All language subtitles for BBCELE~3.srt - eng(2)

Imagine Britain in the
middle of the Napoleonic Wars.

We've been fighting
the French for years.

Napoleon tightens
his grip on Europe.

Closing us in, locking us down.

But the Brits fight on.

Across Europe, more than
three million people die

and then in 1815,
the final struggle.

The Battle of Waterloo was a
decisive victory over Napoleon

and the start of a new era.

I'm at the top of a memorial

to the Commander in Chief of
Britain's triumphant army.

The darkness and destruction of
the Napoleonic wars were over.

In 1815, Britain emerged victorious

as the most powerful
nation on Earth.

Britannia really did rule the waves.

Almost by accident,
we'd acquired 17 new colonies.

Our leaders and statesmen looked
around them,

asked themselves the question,
"Who are we?

"Who should we be? What should
a modern Britain look like?"

And all this...would be transformed.

Demolished and rebuilt in some of
the most ambitious metropolitan
improvements ever attempted.

Central London would be reborn,

with Regent Street slicing through
the heart of the city.

This was an age of
confidence, exuberance

and above all, experimentation.

It was a decade of design
as wild as the '60s.

With Ancient Greece and Rome,
Egypt, China, France,

and India all thrown into the mix.

There was glorious light
and garish colour.

New technology mixed up
with ancient art.

In the decade of the Regency,

between 1811 and 1820,
there was an explosion of design.

British style was lavish,

theatrical, outrageous
and brilliant!

And at the heart of it all was
George, the Prince Regent,

whose obsession with building
left an indelible stamp on Britain.

I'm Lucy Worsley
and I'm a historian.

I'm Chief Curator at
Historic Royal Palaces

and I love poking around
in Royal buildings.

I'm fascinated by the way palaces
always reflect the character

of the person who built them.

The biggest builder of them
all was the Prince Regent.

He had something like an addiction

for architecture
and interior decoration.

He was constantly building
and rebuilding his houses.

He was always hungry for change.

In 1815, he appointed the architect
John Nash

to rebuild his seaside retreat,

the Marine Pavilion at Brighton.

Nash took it from being an elegant
neo-classical villa

and turned it into this
Indian fantasy palace.

George started this place
as soon as Waterloo was won.

He'd defeated Napoleon, the Emperor
of Europe, and now here he was,

building a holiday home for himself
as Emperor of the World.

The pavilion captures
the craziness of Regency style.

Its clashing of cultures,
its boldness,

its willingness to try new things.

Together, George and his architect,
John Nash,

would give us the very
essence of the Regency.

This book was commissioned
by John Nash

to celebrate his finished building
and the amazing exuberance here,

Indian on the outside, Chinese
on the inside,

was achieved with the help
of some new technology.

These domes are sealed with what
Nash called his patent mastic

and they're supported by an
iron framework.

The building's all about
illusion and theatricality.

It's by one showman for another.
By John Nash for the Prince Regent,

both of them willing to break
the rules of architecture.

Building was George's biggest
passion, his main creative outlet.

Walking through these exotic rooms,

you get the sense
that they were designed

for the naughty, no-rules
lifestyle that George longed for,

with a room for each pleasure.

And for his greatest
pleasure, eating,

the most luxurious rooms of all.

Trapped indoors by his gout and
hardly able to climb up stairs,

the Regent planned his palace around
his consolation - a love of grub.

A quarter of the building
is devoted to food.

He was so pleased
with his new kitchen,

he even used it as a dining room.

The cartoonists showed him gnawing
on a greasy drumstick,

but his taste was
a lot more sophisticated.

Is that enough wax?

'I'm in George's kitchen
with the food historian, Ivan Day.'

So what you're doing
is you're pressing it

into this little impression...
I'm making an urn.

..of a classical urn.
That'll be good.

Shall I start kneading my stuff?

Yeah. If you get some of that out of
there. What's it called again?

This is called gum paste,
or pastillage,

and it's a mixture of sugar
and a gum called gum tragacanth,

which makes it very elastic,
like plasticine.

It's like edible plasticine.

Is it what I put on my
Christmas cake? Not at all.

It was used at very, very high
status regal banquets,

usually to make
edible table ornaments.

Originally, it was
made for making cups and plates

you could actually eat off.

Once you'd finished eating,

you could then eat the plate if you
wanted to save the washing up.

Squidge, squidge, squidge it in.

Right. You'd better start
because it's drying out.

Quick, quick, quick!
Now, let it touch the wood first.
So push it down.

Push it down hard, really hard.

Are you going to hold still while
I...? I'm going to hold it for you.

And then you just squeegee
it backwards and forwards.

Don't break the neck!

That's perfect. Oh, very good!

I'm going to get the
little pointy thing

and start pulling it out.

Work your way around the sides.

Come out, little urn.

This is going to be a masterpiece.

You've done it. It's done,
it'll come off.

And just let it drop
that side down onto the wood.

