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.

(Onyeka) For good...and for bad.

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

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

(dramatic music) ♪ This time I'm in London... ♪ ...exploring the capital of Victorian Britain.

We're going to see something remarkable in a moment.

London became popular in Victorian times... (Michelle) This belonged to Frederick Dadswell and he clearly loved the Crystal Palace because this wasn't the only time he had a season ticket.

(Onyeka) ...whilst the city's underbelly offered a darker form of leisure time.

So we're gonna find out about the more shadowy, the secret history of Victorian recreation.

Over a century later, Victorian London and its lifestyle has left a lasting impression.

So this estate, in a way then, is a kind of memorial to Prince Albert.

(Angela) It is, yes.

(Onyeka) And even created a more modern way of thinking.

(Pen) For the first time, they can go and meet other women in public without a man escorting them.

♪ (Onyeka) From various parks to an extensive railway network and famous landmarks, so much of what we see in London today is Victorian.

This is Tower Bridge.

Often portrayed as the symbol of the Victorian Age.

It was in fact created in 1894.

And when it was made, it was thought of as a symbol of everything that was great about the Victorian period.

(dramatic music) But on this walk, I'm not in search of what the Victorians created so much as how they spent their leisure time.

♪ From Hyde Park, that proved to be a popular day out, I'm heading south to where leisure time and paleontology crossed paths.

♪ After a trip to the local public house, I'll have Victorian afternoon tea before heading west to Kensington, to one of Victorian London's lasting legacies.

But where else to start than the heart of London and a grand event of the 19th century.

♪ Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 14 years when the capital played host to an extravaganza unlike anything seen before: The Great Exhibition.

♪ The Great Exhibition of 1851 was an advert for Britishness but it was intended to be a Victorian day out.

It was intended to offer to all of its citizens, all the citizens of the British Empire, an opportunity to see how far the Empire had gone.

To be an international advert for everything that was British.

♪ This was a period when Britain's empire was expanding to all the corners of the globe.

With Queen Victoria on the throne, Britain would go on to control nearly a quarter of the world's population.

♪ This is a time before the TV, a time before video, a time before the computer.

How would the British Empire be sold to its people?

One of the best ways of selling empire is to make it pleasure, is to make it fun.

♪ And so, the Great Exhibition worked as a visual feast, a global jamboree of exhibits that would entertain and inform.

From a golden eagle... to an ivory throne... the Great Exhibition was about turning the ideas of empire into something that people could understand.

At the heart of this extravaganza was a glass-covered structure constructed by 5,000 workers.

It was a Victorian marvel.

Nothing like it had been seen in the world.

In the six months it was open, the Great Exhibition attracted six million visitors.

To discover how it achieved this, I've come to the location of the Exhibition itself to meet social historian Dr. Michelle Johansen.

Michelle, we're just outside Hyde Park where the site of the Great Exhibition was.

What was the Great Exhibition?

The full title was The Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations.

And so the idea was that it was going to attract exhibitors from all over the world to showcase the best of their invention, the best of their talent.

So that was the idea of the Great Exhibition.

(Onyeka) Hyde Park is really big.

Did the Great Exhibition cover the whole of Hyde Park?

(Michelle) It was enormous.

The Exhibition site itself was absolutely huge.

You'd loop around, so anyone that visited the Exhibition would expect to walk for about eight miles to cover everything and see everything.

(Onyeka) The Palace, which housed 14,000 exhibitors, was so big it required around 300,000 panes of glass.

I've heard that the Exhibition was an idea of Prince Albert.

Is that true?

Well, he was very prominent in the organization of it but the idea, it's believed, was from a civil servant called Henry Cole.

So Henry Cole was an inventor, alongside his civil servant duties, and he was very keen to showcase other inventions and he'd been to similar exhibitions in France but those exhibitions were only showcasing French work.

And there was so much excitement around it that they started opening up the Exhibition site as it was being built to people to come and have a look at it, and Queen Victoria regularly visited to see what progress was like.

