Original subtitles

Narrator: Ptolemy Dean believes in the power of art

in architecture.

Architect, sketcher, painter,

restorer of buildings,

co-presenter of the television series 'Restoration',

Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey,

he is inspired by the work of Wren and Hawksmoor.

His latest project was born on the train.

On the 08:00 to London Bridge,

Ptolemy Dean sketched a scheme

for the first major addition to Westminster Abbey

in 250 years, a stair tower,

that allows visitors to see a secret part of the Abbey

hidden for centuries.

- When you're sketching this thing, you know,

how does it work, how does it work?

And of course, it suddenly came.

In fact, I can remember where it came.

It came between Tunbridge High Brooms.

[piano music]

[piano music continues]

[classical music]

Narrator: It's been at the heart of the nation

for over 1,000 years.

William the Conqueror was crowned King of England

on this site in 1066.

But Westminster Abbey as we know it

was built in the middle of the 13th century,

started in the reign of Henry III,

paused after 25 years

and completed over 100 years later

when Richard II was on the throne.

All the coronations of English monarchs have been held here.

The tomb of the Unknown Warrior lies in the nave.

It's the burial place of prime ministers and poets.

And it's imprinted in our collective memory

through the scenes of countless Royal weddings.

In living memory,

the Abbey has seen the coronations of George VI

in 1937...

..and in 1953, his daughter, Elizabeth II.

It was the first coronation to be televised,

Richard Dimbleby commenting from a seat

high above the nave in the triforium,

a gallery that runs around the inside of the Abbey

52 feet above the floor.

And where the BBC's famous narrator perched

was never on the Abbey tour...

..until now.

When I was appointed in 2012,

the Abbey had already decided

that they wanted to reclaim these triforium gallery spaces

for an exhibition area.

They had worked out whether the floor could be made level,

which it could.

They'd worked out whether the pipes could be diverted.

There was lots of pipes here and they could.

They'd worked out the roof needed to be recovered

and they had done all that.

They also worked out that there was one place

where you could create a new lift

and staircase access tower.

which is behind us over there.

One place where there was no window in the wall,

one place where you can make a new entrance.

When it came to working out how that tower would look,

there had been a pause.

So when I was appointed in 2012, they said,

"We've got everything ready for this triforium gallery

"but the access tower and lift await some attention."

So they said,

"Would you like to do that commission

"as part of your appointment

"as Surveyor of the Fabric to Westminster?"

and I said, "Well, of course, why not?"

Narrator: What's remarkable

about Ptolemy Dean's major intervention

is that it's the first for 250 years.

He's walking in the footsteps of Sir Christopher Wren,

whose position as Surveyor of the Fabric

at Westminster Abbey he now holds.

Wren's wooden model of his design

for a central crossing tower and spire

is on display in the triforium.

It was never built.

But he did oversee major restoration of the stonework

and roof of this great church at the end of the 17th century.

The Abbey's two Western Towers

were built by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor

and completed in 1745.

After that, apart from some rebuilding

by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott,

the man who gave us Bankside, Battersea Power Station

and the red telephone box, nothing.

I became Dean in December 2006

and had a series of meetings, obviously,

with all the sort of senior staff,

including our archaeologist, Warwick Rodwell.

And he said, "You know,

"there's an extraordinary space up there

"which is not being used at the moment properly."

Well, there was a sort of collection of stone up here,

actually, various bits and pieces.

But there was nothing substantial.

So I came up and looked.

And I essentially agreed with him

that we ought to do something.

This is a most amazing, astonishing space.

Narrator: The job of creating the displays in the triforium

which would eventually be named

the 'Queens Diamond Jubilee Galleries'

was given to design experts MUMA.

But the challenge of getting visitors to them

was given to Ptolemy Dean.

No design committee, no focus groups,

but a simple faith

in an architect known for his sketches

and watercolours

and his respect for ancient buildings.

He's a brilliant architect

who has an absolutely passionate sense of place...

..and enormous respect for historic buildings.

So what he's produced in the Weston Tower

is something which...

..you could say is completely out of keeping

with the rest of the Abbey,

because it's glass and it's wood and lead.

Actually, it fits in so beautifully.

It's tucked in behind a great flying buttress.

It fits very beautifully.

And it's absolutely gorgeous in terms of its detail.

[classical music]

Narrator: Ptolemy Dean sketches constantly,

recording the world around him

as he practices architecture

from his base in London's East End.

He is passionate about the city,

its old buildings, the grain of its streets.

He regularly joins campaigners

to help save buildings under threat

and they use his watercolours

to show people what they are about to lose.

Ptolemy narrates: Drawing is very important.

When you go to a site for the first time,

you need to go there and really look at it,

look at it very hard.

And actually, also, you need to listen to it.

And one of the nicest things to do is if you sit down

or stand up and draw something,

you really do have to look at it,

look at the relationships between the buildings.

You look at the light,

the play of light

and then you sort of hear it

and you feel the atmosphere of it.

If I don't draw a building site,

whatever the site is, when I visit it,

I find it very difficult

to formulate any kind of thought about it.

I think the drawing part is a sort of essential way

of looking and understanding and sort of feeling the place.

The drawing is the key thing.

It's the process of looking.

It's the process of really thinking about it.

So, for instance at Westminster,

I sat against the parliamentary concrete bollard

outside Parliament

and drew the view of that future tower site

before we did the work.

It was then that you realised

the pointed roof of the chapter house,

the screening effect of the London Planetree,

the regular rhythm of the buttresses

and pinnacles of the Henry VII Chapel,

and of course, the rotated square pattern

of the Henry VII Chapel,

which ultimately came to be in the finished design.