Just flick it over and
it'll just drop out.

Ooh! Look how
finely decorated it is.

It's superb.
And then you make another one

and you join the two together
with a bit of adhesive.

And then I could put it on the
top of a building like that.

Exactly, yeah. Brilliant!

My urn is a tiny bit of the most
spectacular part

of a Regency Banquet
- the sugar Sculpture.

The undisputed master of this
arcane art was Antonin Careme,

the Regency's most celebrated chef.

He'd cooked for Napoleon,
which instantly attracted George,

and in 1816 he managed to
lure Careme over from France.

It turns out the Regent and his
new cook had a common interest.

Tell me a bit about Antonin Careme.

The interesting thing about
Careme was he studied architecture.

He went to libraries and looked at,
you know, Vitruvius,

and people like that

so he could understand
the classical orders.

And he defined confectionary

as being an art form because
it was architecture in miniature.

So even the Regent's cook
considered himself an architect.

His bestselling books were filled
with diagrams of edible buildings,

reflecting all the latest
architectural trends.

His style is very eclectic,
and on one table

you might get an Egyptian colossus
and a Greek Temple,

but you also might get a Swiss
cottage or a Russian Orthodox church

made out of nougat
and sugar and almonds.

And it became very much based on a
really early 19th century aesthetic

of pinching forms from all kinds of
architectural and artistic genres.

So when you look at his
designs, they are caprices.

It's a fantasy kind of world.

Rather like this building.

In fact, this building
is rather like a big sugar
Careme in its own right really.

Sadly the perfect match between
George and Careme, wasn't to last.

But he didn't stay for long cos I
think he saw the Prince Regent

as being a little bit
on the boorish side

and not really appreciative of some
of the finer details

of French cuisine classique,
and he moved on.

Careme wasn't the only person
to fall out of love with George.

The world at large thought
his pavilion looked ridiculous.

A shoddy version of an
opium smoker's dream.

Satirists painted the Regent
as a fat, debauched addict,

ensconced in an
outrageous oriental den.

And George, oblivious, carried on
building away, living the high life.

But his government was taking a
rather more cautious approach

to honouring Waterloo.

How do you celebrate the glorious
ending of 20 years of warfare?

Well you'd expect the government
to put up a whole lot of monuments -

triumphal arches, columns,
that sort of thing.

But two years after the
Battle of Waterloo,

they'd only finished one monument,

and it wasn't
even a proper monument at all.

It was a bridge.

Of course, the original Waterloo
Bridge wasn't made of concrete,

or even of sugar.

The Regency version was a
granite affair with many arches

and on the second anniversary
of the Battle of Waterloo,

it was the scene of a huge party.

The Bridge was opened
on the 18th June 1817.

For the occasion,
there were lots of flags flying.

The bridge was packed with veterans
from the battlefield of Waterloo

and the houses all around

were described as looking as if
they were roofed with people.

This feat of engineering

was proclaimed as a
fitting and practical monument

to the brilliant victory of Waterloo

and it was described as one
of the wonders of the age.

Waterloo's victorious general,
The Duke of Wellington,

crossed over the bridge.

Smoke filled the air
as cannons fired.

One shot for each of the
202 guns captured at Waterloo.

In amongst this crowd was
the painter, John Constable,

and for him the occasion would turn
out to be a bit of an obsession.

Constable set out to paint his
grandest canvas yet -

a patriotic tour de force

recording this great moment
in the life of the nation.

He slaved away at his
painting for 15 years.

Finally in 1832, it was ready to be
exhibited at the Royal Academy,

here at Somerset House.

In the finished canvas, we see the
Prince Regent getting into a barge

up at Whitehall,
with the bridge in the distance.

I think this picture
meant a lot to Constable.

This was his chance to paint a
historic moment -

the opening of a monument

to the greatest victory
in military history.

But poor old Constable was
completely upstaged by Turner

in the same exhibition.

This is Turner's effort.
It's a seascape.

It's full of movement,

although apparently it's
a much simpler picture,

and when Turner saw
what Constable had done,

he played rather a naughty trick.

He saw how bright and busy
this work was and he came back

and added just one little red buoy
on the surface of his waves there.

When Constable saw what
Turner had done, he knew

Turner was playing a trick on him
and he said in a rage,

"Turner's been here
and he's fired a gun!"

Even without Turner's mocking,

Constable's painting
was a total flop.

15 years on, critics couldn't
remember the event he'd painted,

or why Waterloo Bridge was
supposed to be so important.

So why did the government make
all this fuss about a bridge?

The real reason that a bridge
ended up being the official monument

to the Battle of Waterloo
was that the government was broke

and the amazing thing about Waterloo
Bridge

is that it was funded
entirely by private investment.

It may have cost members of
the public

a penny to cross
over the bridge,

but to the government, it was free.

Something free was very desirable
in a post-war recession

with a huge national debt.

The Tory government needed
to slash spending by a quarter

rather than spewing
away public funds.