It was a real moment of excitement and the press covered it regularly.

-And who could come?

-In the beginning, it was very, very expensive so the first day it was only people that could afford to buy a season ticket.

Only they could come, so that of course was the wealthy and the elite.

Then, after that, the prices slowly went down through May and then at the end of May, I think it was the 28th of May, maybe the 26th, that they actually threw the building open and you could come in for a shilling entry.

When the price did drop, at first, not that many people visited because they were scared that once the working classes came there would be disorder and there was a lot of fear of disorder as well because at that time in Europe, there was a lot of rebellion going on and people were very worried that there might be some organized disorder.

(Onyeka) As the prices to enter the Exhibition dropped, the authorities demanded a greater police presence.

But in the six months that it was open, only a handful of people were arrested.

Can I find out more about the sections of the Exhibition?

The building was split into two halves.

So the eastern half was for the foreign goods and the western half was for the British goods.

(Onyeka) Oh, foreign goods and British goods?

All right.

But this might surprise you, it certainly does kind of strike an odd chord.

But with the British goods, they included the British possessions so there was India there as well, of course, and African possessions there, Canada, Australia.

What was in the foreign goods?

They were particularly interested in raw materials so it'd be things like tin, silver, kind of things that people hadn't seen before.

So it wouldn't sound that exciting to us but when people saw them, and especially because everything was about scale, so it was always an immense this and a gigantic that.

Also, from Germany, there were loads and loads of stuffed animals and they were doing things like human beings would do.

So there were these door mice who were fencing with each other and there were hedgehogs who were performing different things as well.

So people loved looking at the stuffed animals as well.

That's what they would come to see.

Canada, for example, sent sleighs.

So you know, they were these huge things.

Really enormous exhibits.

So if you could sum up the Great Exhibition in three lines, what would they be?

(Michelle) I would say the Great Exhibition was completely pioneering, really original.

I would say it placed London-- fixed London in the popular imagination as the global city of the period, absolutely, definitely.

And it also did make everybody aware that London was a safe space to visit.

It was an incredibly good opportunity for London to represent itself as somewhere that was culturally advanced, industrially advanced, and then also socially and ethically very, very progressive.

♪ London was being promoted as the center, not only of Britain but of the Empire.

And that's why the Great Exhibition was situated there.

So people from different parts of Britain came to London and there is this concept where London is a mecca, a mecca of industry, of commerce, of artistry, of everything that's new and modern.

Of course it wasn't but that's the idea.

And we get a lot of that idea from the Great Exhibition and from the popularizing of the Great Exhibition as a day out.

(dramatic orchestral music) ♪ I'm on a walk through Victorian London, a city important for the development of Britain and its empire.

♪ The successful Great Exhibition of 1851 had showcased the capital's global confidence, but it had also promoted a simple idea of the Victorian day out.

♪ So often when we think of the Victorians we think of their ingenuity, their science, their technology, but the Victorians were even able to turn leisure into an industry.

♪ So I'm heading further south to explore another part of London that was affected by the Great Exhibition.

♪ When the Exhibition ended, there was an obvious question: what do we do with this magnificent glass structure?

Thirty-two months later, a group of businessmen seized the opportunity to buy the great glass house and move it to a rural hill some seven miles away.

So they actually took the Great Exhibition of Hyde Park and lifted it and then placed it here in South London, looking out over London and over the surrounding countryside.

350 feet up, I'm meeting Richard Watkins of the Crystal Palace Museum to discover the remarkable legacy of the Great Exhibition's new home.

(Richard) Most of the ironwork was transferred and the actual look of the building was changed.

So one thing, when you look at the building in Hyde Park, it's this long, rather boxy, rectangular structure with just one section in the middle.

-Right.

-Here, it became more fancy, if you like, with three sections, one grand, one in the middle with two at the north and the south called transepts.

(Onyeka) The central height of the adapted structure reached over 200 feet.

