(dramatic music) I'm Dr. Onyeka Nubia and I'm a historian, and I'm walking through Britain to reveal a fascinating period in our history.

The Victorians shaped modern Britain.

I'm searching for the innovation, the technology, and the industry that the Victorians gave us... (woman) It's the oldest working engine in the world, so it's really a jewel in our collection.

(Dr. Nubia) ...for good and for bad.

(man) If you get your finger caught in the belt, you cut the fingers off.

(Dr. Nubia) I'm going to explore this era that is as complicated as it is fascinating.

♪ (majestic music) This time, I'm in Liverpool.

In Victorian times, Britain's most significant port.

(Professor Belchem) By the end of the 19th century, one-third of all shipping in Britain, you know, is passing through Liverpool.

(Dr. Nubia) From a small 17th-century town, the story of Liverpool's rise is as important as it is remarkable.

(Professor Lee) Liverpool had the well-deserved reputation as being the second port of empire.

(Dr. Nubia) Liverpool was where Britain connected with the world, and what happened here in the Victorian age has shaped this country's development ever since.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪ In the 19th century, Britain wasn't just an island.

It was an empire.

And places like Liverpool here were the center of trade for the empire.

To the west is Wales and Ireland, the Atlantic, the Americas.

And to the east, we have all the mill towns.

And Liverpool was right in the middle... the center of this international collection of people and this international empire.

This city has many historic buildings that were established in Victorian times.

♪ And there is no better place to see the relationship between Victorian Britain and industrialization and commerce, and Victorian Britain and the British Empire.

I'll be walking the streets of Liverpool, discovering just how this port city functioned during its pivotal moment in history.

From the all-important docks, I'll discover how diverse this Victorian city was.

♪ The city was a hive of innovation and pioneering in railway development.

And wealthy city merchants commuted to the suburbs and built palatial private homes.

Then it's across the Mersey to the wheel in Birkenhead and the famous shipyard of Cammell Laird.

♪ But a Victorian tour of Liverpool can only start in one place, the port that secured this city's extraordinary status in the 19th century: the Albert Dock.

This is cutting-edge 19th-century technology.

The same sort of technology that we would now associate with traveling into space is what the Victorians built here.

And they used what they built here to control trade.

Forty percent of world trade came through these docks in this city, in the 19th century.

It's absolutely remarkable and truly incredible that this one place should have such a monopoly over trade.

How can it be?

Britain entered a new phase of industrialization during the Victorian period.

It was one that relied on trade and technology.

The Albert Dock is proof of both.

I think this is a crane and, um, I think the chains helped turn the crane from portside into the dock.

(violin music) From 1846 onwards, ships here could be loaded and unloaded directly to and from the warehouses.

Simple, but revolutionary.

To find out more, I'm meeting Professor John Belchem.

What made this dock so new, so innovative in the 19th century?

Well, it really was the first example in Liverpool of an enclosed dock system.

And because Liverpool previously had a range of docks, in the days when you didn't have this secure system, shall we say that some goods somehow got lost in transit, shall we say?

And, so, the buildings like this, which were totally secure with perimeter walls, policemen's hats all along there, you could still see some of those, this was a way of making sure the cargo was absolutely secure.

Secure in all senses.

Secure from theft, secure from fire.

(soft piano music) (Dr. Nubia) The man behind this revolutionary dock was Yorkshire-born engineer Jesse Hartley.

With no previous experience in building docks, Hartley secured the role of engineer for the Albert Dock, beating 30 rival applicants in the process.

In the 19th century, this place was state-of-the-art technology.

(Professor Belchem) Well, what makes it state-of-the-art technology is the fact that, for once, we've got something which is entirely fireproof.

I mean, there were always great, great problems of fires, fires on wooden ships, fires on wooden warehouses.

Jesse Hartley was absolutely determined he must have absolutely fireproof, secure warehousing.

So he built a series of mock-ups and he tried different combinations of things to make sure that he could do it.

And he put through various experiments.

People came along to watch and so on.

So, two or three of them did go up in flames, but in the end, he came up with the right formula which was using a lot of cast iron.

Absolutely everything on top had to be completely fireproof secure.

And it's borne the test of time.

Never been a fire here.

(Dr. Nubia) Innovation played an essential part in the development of the Albert Dock.