The gout-ridden Regent stands by,

his expensive projects propped
up with the people's cash.

It was time for cuts...

..not for squandering money on
public monuments and art...

..which is where some broken
old Greek statues come in.

These are the Elgin Marbles,
taken by Lord Elgin

from the Parthenon in Athens
at the start of the 19th century.

These bits of
somebody else's monument

would turn out to be a real
emblem for a triumphant Britain.

But when they first arrived,
not everybody was convinced.

Their curator, Ian Jenkins,
can tell me more.

So Ian, what was new about the Elgin
Marbles? Why were people excited?

Well, when they first
came to Britain

and went on show in Lord Elgin's
temporary museum in London,

people had never
seen the like before.

They were immediately shocked

by the almost brutal naturalism

of these great colossal figures.

These were ancient Greek originals

and they weren't what
people expected.

People liked their sculpture
complete, white, restored, domestic.

These were not domestic,
they were not tamed.

They were broken, they were
stained,

they were often headless,
they were unrestored

and Lord Elgin entertained
for a long time

the possibility that they
should be restored

and consulted the
great sculptor Canova,

who said that they were real meat.

Real meat!
Real flesh. Real flesh. I love it!

They were avant garde.

They represented the shock
of the new, a new wave.

Were these frightening objects

the sort of thing we really
wanted in Britain?

In 1816, Parliament held an enquiry

to decide whether to
buy them for the nation.

It came down to two things

- were they any good,
and what did they stand for?

It's a defining moment when
all the congnoscenti, the artists,

the connoisseurs, were brought in,

each interrogated in turn,
and each giving his own

account of the marbles
and how they should be evaluated.

The answer came back
from most of them

that these were the greatest
works of art ever seen in Britain.

and yes, the enquiry concluded,

it was entirely appropriate for a
triumphant Britain to own them.

Greece was seen by Britain
in the 19th century as somehow pure,

an untainted society.

To have the Elgin Marbles in Britain

was to have transplanted
Old Greece to London.

Even though the
Government was broke,

it found £35,000 to buy the
Elgin Marbles

for the British Museum.

We were the inheritors of
the Greeks,

plucky little Britain,
defender of freedom.

This was powerful stuff and it
changed the way Britain looked.

Within a few years the home of
the marbles itself

was being rebuilt as a Greek temple.

The most modern buildings after 1815

drew upon Ancient Greek originals,

like St Pancras Church in London.

Achingly cool and built for
the north London intelligentsia.

These urbanites
aspired to Greekness.

Like the Athenians, they hoped to
change the world with ideas and art.

But a city with a greater claim
to this Greek inheritance

lay north of the border - Edinburgh.

Now London didn't have a monopoly
on the idea of Ancient Greece

and Edinburgh, too,
wanted to be the New Athens.

I'm sitting on Britain's
first monument

to the dead of the Napoleonic Wars

and clearly there's a bit
of competition going on here.

Down in London they had
the real Elgin Marbles,

but up here in Scotland

they were hoping to build a complete
Recreation of the Parthenon.

In 1820, someone suggested
reconstructing the Greek ruin

as a massive memorial,

complete with its 46 giant columns.

The Scottish people gave generously,

at least at first,
and building began.

But it didn't last long.

Sadly the money ran out
and it never got finished.

Construction ground to a
halt after just 12 columns

and the monument became known
as Scotland's shame.

Not that this put
Edinburgh off the Greek theme.

The city had been the home of
the big brains of the Enlightenment,

like Adam Smith, and David Hume

- the modern heirs of
Ancient Greek thought.

After Waterloo
the New Town's architects

turned those ideas
into bricks and mortar,

earning Edinburgh its title of
The Athens of the North.

But this cold Greek
purity wasn't for everybody.

This is Sir John Soane.

He was one of the most
important architects of the age.

A man with a very different
architectural mission,

and this is his house in London.

Soane shared the
Prince Regent's belief

that you should express your
personality through architecture.

As we're about to see,
Soane was a pretty unusual man.

# People are strange

# When you're a stranger

# Faces look ugly

# When you're alone

# Women seem wicked

# When you're unwanted

# Streets are uneven

# When you're down

# When you're strange

# Faces come out of the rain

# When you're strange

# No-one remembers your name

# When you're strange

# When you're strange

# When you're strange

# People are strange

# When you're a stranger

# Houses look ugly... #

'Jerzy Kierkuc Bielinski
is a curator here.'

This is John Soane.

Yes. And what sort of a man was he?

He was a very driven man.

Because he was driven, I think he
could also be slightly difficult.

He's not short of self confidence,
is he?

Placing a bust of himself
so prominently.

No. Well, I think it's
also a comment that he's making

about architecture and the
role of the architect

because if you notice,

there are two small figures,
two statuettes beneath the bust.

You have Michaelangelo
representing sculpture

and Raphael with his artist's
palette representing painting,

and what Soane is saying here

is that architecture,
as personified by himself of course,

is greater than those two arts

because painting and sculpture
ornament architecture.