That's 30 feet higher than Nelson's Column.

All it needed now was a name.

When the building itself went up, it just looked like this greenhouse, this mirage that had suddenly appeared.

And so, Punch magazine, which was a satirical magazine that began publishing just a few years before the Great Exhibition, nicknamed it the Crystal Palace and that's what stuck.

(Onyeka) The Crystal Palace's new owners were happy to build on the proven success of the Great Exhibition.

The latest examples of industry were here once again, as were festivals, concerts, and sports, including the FA Cup.

But more importantly, there was an idea that you can learn through entertainment.

It's the Egyptian Court that I want to draw attention to here because, of course, we're seeing it in black and white so it doesn't look so exciting, but you imagine that in color.

It would have been an extraordinary view to see that.

You know, and people's lives, typically very, very drab, but to come and to see something like this here would have been a really extraordinary thing.

(Onyeka) Audiences experienced parts of the world that they may never have had a chance to visit.

These two sphinxes, are they modern?

Are they modern creations or are they Victorian?

(Richard) The directors applied to the Louvre Museum in Paris to take plaster casts of the Ramses sphinxes there which had been captured from Egypt in the early 1800s in Napoleonic times.

And so, from those casts, they recreated them here.

(Onyeka) You're not sure whether they're follies.

You know, 19th century follies made up things made in the Victorian period and made to just excite an audience, or whether there's something more to it.

So that's really helpful.

The revamped Palace, with its sphinxes standing guard, was a hit with its two million annual visitors.

(Michelle) What we have here is a really extraordinary annual season ticket for the Crystal Palace in South London.

And this belonged to Frederick Dadswell and he clearly loved the Crystal Palace because this wasn't the only time he had a season ticket.

And what I really love about it is it says, "Mr. Dadswell and Lady."

So it's an ambiguous lady, any lady he chooses to bring along is allowed to come.

(soft music) (Onyeka) Over time, the Palace became a home for big events.

(dramatic operatic music) ♪ And in the summer, there were fireworks.

(fireworks popping, exploding) Were the working classes, the ordinary people, coming here?

And if they were coming here, did it affect what the intention of this building was meant for?

(Richard) There were events which perhaps we might consider a bit elitist, a lot of royal visits and so on that unless you were quite rich or an important person, you wouldn't get a good seat in the house.

(Onyeka) Yeah, I see.

But no matter what your social class, everybody benefited from a Victorian innovation.

The Bank Holidays Act of 1871 introduced four new public holidays a year.

(Michelle) The August bank holiday, in particular, was absolute mayhem at Crystal Palace.

So all of the class systems that they had on the trains at the time, they had first, second, and third class carriages, that all went to pot.

Everyone just piled in.

They would have music in the carriages and of course we've got to remember, people were smoking at the time so the carriages would be a fog of smoke, packed in, everyone sitting on everyone else's laps, somebody playing a musical instrument, they would all get to the Palace, everyone would bundle out and go and enjoy the Crystal Palace.

(Onyeka) But what happened to this incredible structure?

Well, at 7:00 p.m. on November 30th, 1936, a huge fire broke out.

Its flames were so vast that they could be seen 40 miles away in Brighton.

(Richard) By the time it had broken out into the main nave, while some of the fire people were beginning to arrive and despite the efforts of about 90 different hoses being applied to it, you know, by sort of 9:30, 10:00, it was clear it wasn't going to be saved.

(soft dramatic music) ♪ (Onyeka) Of course, the Crystal Palace has now gone but its name has been inherited by this area of South London and a football team.

And today, we can still visit the park that surrounded the Palace.

♪ There was lots to learn in the grounds, walking around in the grounds.

There were lakes, there was a lot of sporting activity taking place.

Also dancing was another big part of the grounds, lots and lots of fountains too.

The play of water was something that was very, very popular in the Victorian period.