What was the technology that made this place work?

(Professor Belchem) You need some power to help you with the problems of moving cargo, moving ships, and so on.

So the best way to do that, since you're on the water, is to use water power, so you use hydraulic power to do things.

So you see this in many, many things.

For example, you have all these capstones where you put the ropes-- The capstone is--we can see them here.

You put ropes around these and hydraulic power turns them, and that allows you to move the ships quickly because, remember, when you're unloading cargo, speed is of the essence.

You want to do this as quickly as you possibly can and so, though, you're largely dependent upon human labor.

Nevertheless, when human labor can be aided by machinery, the Victorians really appreciated that and the use of hydraulic power.

And you're getting it for capstones, you're getting it for moving the cargo up into the various levels of these warehouses because they're 60 feet high, these warehouses, so it takes some doing to move cargo right up to the top of it.

So we do have those cranes, and they're constantly innovating with those, and so we're getting newer and bigger ones.

(Dr. Nubia) By utilizing hydraulic technology, the Victorians were able to halve the time it takes for ships to load and unload their cargo.

♪ So the idea was to make everything here move fast.

By the end of the 19th century, one-third of all shipping in Britain, you know, is passing through Liverpool.

And in fact, one in seven of all ships in the entire world are registered in Liverpool.

Liverpool really is the classic maritime mercantile city.

So how was it that the industrialists here were able to overtake Bristol and other towns and cities?

Well, because you've got a long estuary here and so you can keep on expanding the docks because you've now discovered the technology which allows you to do it.

You've found out how you can tame that huge tidal range, how you can build things which are fireproof, how you can use hydraulic power to make sure that you can lift quickly and so on.

So, the further and further you go along, the more ambition is there.

(Dr. Nubia) The construction of the dock cost the equivalent of 41 million pounds.

This shows the wealth and power flowing from Liverpool.

It was power that other industrial centers in the north were part of.

(Professor Belchem) Once it starts building the docks, it really takes off, and it's in the perfect position because America is developing and inland, you've got the Industrial Revolution taking place, so yes, this is really the apex for the northern powerhouse.

(Dr. Nubia) So, 170 years ago, this place was state of the art.

State-of-the-art technology, ingenuity, built with civic industrial pride.

The industrialists that built this wanted to create a port like no other.

But where do they get their money from?

(dark music) To answer that, you have to go back before the Victorians to the 18th century.

(melancholy music) ♪ I'm in Liverpool, the city once known as the most important port of the British Empire.

♪ I've seen how Victorian Liverpool placed itself at the heart of world trade.

♪ But, now, we will discover how Liverpool's past built its status in the 19th century.

As I'm walking through Liverpool and I think of Victorian Liverpool, I wonder where the wealth came from to build buildings like these.

Well, the answer lies in the fact that a hundred years before, Liverpool was the largest slave-trading city in the world.

The wealthy, powerful Liverpool families who controlled these activities turned human beings into property, and this terrible institution was integral to Britain and many other European countries' economic power.

(dark music) All over the city, these families have left their mark, from Foster Cunliffe and John Ashton to James Penny, whose name is now associated with a famous Beatles song.

(soft music) ♪ These families, the Pennys, Ashtons, Cunliffes, and Kenyans want to be remembered for their philanthropic work, but their power was reliant on wealth amassed from the dehumanizing activities that continued long after the abolition of enslavement.

♪ By 1740, Liverpool eclipsed Bristol as the leading slave-trading city in the entire world.

And Britain was the leading slave-trading country in the entire world.

And people such as William Gladstone, you see the statue too here, was part of a family who had accumulated wealth in the 18th century, so that by the time they came to the 19th century, the wealth that they used to build Liverpool was wealth brought on the backs of enslaved people.

William Gladstone served as prime minister four times under Queen Victoria, and he's often regarded as one of Britain's greatest leaders.

But his family's immense personal wealth came via their businesses which owned enslaved people.

In the 1830s, the law made the owning of enslaved people illegal.

Families such as the Gladstones were compensated for the loss of their property with enormous payouts.

The trade, the activities.

Sugar, tobacco, cotton, tea, coffee, all of these industries relied on an indentured labor or an enslaved labor.

And, then, the local population were turned into a working population who were also denied rights and privileges.