So it's sort of a comment about the
union of painting,

architecture and sculpture
within this house as well.

So he's making a wider point
than, "I am the greatest!"

He's saying architecture
is the greatest art. Yes.

Soane, a self-made man,

won social status through
his skill as an architect

and he wanted to be sure people
saw architecture as a proper art.

Here, he made the world's
first architectural museum -

a temple to architecture
with himself as high priest.

# When you're strange

# Faces come out of the rain... #

He hoarded Roman, Greek,
Egyptian and Gothic fragments.

All the stylistic
influences on Regency taste.

And what Soane has done here
is that he's created

a type of dictionary
of architecture, if you like.

He's taken casts or actual
fragments of the great buildings

and he's brought them into
this London townhouse.

Sort of telescoping the classical
past into this incredible interior.

So there is method
behind the madness, if you like.

But Soane didn't take the rules
and follow them to the letter.

He liked to experiment.

# When you're strange. #

I think that one of the reasons
that modern architects

are so obsessed with Soane

is because he broke the box,
if you like.

If you think of a room as having
four walls, a ceiling and a floor,

Soane bursts through
those constraints.

Absolutely. And this space here,
in an ideal world

it would be just
a little square in the middle here,

but he's dissolved
the walls and all the energy

is taking place
beyond the boundaries

of the traditional room, isn't it?

Absolutely. He's punctured this
space through the use of plate glass

and he's illuminated it
with this amazing skylight,

this huge ceiling rose that seems
almost about to sort of crush us.

There's a lot of
spatial ambiguity here.

A lot of playfulness,
I think, because of that.

He's a real conjurer, isn't he?

Yes, definitely, definitely.
Light and space.

He's a magician of
light and space really.

Soane liked to talk about
"the poetry of architecture."

He thought it should
stimulate the imagination.

So Soane treated his house
as a kind of laboratory

for trying out different
architectural ideas

and this room is full of
what he called "fanciful effects."

Let's start with this
weirdly truncated dome.

You would expect it to land in the
four corners of the room,

but it doesn't.

Beyond the dome there are these
slots with light coming down

and it's not normal light,

it's yellow coloured

because of the coloured glass
that he's put into the skylights.

We've also got more than
100 mirrors in here.

So that everywhere you look,

there's a disconcerting
reflection of yourself.

We're really in the hands here
of an architectural wizard.

And he didn't stop at innovating
with light and reflection.

Soane's also what you
might call an early adopter.

Now, although he loved antiquity,

Soane also loved all mod cons

and this is his own
little dressing room

where we've got all
the latest gadgets.

Firstly, we've got a nice fitted
desk and drawers.

Just outside the window here
we've got gas lighting.

This is a great novelty.

The first gas company is
only set up in 1812.

This square was the first in
London to have a gas supply

and just as soon
as it was available,

Soane installed it in his courtyard.

Down here we've got a
hot air central heating system.

Over here we've got a plumbed
in washbasin,

and over here, best of all,
we've got a flushing toilet.

But Soane didn't just
rethink interiors.

He was after big commissions.

By the start of the Regency,

he'd already rebuilt the Bank
of England in Roman style.

Bloated with the profits of lending
money in the Napoleonic wars,

the bank needed
a giant new building.

He created the pioneering
Dulwich Picture Gallery -

the first national art museum.

And he also left us
a funny little surprise.

This is the monument he
designed for his wife, Eliza,

when she died in 1815.

He eventually joined her here.

It has a very distinctive shape,

which might remind you
of something else.

In 1924, Giles Gilbert Scott

entered a competition to
design the new phonebox.

This is his winning entry, inspired
by the mausoleum of Sir John Soane.

It must be one of the strangest
architectural legacies

of the Regency period.

If he'd had his way, Soane
would've left us with much more.

This is London, Soane style.

Crammed with triumphal arches,

a Senate House, new Royal
palaces, oh, and mountains.

Actually, it's all a fantasy.

These are all the buildings
Soane never got to build

because the biggest patron of
them all always eluded him.

An important architect like Soane

might have expected to get a big
job at the royal palaces,

but it wasn't to be.

Soane had a reputation for being a
bit difficult,

for bossing his clients around

and only for doing
his own very distinctive style.

This isn't what the Prince
Regent was after at all.

He wanted an architect to
help him realise his own vision.

As he put it,
someone suited to his mind.

That's why he chose John Nash.

Nash wasn't the most original
designer of his day,

but he was a much
easier-going guy than Soane

and happy to design in any
style that took the Regent's fancy.

As well as Brighton Pavilion,

Nash worked on the
Regent's official home

at the heart of London -
Carlton House.

This place had already had several
facelifts,

but when he became Regent in 1811,

George spent a fortune
beautifying it even more

to make a palace fit for,
well, a Regent.

This a book published in 1819,

showing the interiors of the
different Royal Residences.