It was like a theme park almost, especially as the years went by and more and more rides were added so that it became like a fun fair that people would visit very regularly to get a kind of buzz and excitement.

♪ (Onyeka) And this is one part of London I've never visited before.

So before I move on, there's a place I've got to see.

So Crystal Palace is a massive park and we're at the other end of it and we're gonna see something remarkable in a moment.

With their glass house in place, the Crystal Palace Company commissioned something rather unusual.

(whimsical music) ♪ A collection of life-size statues, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.

(laughing) To be honest, when I first saw them I thought they looked quite ridiculous.

Certainly there is something unusual about these dinosaurs.

I'm meeting social historian Sarah Slaughter and paleontologist Ellinor Michel to find out the story behind them.

The first thing is that the Victorians know about dinosaurs, or do they?

'Cause some of these stone dinosaurs don't look like any dinosaurs that I know.

(Ellinor) Yeah.

Well, the Victorians knew that there were these things called dinosaurs and the scholars and stuff had piles of bones that you could have a look at.

But they'd never seen anything that brought them to life and this was the first time that they were modeled in life-size and life form.

(Sarah) The notion was to show people something as well as teach them the name of it.

This was quite sort of a new idea at the time because you'd learn by rote, you'd learn the names of things; you didn't necessarily know what they looked like.

(soft whimsical music) (Ellinor) They were put together by a fantastic natural history artist named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins who used what was known from the fossils at the time to make a pretty good guess about what the animals might look like.

He had scientific advice from a famous, famous paleontologist at the time named Richard Owen.

Richard Owen often pops up in the conversation, he takes a lot of the credit.

He probably didn't have as much to do with this site as he claimed.

(Onyeka) Okay, so it was about attaching a name to it.

Yeah, he was sort of a celebrity scientist.

(Onyeka) And along with a celebrity endorsement, there was a showpiece opening event.

(Sarah) On New Year's Eve between 1853 and 1854, they staged a dinner inside the iguanodon.

(Onyeka) Okay.

Which one?

(Sarah) The standing iguanodon, the one that's on all fours.

Probably wasn't the exact sculpture, it was more likely to be the mold, and then they had a table that came out from the sculpture.

And so the most famous people were inside.

So this was a big publicity thing in order to get it into the papers and to get people to see that this was here, to get them coming.

So commercial endeavor, we want people to come, we want people to pay, and so we need to make it widely known.

As we came in today, we walked into the park, it was free of charge.

Would it have been free in the Victorian period to come in?

(Sarah) No.

(Onyeka) Would I have been able to see these dinosaurs and reptiles and the great mammals free of charge?

(Sarah) Absolutely not, no.

It was a shilling to get into the park and the park was closed on Sundays.

But in actual fact, anyone who was working class, their day off would be Sunday.

-Absolutely.

-So, structurally, it made it quite difficult.

They would have to come in the evenings or just on bank holidays.

They would only have a Sunday free.

-That's right.

-And so, it's actually stopping them from coming to see this altogether.

It's clear that Victorian London became full of ways to spend your leisure time.

The question is whether the poor had an opportunity to enjoy these days out.

I think what is impressive about this is that, and it's not in a sense of what's being shown here but in the fact that this has remained since 1854.

So in that sense, it has an importance because this is Victorian ideas being preserved.

Yeah, I think that that is truly remarkable and very, very interesting.

(soft music) I'm on a walking tour of London, exploring how the Victorians spent their spare time.

Already, I've discovered some of the capital's greatest days out, from exhibitions of empire to private dinosaur parks.

♪ So as I head back towards the city center, I'm stopping off four miles north in Clapham to explore something far more down to Earth.

We're talking about the Victorian day out, Victorian life, and we wouldn't be complete-- that wouldn't be complete, that story, without visiting the pub.

The pub played a vital part in Victorian life.

The Victorian pub was a place where people of all classes could feel at home.

(Louise) Pubs.

Very important to the Victorian people and particularly, actually, to working people.