So all in all, we have a lot of injustice there.

Another part of Liverpool's social history is the diverse population that settled here.

In the Victorian period, Liverpool grew to be the city that you can see, and it did this by attracting lots of people who migrated here free of choice, some escaping persecution elsewhere or poverty.

They came from Ireland, the Isle of Man, they came from Wales, they came from Scotland, and they came from all over the empire.

And, also, they came from Asia, from China.

And they settled here in this city because there was work here.

Liverpool was a city of industrialization.

It was a city of growth and a city of expansion.

And most of all, it was a city of empire.

And they settled all over the city.

One community that arrived in the 1860s settled half a mile inland from the River Mersey.

Standing behind me is this ceremonial arch.

Now, this ceremonial arch is modern, built in the year 2000, and we might think that the Chinese community that's behind it is also modern, but we'd be wrong.

This is a Victorian community.

The Chinese people have lived in Liverpool for more than a hundred years, and they lived on these streets.

These people who lived here worked on the docks.

This community has lived and survived for more than a hundred years and it's still here today.

Liverpool is a history of its peoples.

People of African descent did not just arrive here through enslavement.

Some came by choice.

These people included West Africans who built their communities around the Liverpool 8 area.

The Welsh also settled in Liverpool in very large numbers, and places such as The Welsh Streets were named after them, whilst German migrants built their own churches, and Jewish and Greek travelers built their own synagogues and churches on Princes Road and elsewhere.

But I'm heading to one very particular spot, a Victorian mosque.

Remarkably, as far back as 1891, Liverpool had its own mosque.

It was set up by a British Victorian, and it was home to a diverse community of Victorian Liverpudlians.

To discover more, I'm meeting the imam Ajmal Masroor at the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque.

So, um, this is a mosque in Victorian Britain.

How--how can this be?

(Ajmal) 1887, a gentleman called Abdullah William Henry Quilliam converted to Islam, bought these buildings, Brougham Terrace, five of them actually, and he converted them into orphan homes for kids, schools, feeding center, printing press, lawyer's office, mosque, registry office for marriage.

Everything that you need was here, and this was primarily targeting at a community who didn't exist here as much in terms of numbers.

But he had a vision.

He saw an emergence of a group of people who would embrace Islam.

(Dr. Nubia) A solicitor by profession, Abdullah Quilliam was born in the Merseyside town of Bootle in 1856 to Methodist parents before converting to Islam at the age of 31.

What was his reason for setting up this mosque?

(Ajmal) He traveled through Muslim world and he studied Islam while he was traveling.

He met Muslims, of course.

He did business with them, et cetera...

In 1887, he became Muslim and converted to Islam in Morocco.

And when he then traveled to Istanbul, I think, to be more precise, in Turkey, he was given the title of the Sheikh of Britain, the Grand Mufti of Britain, in other words.

He came to the British Isles back again and he established his prayer space here.

(Dr. Nubia) Quilliam and his supporters' ideas were attractive to many Liverpudlians and more than 600 people turned to Islam.

♪ (Ajmal) He was able to convert local Liverpudlians and from the aristocratic backgrounds.

The lawyers, the judges, the teachers, they were becoming Muslims.

And, of course, the establishment didn't like that.

I call it mother of all mosques for British Muslims.

This is where it all began.

(Dr. Nubia) What's the type of Islam that Abdullah Quilliam teaching, what kind was it?

(Ajmal) So, Abdullah Quilliam was teaching what we know as Islam.

What was his local take?

I have no idea.

For example, he believed in the same principle as I do.

One god, worship of God, not human beings, being good to people, being good to others.

That kind of Islam is what he was doing, philanthropic Islam, he was running a charity center here, feeding people.

Very prophetic tradition.

He was inviting people to come here and pray.

Very spiritual.

So he covered everything.

He was not a pacifist.

He did not sit on his backside, do nothing about social problems that he saw.

He wanted change and, to me, that's Islam.

(Dr. Nubia) This unlikely red brick building on its quiet residential street was officially established as a mosque in 1891.

Some people think of Islam as not being compatible with British history, but this mosque proves that that's not true.

I hope that it helps us to change our perspectives about Islam and about Victorian Britain from the way in which we've imagined that society to be.

I had to alter my thinking about Victorian Britain after coming across Abdullah Quilliam Mosque.