These pages show Carlton House and
you can see how it had now become

the most amazingly lavish
and opulent interior.

Regrettably, Carlton House
is long gone,

but you can get
the Carlton House experience

at another Royal Palace, Windsor.

In these rooms at Windsor Castle,

you get a real sense of what
Carlton House was actually like.

In the 1820s, George
remodelled this suite

and he re-used several
of the fittings from Carlton House,

so here you can see tantalizing
traces of the Prince's lost palace.

Fireplaces, doors, even whole floors
from Carlton House ended up here.

George treated his palaces
like doll's houses,

to be constantly rearranged

and filled with an ever-stranger
assortment of stuff.

I've come to meet
the Deputy Surveyor of the Queen's
Works of Art, Rufus Bird.

Paint me a picture
of what it was actually like

to walk into Carlton House,
perhaps the Crimson Room.

You would have walked into a room
of almost unimaginable opulence...

..with incredible gilded ceilings,

fantastically rich silk velvet
on the walls,

amazing combinations of English
contemporary Giltwood furniture,

with French decorative
works of art...

..amazing chandeliers,
he was obsessed with lighting,

huge quantities of light.

Very bright,
very, very impressive rooms.

The 20 or so showy rooms
in Carlton House

were designed to project George's
royal magnificence to the world,

in styles that ranged
from the fashionable Grecian decor

of the Old Throne Room
to Nash's Gothic Dining Room,

completely gilded and perfect
for George's intimate dinners of 30.

There was a real sense of exoticism.

The combinations that he chose
were quite adventurous.

We've got a pretty good example
of exactly what you're talking about

just here. Tell us what this one is.

Well, this is a Chinese vase.

It's a very plain blue
18th century vase,

and then it has been
completely transformed

by these magnificent mounts.
Here you see a satyr's head,

and then between the satyrs'
heads are these swags of vine,

and the horns scroll up and twist
around onto the rim of the bowl.

And it's stood on a griffin stand.

Three griffins
which support the top

and they are derived
from Roman fragments.

So we've got a mid-18th century
Chinese vase,

we've got late 18th century
French decoration,

standing on a British Regency
but Roman-inspired stand.

Absolutely and that's exactly
the sort of confection

that creates this wonderful
mixing of styles and eras,

and shows the eclecticism
and exoticism

that the Regency is really all about.

This place may look
about as grand as it gets

but, in fact, for their time,
George's rooms
are shockingly informal.

It's all about the furniture.

A generation before it would have
been lined up against the walls,

but now chairs and tables
are scattered about willy nilly.

And it wasn't just the furniture
that was informal.

George was shaking up behaviour too.

In 1816, a scandalous new dance was
seen at court for the first time...

the waltz.

Waltzing scandalous?
How could this be?

Well, before the Regency,
people danced in groups,

only occasionally touching
each other.

The waltz was a very
different matter,

as the dance historian
Robin Benie shows me.

This is a quite nice
and romantic movement too.

It is. But it's not as good
as waltzing.

And it's only for a few seconds. Yes.

In the waltz, when I take you,
I have you...

For the whole dance.
..for the whole dance. Just you.

When this German waltz arrived,
it broke all social rules.

It's the arms that go round
rather than...

Don't be fooled by the plinky plonky
music, this is dirty dancing.

And we've got this wonderful
close proximity.

This is one of the reasons
that people thought

the waltz was a bit iffy, dodgy.

Just think of the things,
that I could be whispering to you.

Well, you could be telling me
all sorts of things,

but unfortunately, there's
a camera just six inches away,
so I advise you not to tell me now!

For polite society,
this was the Regency version
of a swingers party.

The cartoonist Cruikshank
made this print in 1816.

He called it "Waltzing
or a Peep into the Royal Brothel".

The Times called the Waltz,
"An indecent foreign dance"

and drew attention to its,
"Voluptuous intertwining
of the limbs".

Led by the Regent's courts though,

the waltz's close embrace
was gaining acceptance.

And such scandalous behaviour
even began to penetrate

the peaceful country homes
of the aristocracy.

Take this place, Attingham Park.

A beautiful 18th century mansion
in Shropshire

that got a decadent
Regency makeover.

It's a bit of a cautionary tale

about a man who indulged
a lascivious taste for luxury.

We're talking shocking pinks and
garish colours and gilding aplenty.

This fan of soft furnishings
was Thomas Hill, Lord Berwick,

a true follower of Regency fashion.

Thomas the second Lord Berwick
was a typical Regency rake.

He went on a grand tour
in the 1790s,

came back with a lot of these
paintings and pieces of furniture,

and then he took this house
that he'd inherited

and ripped the middle out of it.
He carried out a major remodelling.

And he gave the job
of making over his house

to the defining architect
of the Regency.

His architect was John Nash

and here in the picture gallery,

you can see Nash at his most
extraordinarily inventive.

It's a really rich, bold interior.

There's quite a few novelties here,
the glass roof for example.