They were where, if you were in a trade union, for example, they were where your trade union would meet, where you'd meet your friends as well, obviously, social side to it.

(Onyeka) Are we saying it's a class thing?

Are we saying that middle classes or the upper classes wouldn't use or think of the pub in that way?

Or are we saying that the middle class or the upper classes wouldn't come to the pub at all?

There were pubs which were just a front room, literally, of someone's house and you wouldn't tend to see many toffs in there.

(Onyeka) You said toffs.

That's what they would have called them.

The toffs in the top hats.

They probably wouldn't frequent low dives like that.

But other pubs, bigger pubs, had the saloon for the gentlemen.

The drinks were even a bit more expensive and they were even decorated a bit differently.

(Onyeka) It is not just that you drink; it is what you drink, where you drink, and how you drink it that determines your position and your status.

(Louise) Alcohol is around, it's around for everybody of all classes, though.

So it's not a question of working class people just being constantly drunk.

That is the impression you get from the aristocracy, they do look down on the working classes and say they're always drunk, but obviously you couldn't work you couldn't do your 12-hour, 13-hour, 14-hour shifts, could you?

Especially not working with dangerous machinery.

You'd have no fingers left if you were permanently drunk.

(whimsical music) (Onyeka) And there was an intriguing extra element to Victorian pub culture: gambling.

Cards, skittles, bowls, almost any activity could and would be gambled on.

♪ Pubs like this one sometimes had a separate space set aside for gambling activities.

(Louise) In 70 pubs in London, if you went down the creaky, rickety wooden stairs into a very smelly basement underneath, rat-baiting.

And there were rat catchers everywhere as well.

It was a pretty good job actually.

You could make quite a lot of money as a rat catcher.

And one of the things that they would do was not just kill the rats, not just poison them or set their dogs to kill them, but catching them live.

I mean, that's a lot more dangerous.

And those are sold for rat-baiting contests and there are landlords who keep their own rats in cages and they keep their own dogs, their terrier dogs.

The contest begins, you bet money on how quickly the dog can catch and kill the rats, and it sounds just horrific.

Horrific.

They'd unleash the dog on these poor rats which were in this wooden sort of circus ring and couldn't get out and be scrabbling to get out but couldn't.

And the dog would just kill hundreds and hundreds.

(Onyeka) Grim as it may seem, the Victorians were continuing a blood sport tradition that is centuries old.

But attitudes towards animal welfare were changing and by 1849, both bear-baiting and cock fighting were banned.

But these activities still continued.

The upper classes, they may be in there in disguise or they may be fox hunting.

(Louise) The upper classes are often in there not in disguise.

There are oil paintings of rat-baiting and you can see a lot of top hats among the crowds.

People would come out of their gentlemen's clubs and indulge in a bit of rat-baiting 'cause they would bet on anything.

I've never seen a picture with women rat-baiting but you can clearly see from the head gear and the clothes that there are people of all classes.

You don't expect it so much, -do you?

-No.

So in truth, blood sports were widespread and barely concealed in Victorian society.

But some Victorian pastimes would not be socially acceptable today.

There would occasionally be these traveling shows that would display people, a few conjoined twins, that kind of issue, people who were missing arms and legs, people who had a lot of hair, who had hirsutism, but also people who simply were from another race.

(Onyeka) 19th century Britain, with its expanding empire, was certainly fascinated by the idea and the science of race but it was a fascination loaded with preconceived notions about Britain's position in the world.

(Louise) They're justifying the fact that they're colonizing huge swaths of Africa and Asia by saying, "These people are other, aren't they?

They're not quite human.

They're not quite the same as us.

I mean, look at them.

They need our help.

They need us looking after them.

They're running around naked."

So you have people who are portrayed or portrayed themselves as a representation 'cause it's fitting into a Victorian idea about the science of race and about those sorts of ideas, but people would pay to see their own mythology realized.