(Dr. Nubia) By the end of the Victorian age, the mosque included a library, a school, a reading room, museum, and a science laboratory.

(Ajmal) I've got some photographs to show you, if I may.

So this is the original space.

Where we're standing, that's the space.

So that, on my right, is the arc.

-So that's the arc?

-That's the door, where you came through, and that's this arc.

And Abdullah Quilliam would sit here on that chair and deliver his sermons to the people down below.

(Dr. Nubia) After conducting three years of sermons here, Abdullah Quilliam was declared the Sheikh-ul Islam of Britain by the Ottoman emperor.

-Wow.

-There was no other person who had got this title in England.

He was the only one.

Now, if you imagine, this is a prayer space.

And we would think it's just a prayer space.

No, I've got another picture where you can actually see Abdullah Quilliam wearing Victorian dress, wearing a Turkish hat, and doing an English-- English and Islamic marriage ceremony on this very space where we're standing right now.

(Dr. Nubia) And this is more than 100 years ago.

(Ajmal) This is more than 100 years ago.

(guitar music) (Dr. Nubia) As for the man himself, he passed away in 1932.

The property housing the mosque was sold and used as a registry for births, marriages, and death.

But in 2018, Liverpool City Council voted to entrust the building to the Abdullah Quilliam Society.

It stands now a testament to Victorian history, the history of Islam in Britain, and of course to Quilliam himself.

I believe Abdullah Quilliam was able to do something amazing even for people like myself.

For a 21st-century Muslim living here, I look back and see his legacy.

I don't have to be Asian to be a good Muslim.

I don't have to be African to be a good Muslim.

I can be blue-eyed, blond, and European and be a better Muslim than the rest of the world.

That in itself is the legacy of Abdullah Quilliam's thought process.

That's why he began that journey in this country.

As a consequence of this mosque, we have mosques from Isle of Man all the way to Portsmouth and from Land's End to Southend not to take over the country, but to decorate our landscape and make it more multicultural, multifaith, and exciting.

(energetic music) (Dr. Nubia) By the mid-19th century, Liverpool had the largest and most advanced port in the world.

It was Britain's gateway to the Atlantic and the empire.

♪ But it had not always been so.

Liverpool's position on the northwest coast meant it was not the first port of call.

♪ Liverpool is a long way from Bristol and a long way from London and, yet, it became the most important industrial city in the empire.

How did it manage that?

How did it become attractive?

A key reason was the development of infrastructure: the canal system, the ports for coastal shipping, and the development of a railway.

(uplifting music) ♪ By 1830, Liverpool boasted the finest railway connections in the country.

To find out what difference it made, I'm walking one mile south to the Victoria Gallery & Museum where I'm meeting University of Liverpool curator Amanda Draper.

(Amanda) Transportation from the Port of Liverpool to Manchester was incredibly difficult prior to the coming of the railways.

By road, it could take three hours.

The roads were pockmarked, full of puddles.

We are in the northwest.

So goods might get damaged, carriages might overturn.

And, also, the quantity was limited by the size of the carriage and the number of horses you had.

By canals, which had been an ongoing mode of transport since about the 1760s, it took 12 hours to get from Liverpool to Manchester.

(Dr. Nubia) The new railway changed all that.

The journey by train took just two hours.

Eventually, the railways were able to transport goods, commodities like coal, cotton, and finished cotton goods, throughout Britain.

But early railways were a source of curiosity for the elite of Victorian society.

Throngs of excited crowds gathered around the railway lines from Liverpool to Manchester when it first opened on the 15th of September, 1830.

(Amanda) And what you can see here, this very jollied-up carriage, that was the prime minister's carriage, the Duke of Wellington.

(Dr. Nubia) The Duke of Wellington was there.

-The Iron Duke.

-Exactly.

Eight locomotives pulling carriages were set to work that day, and they set off from Liverpool Crown Street Station heading towards Manchester terminus, which is Liverpool Road Station.

And there was a great fanfare, and thousands upon thousands of people came to see and you can see stood on the parapets.

(Dr. Nubia) So, in a way, Liverpool becomes the center of attention inside the empire at this moment.

You could say that.

Yes, why not?

This is one of my favorites.

You would think, "This is just a small locomotive going along flat land.