The glazing's held in place with
iron glazing bars instead of wood.

This was all very exciting
but unfortunately

almost immediately
it started to leak.

How very modern.

For Thomas, this house was all
about displaying his personality

as a cultured gentleman.

Its curator, Sarah Kay, has been
delving into his decorative secrets.

Now, it strikes me
that it's very pink in here.

Is this normal
for a Regency man's study?

People are not expecting to see pink
in here and we've got,

as you can see, sumptuous lavish use
of pink in the curtains.

We have to explain to people
that pink was not

an exclusively feminine
colour by any means.

It was just another lavish,
opulent statement about yourself.

So what we're seeing here
is the room as it was in 1813.

That's right, yes, with all
his Regency bright, bold,

lavish opulent colours.

Do you like it?

Well, you can see
it's making me smile.

I think it's great fun, I think it's
very challenging for us today,

but I think what it does is really
create this impressive, bold,

sock-it-to-you impression

and that is what the second
Lord Berwick wanted to do

and he expressed it in the way
he furnished his room

and this room is the heart
of his suite of spaces in the house,

so he needed to make a big impression
in here and he did.

Thomas had another passion as well
as interior decorating.

He was in love with a teenage
courtesan named Sophia

and this amazing monkey music box
was a gift that he got for her.

Sophia was actually a bit of
a luxury commodity in her own right.

Her big sister was the famous
Harriette Wilson,

the high class prostitute
patronised by Lord Byron,

the Duke of Wellington etc.

And like her sister, Sophia was
hot property in the Regent's circle.

She needed some persuasion
to give it all up to marry Thomas.

She held out on him for some time

although he bought her a house
in London to live in

while he was doing up
Attingham Park.

He asked her to marry him
several times.

Eventually she said in 1812,
when he was 43 and she was 17.

This music box is supposed to be
the gift that swayed her

which is a little bit creepy.

Thomas and Sophia were shunned
by polite society

so they retreated
to their beautiful house,

still splurging
on paintings and furniture.

Lord Berwick's finances
couldn't keep up

with all of this extravagance.

In 1827 he was declared bankrupt

and he had to retire
ignominiously to Italy.

For people outside
the Regent's charmed circle,

it must have seemed that
Lord Berwick got what he deserved.

He really did live
in a different world,

one where waltzing and courtesans
and fancy furnishings were normal.

The top tier that included
the Regent, English courtiers

and peers like Lord Berwick,

contained, according to one Regency
writer, just 576 families.

In contrast, more than half
of the rest of the population

were paupers or vagrants.

But there was a middle way,

a small but growing class
of respectable people,

who might have lived
in houses like this.

This isn't the sort of place
where anyone waltzes.

It's the modest home
of a particular heroine of mine.

We think the Regency's all about
colour and life and vibrancy,

but there's another side
to its style as well.

Simple country-dwelling people
like Jane Austen

stitching away
at very austere garments,

like this nice little shawl,

which is said to have been sewn
by Jane Austen herself.

In her novels, Jane Austen gives us
the voice of the middling sort.

Not poor, but definitely
lacking money to burn.

She didn't spend all of her time
in the country doing embroidery.

In fact, she even experienced

the Regent's extravagant world
first-hand.

In 1815, Jane Austen
visited Carlton House.

She was invited there
by the Regent himself,

who was a big fan of her novels.

She didn't actually meet him
face to face,

but he did make his mark
on her next book.

This is the first edition
of her new novel Emma

and she'd been invited to dedicate
it to the Prince Regent.

The first draft
of her dedication's really funny.

It says, "Dedicated by Permission
to HRH The Prince Regent".

But Jane's publisher,
John Murray, perhaps wisely,

suggested that she pep it up a bit.

So what was actually printed was,

"To His Royal Highness
The Prince Regent

"This work is, by his Royal
Highness's permission,

"most respectfully dedicated
by his Royal Highness's dutiful

"and obedient humble servant,
the author".

It's ironic that poor Jane
was made to include this,

given her well-recorded views
on the Prince Regent.

A couple of years before,
she'd written to a friend

about her support of his estranged
wife, Princess Caroline.

"Poor woman", Jane had written,

"I shall support her
as long as I can,

"Because she is a woman,
and I hate her husband".

The Regent's open separation
from his wife, Caroline,

and his parading
of a series of mistresses,

made him hugely unpopular
with the more proper middle classes,

not least with Jane.

Although we often think
of her books as a bit apolitical,

all romance and nice dresses,

her disapproving views about
the morals of upper class society

are very much on show.

The Prince Regent may have been
a big fan of Jane Austen's works,

but if he'd read them properly,
he might have noticed

that she gave people like him
a pretty hard time.

In Mansfield Park,
the villain, Henry Crawford,

has quite a lot in common
with the Prince Regent.

He'd been, "Ruined by bad examples
set to him",

he had an uncle who openly
kept a mistress.

He was superficially very charming

but this disguised
a cold-blooded vanity.