But the other story is there are integrated populations living in Britain at the same time who do face racism but who exist within British society and who are going to the same pubs that we've just been talking about.

(dramatic music) Perhaps what's most surprising is how publicly acceptable displays and performances of this kind became.

The freak show, as it was known, was a staple leisure activity, all part of an array of attractions known as "curiosities."

To delve into this murky world properly, I paid a visit to the National Fairground and Circus Archive.

Wow.

So we're gonna find out about the Victorian day out, not just the days to the countryside or the beach but the more shadowy, the secret history of Victorian recreation which involved the curiosities.

♪ So these are leaflets for events for Victorian days out where Victorian families would come and want to see curiosities.

-Yes.

-Right.

And what would they be expected to see?

(Vanessa) Well, this is the wonderful thing because when people think of the curiosity, they think of it on the fairground or in the circus but actually in London, it was in the streets, in the shops, on the highways.

In entertainment history term, these are known as "shop shows."

-Shop shows?

-Yeah, or "penny gaffs."

-Oh, penny gaffs.

-Yeah.

(Onyeka) So these were live shows inside the shop?

Okay.

(Vanessa) But one of my particular favorites... -Oh, fascinating.

-Have a look.

(Onyeka) And what are we looking at here?

(Vanessa) A flea circus.

And the flea circuses came over from France in the 1800s and basically became the wonder of the age where you could actually see educated and performing fleas.

(Onyeka) And this is happening in the center of London?

In the center of London, you've got Victorian families coming to see this?

-Yeah, the flea circus.

-That's remarkable.

(Vanessa) On 209 Regent Street.

Paying two shillings to see a flea circus.

(Onyeka) Right.

(Vanessa) It was middle class entertainment.

It was not for the working poor.

These shows, shop shows, were for genteel, sophisticated, aspirational middle class.

(Onyeka) "Greatest wonder of the age!

Under patronage of her most gracious majesty the Queen.

Cantelo's Patent Hydro-Incubator."

So this is a egg hatching machine, chicken eggs.

(Vanessa) You could watch chickens being hatched in front of you on a conveyor belt.

This was so sought after that it was actually taken to Windsor Castle to be shown in front of the Queen.

(Onyeka) "Mr. Harry Phillips' Living Mythological Mermaid.

At The Brighton Aquarium, February 10th, 1886.

Half beautiful woman, half fish."

(Vanessa) Yeah.

So usually, it's the body of a fish with the head of a monkey.

-Yes.

-But they personify it, they portray it as this kind of beautiful woman to bring the crowds in.

Then you get like this Panopticum which is the classic torture museum, wax works.

(Onyeka) "The awful tortures of the Inquisition with the authentic instruments of that dreadful institution.

Admission sixpence, children half-price."

(Vanessa) Exactly.

It's everyday life.

It's not on the margins, you're not going down a back alley or coming out of a pub and seeing a show.

(Onyeka) So it's escapism, then, isn't it?

-But it's mainstream.

-Yeah, it's mainstream escapism.

-It's escapism from-- -Respectable.

(Onyeka) Respectable mainstream escapism from the humdrum nature of life.

(Vanessa) So it's that kind of weird and the wonderful next to the mundane and the normal.

-Yes, yes.

-But what is normal?

To us, it's a very weird concept but to the Victorians it obviously was everyday life.

(Onyeka) Indeed.

(dramatic music) The nature of these Victorian shows may seem very strange to us today.

However, another activity that's very different is as popular now as it was then: the taking of afternoon tea.

In the Victorian era, tea became more than just a drink.

It was a social, a cultural, and a political institution.

So this afternoon, I've arranged to take tea with food historian Pen Vogler.

Okay, great.

Where should we start?

(Pen) Well, I think we should start with some tea.

(Onyeka) Okay, all right, fantastic.

(Pen) So the hostess would pour the tea.

(Onyeka) Thank you.

I was gonna say actually when you were pouring the tea, do you think there's a ritual involved in the drinking of tea?