What is to marvel at?"

Well, this is Chat Moss which is a bog, and to get the railway to sit on it, they had to sink logs and gravel to stabilize the base, four and three quarter miles of that, so that is--doesn't look much, but it's a real piece of engineering.

(soft music) (Dr. Nubia) Boggy ground then gave way to a 60-foot-deep valley.

The Victorians had a solution: the red brick and yellow sandstone Sankey Viaduct, completed in 1830.

(Amanda) It was the first railway viaduct in the world and it's been a Grade One-listed building since, I think, 1966.

-And it still works?

-It still goes, yeah.

(Dr. Nubia) And railways still go over the top of it?

-Oh, yes.

-Wow.

(Amanda) This shows Mount Olive which is just when you come into Manchester, so the Manchester end of the line, and it was a phenomenal two miles of cutting through sandstone.

(Dr. Nubia) The railway line was a success.

(Amanda) The amount of people who rushed to buy tickets, rushed to have the wind in their hair and the soot in their face, I think, tells its own story.

(Dr. Nubia) With 1,200 passengers traveling daily, the railway eventually outgrew its Manchester terminus, which led to the creation of what is now known as Victoria Station.

So, the railways, in Liverpool's case, -cemented its position?

-Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely, it was core, I think, to the, um, the growth during the Victorian years of the whole of the northwest region.

(Dr. Nubia) By 1844, Britain boasted 2,210 miles of railway tracks, with major towns and cities being added to a growing network.

But back in 1830, it's important to realize just how innovative and forward thinking Liverpool and Manchester were being.

So these northern cities powered the British Empire.

(Amanda) There was a great rivalry and that developed during the Victorian period as well between London and the northwest, the cities of the northwest, Manchester and Liverpool and Yorkshire, Leeds, Bradford.

I would say that possibly the bourgeois of those cities had slight chips on their shoulder about London's centricity, and so they did want to make it on their own -and make it big.

-The railway line between Liverpool and Manchester was only made possible by strong local support that pressed Parliament into giving permission for the track to be built.

But I'm now heading slightly out of the city center in search of Liverpool's business elite.

♪ In the 19th century, Liverpool was the most important industrial city perhaps in the world.

The people that made that happen were finance men, stockbrokers, merchants, and traders, and they lived in areas like this.

They had control of the docks, but they bought houses in the suburbs and they tried to link up Britain's industry so they were connected with the Lancashire mill towns and the cotton production, and they were linked to the colonies.

So, Liverpool actually acted as a bridge between the colonies that supplied the raw materials and the manufacturing that took place in Britain.

And, then, Liverpool was the mechanism by which those finished goods were exported to the world.

(soft piano music) Three and a half miles from the city center, West Derby was once home to the traders, merchants, and financiers that made Liverpool work.

I'm looking for one of the very few grand Victorian houses that remain.

Lowlands is a Grade Two-listed Italian age-style mansion built in 1846.

♪ Wow, this is some balcony, some staircase, and some ceiling.

Look at that.

This house is a statement.

It's a statement about power, economic power.

Liverpool in Victorian Britain was shaping not only Britain, not only the empire, but in many ways, the world.

And the people that built houses like this in Liverpool knew what they were doing.

They knew and thought that these places would be an indication of their status and their wealth.

To learn about those who lived here, I'm meeting Professor Robert Lee from the University of Liverpool.

Who lived in the Lowlands?

(Professor Lee) Well, this very fine Italian residence was designed and built by someone called Thomas Haigh.

He was an architect, a builder, and highly successful.

He was involved with railway development.

So you can see the link between one of the economic drivers of the early Victorian economy and how it's represented physically today by the Lowlands.

(Dr. Nubia) But in the early 1860s, a family from Hamburg moved into the Lowlands, the Tappenbecks.

They are just one example of Liverpool's increasingly powerful international business community.

(Professor Lee) Believe it or not, the largest immigrant merchant group -came from Germany.

-Okay.

(Professor Lee) It's the international context of the Liverpool merchant community -from an early date.

-I see.

So, this class of people that lived in these sorts of houses in the 19th century were making a statement.

-Yes.

-What statement were they making?

(Professor Lee) The house here would've been used for entertaining purposes, and people would've been impressed almost certainly by what they were offered and what they were entertained with.