And just like the Prince Regent,
he was addicted to remodelling

perfectly good houses.
He wanted to knock them about

and alter them in line
with fashionable but frivolous ideas

of ornament and beauty.

For Jane, people's houses
tell you an awful lot

about their attitude to life.

And in her final work,
she fires a kind of parting shot

at some Regency trends
in property development.

In 1817, Jane Austen wrote 12
chapters of quite an unusual book.

She was very ill at the time,

she would die later the same year
and never finish it.

But it's not what you'd expect
a dying woman to write.

It's not about melancholy
or longing.

It's about the very British folly
of property speculation.

It's a satire of Britain
in the years following

the battle of Waterloo

and it's set in the fictional
seaside village called Sanditon.

We meet the comical Mr Parker,

a man obsessed with building up
his quiet seaside hamlet

into a fashionable resort.

He wasn't alone.

New seaside resorts were springing
up all along the coast

in the Regency, with houses
for middle class tourists

who wanted to try the health trend
of sea-bathing.

In Sanditon, Mr Parker has traded
in his honest, old family home

for a flimsy, fashionable residence
exposed to the biting sea breezes.

He's called it Trafalgar House,

although now he regrets not calling
it after the more up to date

Battle of Waterloo

His quest for modernity is clearly
more than a little bit ridiculous.

Now you may personally agree with
Jane that old-fashioned houses

and old fashioned values
are worth preserving,

or you might be a modernizer,
like Mr Parker.

Either way, what you see
in the story of Sanditon

are the preoccupations
of Regency Britain.

It was a country intending
to transform itself

but also to chase after a profit.

The years after Waterloo
saw a boom in house-building.

Property speculators spread
their stucco-clad tentacles

anywhere that people might want
to visit, not just the seaside.

Spa towns were
another nice little earner.

There's one that really sums up
the Regency building craze.

It's not the long established
spas of Bath or Cheltenham.

No, in the 1810s,
there was a new Spa on the rise.

This is a guide book
to Regency Leamington Spa.

Leamington had been a little village
but in the Regency period

it burst into life
as this new spa town.

Between 1811 and 1820,
its population quadrupled.

The guidebook says that this
terrace of houses behind me

looked as if an invisible hand
had picked it up

from a smart part of London
and dropped it here in the fields.

There are all the features you'd
expect from a Regency new-build.

Stucco facades and big windows,
lots of classical details

these wrought iron balconies,

and plenty of columns.

The private speculators
who built Leamington

threw up grand town houses,
available to rent,

next door to the village's
original cottages.

This was Leamington's
very own Parthenon,

not a particularly Greek one.

It housed a library
and assembly rooms

where you could pick up
an improving book,

meet new people, maybe indulge
in a bit of old-fashioned dancing.

Leamington had one
of the largest hotels in Europe.

It had 100 rooms
but only one bathroom.

Oh, and parking for 100 carriages.

One of the most spacious, splendid
and complete hotels in the kingdom.

But, of course,
the main attraction in any
aspiring spa town was the water.

The mineral properties of the water
are supposed to be excellent here,

much better than those at
Cheltenham, that's very important,

and the diseases which
they're supposed to be

particularly good for include

tumours...

piles,

diseases of the kidneys,

intestinal worms,

and above all,

obstinate constipation.

The pump rooms and baths where
visitors paid to take the water

opened in 1814.

Now, the lucky Leamington residents
get it for free.

Here we go.

Hmm.

That's really quite nasty.

It tastes like Alka Seltzer,
I think.

I don't know if I could manage
half a pint.

And I'm a bit worried now that it
really is going to relax the bowels.

Fortunately, this was just what
the Regency tourists were after,

and Leamington did very nicely
for a while.

But then Spa towns
went out of fashion

and when the profits dried up

Leamington was left
with a few oddities.

The Regency property boom
didn't last all that long

in Leamington Spa,

and when it was over,
some projects got left unfinished.

This was supposed to be one of those
long and curving Regency terraces.

They did this end, you can see,
and down there,

they've also put in the other end,

but they didn't get round
to filling in the middle,

so that's why, later on, the gap was
filled with these Victorian villas.

Grand schemes for town planning
didn't always work out

quite as intended.

In London, another incredibly
ambitious project was under way,

which would really capture
the tastes and aspirations

of the Regent and his country.

It all began with a farm
in Marylebone.

Up until 1811, this whole area
was covered with cow-sheds,

but then the lease ended
and the Prince Regent

took the farmland here
back into his own management.

Now his government started a really
visionary piece of urban planning.

They created a great,
new city park here

and they also constructed
a big, new grand road, a mile long,

right through the heart of London.

The Park became Regent's Park

and the new road, Regent's Street,

London's first grand boulevard,
30 yards wide,

slicing through the small
tangled streets of Soho

and linking the park straight
to the Prince Regent's front door

at Carlton House.

This ceremonial route would allow
the Regent, as he put it,

to, "Eclipse Napoleon",

a sign that London
could equal Paris or Rome.