(Pen) I think the British have got so many rituals involved in the drinking of tea and the eating of tea.

I mean, in this tiny little three-letter word and we've just put so much meaning into it.

The thing that we call afternoon tea, the thing that we're having now, is a very Victorian invention.

It started off with the kind of aristocracy.

So the story that everybody tells about it is that the Duchess of Bedford, in about the 1840s when dinner was becoming later and later, got a bit peckish.

-What's dinner?

-So what was dinner?

Dinner was the meal that used to be about three or four o'clock and then if you were aristocratic, the middle classes, because the middle classes were growing bigger and trying to imitate you, and so you wanted to put some sort of clear blue water between you and those people down there, so you'd have your dinner later and later which meant that people started getting peckish in the middle of the afternoon.

And then, supposedly, the Duchess of Bedford kicked it all off by inviting her friends round to her rooms in her castle and gave them tea and cake.

(Onyeka) So this is supposed to be so British and we've got Indian tea in China cups and one wonders whether any of it's British.

And with sugar that's not from here.

The only thing probably that may be may be the milk.

And so what makes it British?

(Pen) What makes it British is that the Empire made it British and one of the reasons that we liked Indian tea rather than China tea was that it was considered that all these tea plantations in India or, you know, Assam, Darjeeling, run by proper British men, you know?

And they were part of the Empire therefore it was a British thing.

(Onyeka) As part of the ritual, they would also be eating certain things.

Right at the beginning, when tea was just this afternoon tea idea, was quite novel.

It might have been very simple, some bread and butter, always bread and butter.

The Victorians were obsessed with bread and butter as everybody should be 'cause it is delicious.

And then another technical thing happens in the middle of the century.

Somebody invents baking powder, and lo and behold, you can start having things like scones with Madeira cake, this lovely Victoria sponge named for the Queen.

-Right.

-Yes.

Which would be a way of kind of showing off the fact that you have a good cook, you can make your sponge rise.

(dramatic orchestral music) (Onyeka) So even the taking of afternoon tea is laced with the whiff of empire and thick with the projections of status and class.

♪ (Pen) In the previous century, Samuel Johnson, for example, was a complete tea addict.

He wrote this wonderful defense of tea and he was really clear that the intelligentsia, the middle classes, needed tea because it stimulated.

But if you were the working man, what do you need it for?

It doesn't give you any calories and it's not up to you to drink tea.

It's a waste of your money and it's a waste of your time.

And other people went even further and said tea was corrupting for the working classes.

That's why the middle classes and the upper classes have this etiquette thing.

And so, they have etiquette, they have this series of rules about you've got to do it this way, you've got to hold your finger up or not hold your finger up.

And that's how you keep the class below you out.

(Onyeka) But surprisingly, there's one aspect of this pastime that became progressive.

♪ I think the most liberating thing for women in the 1880s, 1890s, are tea shops.

So for the first time, they can go and meet other women in public without a man escorting them or an older lady, which might have been just about acceptable.

They let women come and have some bread and butter, some tea, some sandwiches, and chat.

And to be honest, I think it's not as dramatic as throwing yourself in front of the king's horse or chaining yourself to the railings, but I think for a lot of women that was probably incredibly liberating.

(bright orchestral music) (Onyeka) I'm on the final leg of my journey through Victorian London.

And from a day out to an evening in the pub, I've been exploring how the Victorians spent their leisure time.

But just as important for me is what these activities can tell us about Victorian Britain and how the Victorians liked to see themselves.

♪ I'm finishing my journey in one of London's most desirable and upmarket areas, South Kensington.

As we know it today, it is one of the great legacies of the Victorian era.

♪ So we're here in Central London in South Kensington and we're sort of surrounded by museums.

On the right here is the Natural History Museum, on the left here is the Victoria & Albert Museum, and far left we have the Science Museum.

And it's not by chance that these institutions are located in the same space at the same moment in time.