(Dr. Nubia) The families that ran, for example, the Lowlands here were a family that would raise money in Liverpool and outside for enterprises that would benefit Liverpool.

(Professor Lee) Those men who made fortunes in Liverpool, obviously they spent money here, but there was a tendency over time to move further away from the city center.

We're in the suburbs now.

(Dr. Nubia) What role did the merchants play?

They financed the trips that brought back raw materials like cotton.

(Dr. Nubia) So, the people that lived in the Lowlands, they were responsible for raising money for these enterprises, for the most part.

(Professor Lee) They have to finance these journeys to make purchases at a huge profit to bring them back, and if it's cotton, then, in fact, to make sure that that's sold at a good price to the cotton spinners in South Lancashire.

(Dr. Nubia) By the mid-19th century, Liverpool had the second highest number of millionaires in Britain.

Liverpool had the well-deserved reputation as being the second port of empire.

And that, again, just reflects on the importance of all the trade generated here.

(Dr. Nubia) How about their morals?

(Professor Lee) Well, if you work on the premise that most of them-- not all of them were really intent on maximizing wealth, then the answer is probably that they were prepared to cut corners.

(Dr. Nubia) One individual more than happy to bend the rules for profit was a notorious ship owner and MP, Edward Bates, often known simply as Bully Bates.

(Professor Lee) He's the man who, it was reported, was not involved in any way in philanthropic activities and was notorious for sending to sea what were called "coffin ships."

-Coffin ships?

-Yes.

(Dr. Nubia) Oh, what are they?

(Professor Lee) He bought all his ships secondhand.

They were steamers, but he converted them back into sailing ships.

And often they were old and really unseaworthy.

He loaded them up beyond any viable limit and sent them to sea in the expectation that some of them would sink and he could claim the insurance cover.

(Dr. Nubia) And, of course, the crew dying would only be collateral damage.

-Yes, of course, yes.

-Because he still makes the money from it.

(Professor Lee) Yes.

(Dr. Nubia) That's a mercenary.

It's believed that Bully Bates once lost six ships in a single year.

When the law finally caught up with him, it wasn't for manslaughter or insurance fraud.

He was expelled from the commons for bribing the electorate.

(soft music) I've been exploring the Port of Liverpool.

Like so many great ports, it sits at the mouth of an important river, the Mersey.

But just across the Mersey is another town that is sometimes forgotten.

This is Birkenhead.

It was the ferry across the Mersey that linked Liverpool to Birkenhead, and in turn, the ferry became a Victorian institution.

♪ The first steamship operated here as early as 1815, but by the end of the 19th century, ferries were carrying 44,000 passengers a day.

♪ We're in a very suburban area.

And it doesn't feel like Liverpool.

That's because it isn't.

It's Birkenhead.

And, yet, Liverpool is just a few thousand meters across the river.

And, yet, the builders of this place have tried very hard, it seems, to make it feel not like Liverpool.

(violin music) Birkenhead's original purpose was as a residential area.

But over time, there was an industry that this town made its own shipbuilding, and one family name has been integral to this industry since 1824.

Here in Birkenhead, families like the Lairds constructed a shipbuilding industry that wasn't just feeding and supporting Liverpool, but in its own right, in its own way was functioning as a worldwide industry.

It reached out across the world to the United States of America, to Canada, to the Caribbean, to parts of the continent of Africa and Asia.

And this industry in this place is as much a part of the Victorian story as Liverpool is and its story.

Since 1903, the Laird family shipyard has been known as Cammell Laird.

Overlooking it, I'm meeting historian Elizabeth Davey.

How much that we see here now was in the Victorian period?

The real development at Birkenhead, and you'll be amazed really, was as a seaside resort.

And, so, this church was built prior to Victoria coming to the throne because you couldn't have a settlement without a place of worship.

So it was literally tiny, it was a hundred-something people.

And people came across from Liverpool, and what really helped Birkenhead take off was the application of steam to water transport.

The docks were gradually building up.

-Yes.

-And the opportunities for shipbuilding were quite limited.

So in 1824, a Scot from the Clyde, William Laird, crossed over-- he'd been in Liverpool since 1810-- crossed over and established a boiler works to the north of us here.

That soon developed into small-scale and then increasingly large-scale shipbuilding.

