Scattered across Britain there are many extraordinary buildings and structures that have outlived their original purpose. There they lie, in the back streets of provincial towns, on remote stretches of coast, in the centres of cities: abandoned, boarded up, mysterious. Each hides a unique narrative, of personal endeavour or heartbreak, of momentous events that shaped the nation. In this book, and in the television series from which it sprang, I explore twelve such sites, shining a light into their cobwebbed corners to reveal a hidden history of modern Britain.
I was trained as a historian at Cambridge University and since I left politics and turned to broadcasting some twenty years ago, I have made a number of television and radio programmes with historical themes. In them, I have found myself being drawn again and again to buildings – because they featured in a historical event, or could illuminate some aspect of history, or simply because I found them arresting to look at. Buildings that have caught my eye and suited my purpose range from the Royal Crescent in Bath to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. But, however splendid, they were incidental to my theme of the moment.
In Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain I wished to switch that perspective around, to focus on my fascination with buildings – their beauty, their purpose, the stories hidden in their walls. The way into a particular subject is a vital consideration for the popular historian. In a radio series I made entitled Things We Forgot to Remember, I revisited great moments in history that are largely misremembered in the popular retelling, such as ‘Magna Carta’ and ‘Jesse Owens and the Nazi Olympics’. In my television travels by train, a focus has been on how the railways changed societies. The idea of Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain is to put a building (or structure – I made the definition loose enough to include obvious ‘non-buildings’ such as a submarine) centre stage and invite it to ‘speak’ to us.
Over the course of two television series I have explored some remarkable sites, from the south coast to Yorkshire and East Anglia to the West Country. In most cases they were derelict and abandoned, on the point of changing into something else. This made my intervention particularly opportune: I got in at the eleventh hour, before much of the fabric of the original building was destroyed or changed beyond recognition. From prison to sewer, from bunker to pier, they have helped me understand some of the ways in which modern Britain has developed.
In the course of filming, I accumulated a wealth of material – personal testimonies, documents, letters, photographs – which was crying out for more detailed examination and exposure. This book is the result. It has allowed me the time and scope to elaborate on important themes and place them in context. Whether on screen or page, the structures I explored became ‘witnesses’ or ‘documents’ in their own right, to be listened to and interpreted. Some were more or less intact and therefore relatively straightforward to make sense of. Shepton Mallet prison, in Somerset, for example, looked practically the same as on the day it closed in 2013, which is not to say that the stories it revealed weren’t eye-popping. On the other hand, the West Pier at Brighton barely exists, is a mere and diminishing skeleton that offers next to no clues about what happened there. Yet, in the end, its testament was just as powerful.
By the same token some buildings confounded expectations. When I visited Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot I had already dissected the rich and significant history of the Royal London Hospital in London’s East End. I had expected the military hospital’s background to be comparable, one of pioneering medical work with an emphasis, in this case, on the peculiar challenges posed by battle injuries. Only up to a point was this true. Beyond, I discovered a story that teeters on the edge of the credible.
I found the building-based approach genuinely liberating. Sleuthing around the dusty corners of atmospheric old places gave full rein to my sense of curiosity, while drawing on a natural scepticism that I developed as a history undergraduate. It’s important that historians ask themselves, ‘How do I know this, who told me, how did it pass down through the years or the generations, what is the foundation for this piece of knowledge?’ For a politician to be overburdened with scepticism, by the way, is not necessarily a good thing: too often you are required to express a remarkable degree of enthusiasm for a new policy when your experience tells you that it’s very unlikely to be the panacea that your party claims. This is why, in the end, broadcasting now suits me.
I should point out, however, that I am no David Starkey or Simon Schama. I am not an academic and nor have I confined my interest to a particular era or aspect of history. I am a generalist who wishes to take the reader or viewer along with me on my explorations. And sometimes my initial instincts are wrong, or I am simply baffled by what I find. This is why, for the television series and book of Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain, I arranged to meet people along the way who know more about each structure than I can ever know. In this way the project has been as much a journey of discovery for me as I believe it will be for you.
Some of these witnesses were experts, on the ballistics of nuclear bombs, for example. Many were just ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events – such as the college leaver from Lancashire pitched into the cloak-and-dagger world of the Cold War. One witness, with an incredible life story to tell, made more of an impression on me than just about anyone I have interviewed in my broadcasting career. All offered a perspective that was far more vivid than simply looking at a diagram or reading a passage in a book. I am happy to acknowledge that in some cases this approach introduced a certain bias to my recording of history. Because I was insistent on including, where possible, eyewitness accounts, I tended to concentrate on events that people are still alive to remember – which means, effectively, from the 1920s onwards (the oldest person I interviewed was 102).
This is partly why the Second World War pops up in some surprising contexts. Nevertheless, that epic conflict has been central to the shaping of modern Britain – our politics, our economy, our place in the world, our very character. And it is modern Britain, in the end, that is the subject of this book. In it, I attempt to illustrate how we have developed as a nation in certain key areas, which I divide into four sections. These are ‘Crime and Emergency’ which looks at prisons and the work of firefighters and first responders; ‘Life and Death’, on the evolution of healthcare and much more; ‘Defence of the Realm’, which examines top-secret installations and dramatizes the moment when the world stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation; and ‘People’s Pleasure Domes’, about, essentially, how we entertain and distract ourselves.
Throughout I have tried to keep the building – the place itself – in the front of the picture. Many, such as the military hospital in Aldershot, deserve to be there simply as examples of bold, imposing design. The bizarre structures scattered across the shingle spit of Orford Ness, on the other hand, are by no stretch of the imagination beautiful. But they are haunting, puzzling, and they contribute to a landscape as otherworldly as any in Britain. Everywhere I visited was built with care and skill for a purpose that commands respect – and that applies most particularly to the site that represents hidden Britain in a literal sense: the sewers beneath Brighton.
As already mentioned, several of the buildings were about to be rebuilt and it was crucial that I gained access when I did. Hearteningly, one of them, the New Victoria Cinema in Bradford, is being returned to its original purpose as a cinema and entertainment centre. But most are being ‘repurposed’, most commonly as blocks of flats. This is not necessarily a fate I would have wished on them but it is preferable, in my opinion, to having them razed to the ground and a car park or shopping centre put in their place.
I am sufficiently pragmatic to realize that however beautiful or remarkable a building may be, you can’t simply stick it in the deep freeze when it has outlived its usefulness. But before the men in hard hats move in you can cup your ear close and listen to what it has to say. And that is what I have attempted here. If walls could speak, these are some of the stories they would tell.