And it's not by chance that the Victorians constructed these buildings to occupy this same space at the same moment in time.

They were sending a message about their position, about the society, and about London.

(dramatic music) South Kensington owes a great deal to the huge success of the Great Exhibition and a familiar figure, Prince Albert.

To explore Albert's lasting legacy, I've come to Victorian London's most famous stage, the Royal Albert Hall, to meet archivist Angela Kenny.

So what connection does the Exhibition have to these sorts of structures that we see here in Kensington?

(Angela) It led to the development of this whole estate.

At the end of the Exhibition, the Commission made 186,000 pounds from subscriptions that had been given towards the Exhibition and from money that had been paid on the door to go into the Exhibition.

Albert had the idea that he wanted to buy an estate and to use it for educational purposes so that people could see good design and could learn about science.

And so he had the idea of spending that money to buy this estate.

(bright, whimsical music) So when the Commission first bought the estate, they built the roads around Albertopolis.

So Exhibition Road and Queen's Gate, Cromwell Road along the bottom, and this of course is Prince Consort Road.

So all related to Albert and the Great Exhibition.

♪ (Onyeka) So what was this area like before?

(Angela) Well, when the Commission first purchased the estate, it was a very rural area.

There were a few big houses but there was lots-- (Onyeka) Have you got a picture to show us?

(Angela) I've got a picture to show you, yes.

So here you can see, it was all market gardens and orchards.

(Onyeka) This is South Kensington, is it?

(Angela) This is South Kensington.

This is the Commission's estate at the end of the Great Exhibition.

So this is 1854.

So was it a desirable residence?

Did people want to live here?

(Angela) I don't think it was at that stage.

People were amazed when Albert wanted to purchase it.

And we've certainly got letters in the Commission's archive that say, "Why do you want to buy land in South Kensington?

Nobody is going to travel out to South Kensington to see things."

-Little did they know.

-That's right.

Slightly different now.

His main reason for setting up the estate was to help British industry.

The Great Exhibition showed that the British industry wasn't as good as perhaps French industry.

(Onyeka) There's an idea that by 1851, Britain was at the apex of all industrial development, all scientific development, but what we're clearly seeing is that Britain wasn't at the apex of all this invention and they were still lagging behind.

So that's a dent to our concepts or ideas about Britishness or British success.

-Yes.

-In 1857, the first significant institution here was the South Kensington Museum, now known as the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Five years later came the Natural History Museum.

(Angela) In the 1870s, the Commission offered the site for the Science Museum to the government and some money to develop a science museum and it was turned down.

They decided they didn't need one.

And so it's actually only in the 1920s that the Science Museum was finally built.

(Onyeka) When we think of South Kensington, we think of these sorts of buildings.

We think of the museums, we think of institutions of education and learning, of science.

Perhaps that was the intention.

So Prince Albert had all these fantastic ideas.

Did he get to see any of them come into reality?

(Angela) So Albert certainly saw the estate purchased, he saw the roads built, and he saw what is now the Victoria & Albert Museum opened.

That opened in 1857.

But then he died in 1861.

So he didn't see any of the other things built on the estate.

But the Commission were very keen to follow Albert's plan.

And so, really, all the way along through the 1800s, they continued to develop Albert's ideas with regards to this estate.

(Onyeka) So this estate, in a way then, is a kind of memorial to Prince Albert.

(Angela) It is, yes.

(soft dramatic music) ♪ (Onyeka) Albert's enthusiastic work helped shape the substance and aspirations of Victorian London.

Much of what he stood for is familiar to us today.

♪ The Victorians seem very familiar to us.

Their days out are still the way that we enjoy our days out.

The weekends that they helped to create are the weekends that we still enjoy.

The museums that they made are still the museums that we go and visit.

The tea and the coffee that they consumed are still the beverages that we now drink.

So much of what we think of as modern or brand Britain was fashioned in the Victorian period.

♪ (sweeping, dramatic music) ♪ (bright music)