The brains behind it all was
the Regent's architect John Nash.

First he had to design
the grand urban park,

Surrounded by terraces like this
one, Cumberland Terrace,

with its monumental Greek theme.

This is John Nash
at his most theatrical.

Some people have laughed
at this terrace

because there's nothing behind
that pointed pediment,

and the plaster statues
don't bear the closest of scrutiny,

but actually, he's done something
quite remarkable here.

He's taken what could just be a bog
standard row of terraced houses,

and he's turned them
into a gigantic palace.

Nash wanted men of rank
and fortune to live here,

creating the sort
of exclusive neighbourhood

that would bring in
plenty of cash for the Crown

and these people needed an easy link
to the court and the Regent.

So this is where it starts.

The wealthy new tenants stepped
from Park Crescent

onto Portland Place, already
one of the best addresses in London,

on their way
to the wonders of Regent Street.

Actually, before Nash
had even properly begun,

he'd already run into problems.

This is John Nash,

and I'm not sure he would have
been delighted to end up just here,

because this part of Regent Street
gave him terrible trouble.

He wanted to come in a straight line
down from the park,

but the man who lived just there,

called Sir James Langham,

he didn't want the new road going
too close to his garden,

so he bought up land, forcing Nash
to divert the line of the road.

He ended up with this bend
but Nash made the best of a bad job.

He designed this church, All Souls,

to deal with the inconvenient bend.

It has a unique round portico,

making the whole church
a kind of pivot point.

Characteristically,
Nash completely ignored the rules.

He mixed different sorts of columns

and put a weird pointy tower where
by rights there should be a dome.

This cartoon mocks
the "Nashional Taste"

and the creator of a church
that one MP called,

"A deplorable and horrible object".

But Nash was always better
at the big picture than the detail.

Once the spiritual needs

of our wealthy Regent's Park
resident were satisfied,

it was off across Oxford Circus
to the pleasures of shopping.

There weren't any grand
public buildings here.

The government didn't want
to waste the cash.

It was a perfect example
of a public/private partnership.

The government paid for
the compulsory purchase of the land,

private builders put up
the buildings

and everyone made money.

Nash was really clever

in picking this particular line
for Regent's Street,

because it marks the boundary
between the fashionable area

of Mayfair over here
where the nobility lived,

and the meaner streets of Soho,

which were inhabited by so-called
mechanics and poorer people.

This means the wealthy residents
of Mayfair can get to the shops

without going outside
their own zone.

It also meant that the cheap land
over there

increased massively in value.

So the line of Regent Street
marks the line of maximum profit.

Nash saw this as a place
for the Regency elite to socialise.

He pictured the leisured classes
window shopping

and buying the latest styles
inspired by the Regent.

Here on the curved quadrant,
there were once colonnades,

so that the rich could shop
even on rainy days.

Above the shops there were terraces,

where dandy bachelors renting
the upper floors could loiter

and chat to passers-by
in their carriages.

Then, after all the shops,
you'd reach Piccadilly Circus,

take a sharp bend, and it's about
the proud victorious nation again,

with a dramatic straight approach
down towards the new Waterloo Place.

Regent Street,
Britain's grandest road,

taking you to the Regent himself,
in Carlton House.

Except it doesn't.

Today when you reach Waterloo place,
there's no Carlton House,

just a square filled with
later monuments and parked cars.

So what did happen to Carlton House?

Was it destroyed in a fire?
Was it demolished years later?

Well, no. Nash's grand finale
to his grand street,

the obsession of the Prince Regent
for so many years

was destroyed by George himself,
and the reason's just over there.

Buckingham Palace, George's
new obsession. Typical old George.

They'd built the grandest street
in Europe to his house,

but he was bored with it.

He didn't really like
living on a street.

In 1820, the Regent
became King George IV.

And he commissioned Nash
to create a spectacular new palace.

As usual though, Nash's design
went a bit over budget.

So to help pay for it all,
they pulled down Carlton House,

and developed the land.

Nash put up gentleman's clubs

and exclusive new houses
where Carlton House had been.

All very nice,

but not really what you'd expect
at the end of a ceremonial route.

In the end, though, perhaps
it doesn't really matter

that Regent Street
is a bit of a road to nowhere.

Regent Street was a hugely
ambitious piece of urban design

and it was built at a time when
London had the self-confidence

to try to rival Paris or Rome,

but Regent Street also sums up
a very Regency sense of Britishness.

With unfinished Parthenons
and demolished palaces,

Regency architecture can sometimes
feel like a crazy experiment

that didn't quite work.

But because this was a style
that was so ambitious,

the surviving buildings
of the Regency

have proved to be
the greatest legacy of the age.

Next time,
the workers are revolting.

As Regency arrogance and excess
pushes Britain

to the very edge of revolution.

And the Regent has to face down
a coalition of radicals,

luddites and angry poets.

Even his own wife has it in for him.

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