But when they developed the Birkenhead docks in the 1850s, there clearly wasn't room for shipbuilding.

So the whole enterprise moved here.

(spirited music) (Dr. Nubia) To date, this business has built more than 1,300 ships for clients all over the world.

For example, the ships that completed the controversial expedition to the Zambezi River in 1858.

♪ In the American Civil War, Britain was supposed to be neutral, but in 1861, at Birkenhead, the John Laird and Sons Company built the CSS Alabama.

It was a state-of-the-art warship that could carry enough coal to power it for at least 18 days.

It was a 220-foot-long cruiser capable of traveling up to 13 knots.

(Elizabeth) Their client were the Confederate Navy.

(Dr. Nubia) Oh, so during the American Civil War?

(Elizabeth) Yes, during the American Civil War.

So they didn't mind.

Business is business.

But it was a very bad move in some ways because the British government had a policy of neutrality with the Southern states.

(Dr. Nubia) The Alabama claimed 65 prizes.

This includes more than 28 ships at a total cost of more than six million dollars.

That's $99 million in today's money.

The shipyard faced repercussions.

So, they had to pay huge compensation.

And all the other dignitaries round and about were knighted, and John Laird, who was then nominal head of the company, but he had actually retired, was never knighted.

He was just plain Mr. Laird, Mr. John Laird, MP, until the day he died.

(Dr. Nubia) The Alabama incident severely impacted Anglo-American relations and caused a diplomatic debacle.

Britain was forced to pay more than $15 million in damages.

But despite this, the name Cammell Laird survived.

It has been at the forefront of shipbuilding for generations.

Was this place unique in terms of shipbuilding?

(Elizabeth) You know, we think of ships, but it's the transfer from sail to steam and then on to diesel and so on.

It's the transfer from wooden hulls to iron hulls.

It's the ability to use a compass so that, you know, work with the binnacle which they pioneered.

Um, the first ships that they built were paddle steamers.

Then they had to screw propulsion.

So, always--it's a whole series of changes in technology.

(Dr. Nubia) I notice that there's a Sir David Attenborough ship.

Could you tell me anything about that?

(Elizabeth) Well, 'cause one of the things that the yard has gone for is this building but also refitting.

And the David Attenborough was launched-- I think it was 2016.

But, you know, that was just the hull.

So all sorts of fitting out and it's a fantastic ship.

It's got laboratories and everything.

And that's the sort of example of being innovative and seeking a niche market.

(Dr. Nubia) So that's part of the same tradition of innovation that we see in the Victorian period.

(Elizabeth) There's a huge construction hall where you can work in dry and in temperature-controlled conditions.

So what they were doing there the last time I went around the yard was they were building crew accommodation, little sort of units, in there and then they can be retrofitted to the vessel, but they've got everything you'd want in your cabin.

(Dr. Nubia) And is shipbuilding still a strength to Birkenhead?

It is a strength, but as with so many of the manufacturing industries that we have had in the past, it is one of many.

But it is still important and it's very heartening.

And, to me, when it was the naming, it was very heartening to see the number of women apprentices that they-- Not just apprentices, you know, which is a complete antithesis of what it would have been in the past.

(guitar music) (Dr. Nubia) Liverpool was a city that truly thrived in Victorian times, but it was also a city built on the success of empire.

Inevitably, it came to be reliant on that empire too.

Shipbuilding is still here, but elsewhere, Liverpool's economy had to adapt.

It no longer relies on tea, sugar, coffee, cotton, or tobacco.

I've seen how Liverpool's development... happened.

And I can understand that you can't talk about Liverpool in the Victorian period without talking about empire, without talking about the role that Liverpool played in building that empire, and how some of the worst crimes that the empire committed are attached to Liverpool.

Although, Liverpool shouldn't be blamed for them entirely.

And I also understand how Liverpool kick-started Britain's Industrial Revolution or at least kick-started the second phase of it.

I'm not sure of how Liverpool is reinventing itself, and I'm not sure if Liverpool remembers its past.

I hope that it does and in a beneficial way.

♪ In fact, most of Britain's industrial towns and cities, in some ways, benefitted from the creation and the maintenance of empire.

And they, too, must look back and acknowledge the negative impact as well as the positives of Victorian Britain.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪ (bright music)