have fed the boilers, and that would then drive these steam engines, which would actually raise the bridge. More than 80 men worked continuously here, ensuring that the nation's most iconic bridge kept moving. When it was working, in its heyday, What would it have been like here? The rooms would have been full of smoke and steam, but also a lot of human noise as well. People shouting at each other to get things done in a certain amount of time. They'd be cooking their bacon and eggs for breakfast on the coal boilers next to us as well. Shouting their orders for food and these sorts of things. It took eight years and over 400 workers every day to build Tower Bridge. Entire families were employed in rivet gangs, earning a penny for each rivet they hammered into place. The most daring workers achieved fame and fortune. One of the rock stars of his time, Jack Bateman, known to his friends as Ginger, was one of the Victorian divers that laid the foundations here. And to give you an idea of a danger pay at the time, he was paid £10 a minute in the 1890s. £10 a minute? Yeah, absolutely. In the 1890s? Yeah, probably one of the highest paid, I'd say the highest paid person who was working here as part of the construction. Once built, the bridge was a hit, not least the high walkways, which held an unexpected attraction for some. Has that always been open? It's not always been open, no. The city closed the high-level walkways as a pedestrian route. At the time that ladies of the night were using the walkways as their workplaces, there wasn't a desire to police that, so they closed it to the public. Tower Bridge had a far-reaching impact on the London landscape. It allowed the wealthy to cross to the South Bank, leading to its development as an entertainment and commercial district. Its design inspired bridges across the world, from Chicago to Russia. Tower Bridge was so famous, an urban myth has it, the Americans were desperate to buy it. In their haste, they bought London Bridge by accident. The million pound deal went through, and London Bridge is now a major tourist attraction in Arizona. You're the bridge master, have been for more than a decade. How much of a symbol do you think of high Victorian engineering is Tower Bridge? I think it does very much represent the entire Victorian Empire, you know, as far as it being the Industrial Revolution, the driving forward of, look, this is what we can do, showing the world what they were capable of, and this was the symbol of that. On this journey, I've seen how the Victorians battled to control nature and tame wild waters to make their bridges reach further than ever before. Engineering visionaries pushed iron and steel to their limits in the biggest, strongest, most ingenious structures ever seen. They connected communities. They opened up the furthest reaches of the country to trade and to tourism. Built to last, the best of them still stand. A link to the Victorian ingenuity and bravery that created the nation we know today. Next time, I find out how the Victorians invented the great British seaside holiday. People were coming in by their droves. It's jam-packed with entertainment. I learn why Blackpool became a mecca for the newly mobile working class. It made a mill girl feel like a duchess for the day. And discover how epic engineering became the main attraction. It was about novelty, it was about thrill. They loved fairground rides and of course this would have been something absolutely unique to them.