And you realise that when you stand there drawing it,

that you have to have a building with a solution

that abided by those Westminster rules of gothicness,

verticality

and a sort of general sense of making that space.

Though the drawing that I made

standing against the police barrier

was traced over with the first initial sketch

of the access tower,

and that sketch drawing has sustained the project

through all of its preliminary stages,

because it was enough of that sketch drawing

to show the before and the after.

I mean, subsequently of course there were proper CGI views,

you know, computer-generated views

and models and stuff made.

But the original drawing was the key thing.

[classical music]

[pizzicato strings]

Ptolemy narrates: I spent quite a lot of my life

going to work by train.

I have a long journey in the morning

and an hour-long journey in the evening

and in fact, I find those two hours on the train

the most productive time of my day.

There are no emails. There's seven tunnels.

No-one can ring you.

You're just sitting there.

Of course there's people around you, all in silence.

And happily, our train still has tables.

You know, sketching this thing, how does that work?

How does it work?

And of course, it suddenly came.

In fact, I can remember where it came.

It came between Tunbridge and High Brooms.

The idea that the lift should actually be a square core

with a rotated outer square that would create this shape,

that would allow a staircase to go around

with galleries at landing levels

that would give you views across the rotated square,

would also break down the shape of the tower

so that instead of being a great big fat lump

rising up vertically,

you could have the great big vertical shafts of light

that you need to break down the mass of this thing

into something that really worked better

with the Gothic architecture of Westminster Abbey itself.

And then after that,

it all just completely fell into place.

- He has an ability which I greatly admire.

He will stand there beside me, talking to me,

and at the same time,

his pen is going on his sketchpad

and he is producing a wonderful drawing

while wasting no time at all.

This, of course, is terribly important,

to be able to produce fine sketches

which he then watercolours

to be able to show to people what you are proposing to do,

what it might look like, what its surroundings look like.

He manages to enhance the setting

and bring this out in a very visual way

so that it can be understood,

rather than in two-dimensional architect's drawings,

which of course have to be made anyway

for proper planning purposes and building construction.

But in order to tell the public

and the interested outsiders

what it's all about,

they need work like Ptolemy does on sketching.

It's superb.

He produces the most amazing reports for us

with lots of sketches.

He's done sketches of all kinds.

I mean, all the time, he just goes somewhere and sketches.

It's a sort of marvellous gift that he has.

If you're sketching,

then you look in a way which is different

from how the rest of us might look.

You actually really see something

in a way that you might not otherwise see it.

And then, therefore, you have a sort of deep empathy

with the building itself.

And I think he has enormous respect for this building

and love for it.

As we all do.

And therefore, everything that's done here,

as it were, fits in.

It's all very carefully thought through

and that's what I absolutely love about it.

Narrator: With all this comes another love, churches.

Churches of all shapes and sizes

hold a fascination for Ptolemy Dean.

So his installation as Surveyor of the Fabric

of Westminster Abbey in 2012

was a great moment in his career.

And the Abbey knew they had their man.

He was certainly the right man in the right place

at the right time. Yes. I mean, this...

I mean, not many architects get handed on a plate

making an addition to Westminster Abbey.

I mean, there haven't been any additions to the Abbey

since the West Towers in the early 18th century.

So, you know, this is something that happens,

not once-in-a-lifetime,

but once in some hundreds of years.

Narrator: It was decided that the Weston Tower,

as it would be called,

should be built on the site of some old brick toilets.

After they had been relocated,

the archaeologists moved in,

all before work could start on the staircase.

- They gave us the opportunity

to learn something about this area,

which is called Poets' Corner Yard,

which was totally unknown.

And I mean, we found fragments

of the buildings that had been here.

I mean, William Caxton lived here of course.

He actually lived at No.2 Poets' Corner,

as it was called.

So this is a very historic

and important corner of the Abbey.

- Archaeologists are looking down in the ground.

They are digging away.

And we discover this stepped foundation of the old Abbey.

Made out of stonework that's been salvaged

from the Edward the Confessor Abbey of the 1060s,

rebuilt as a great big sort of lime concrete raft

on which all of this building is set on.

The rebuilding of that raft in the 1250s,

they've used Roman bones from a Roman cemetery

to sort of help drain around the edge.

We have all these Roman bones,

this wonderful raw foundation.

And then below that, we have the sand,

beautiful sandy beach of Thorney Island,

looking as if it had just come from the Costa del Sol.

I mean, really beautiful coloured sand.

So we've exposed the footings and we had to do two things.

Firstly, we were determined not to damage the footings

in any way, the mediaeval footings.

And also, we wanted to leave them exposed.

So our structural engineers were brilliant

because they just simply extended the raft

on which the tower stands,

sitting on the edge of the existing raft.

So, we didn't touch it, we didn't dig into it.

We just simply extended it,

which was a really nice and right thing to do.

Narrator: After the exterior archaeology

came the interior investigation.

And that brought more surprises.

- It was like the attic at home,

full of all the things which for centuries,

nobody knew what to do with.

And of course, a huge amount of rubbish

was underneath those floors.

Now, the floors, underneath the timber,

it's like the craters of the moon.

It goes up and down.

It's a switchback.

Because below you are the great stone faults.

So, when you are standing in the Abbey and you look up,

you see the great stone vaults.

They go up and down.

Well of course, upstairs, they go down and up.

It's those pockets that were filled with rubbish.

And there was anything up to a metre or in some cases,

a little more than a metre of rubbish in those pockets.

750 years of rubbish collected in there.

So that was hugely important.

It's a subject that one tends to forget.

You think, "Oh, you can just clear out all the dirt."

It was filthy and revolting, all this stuff.

And a lot was being cleared out

and there were some bags of it already in a skip.

And I looked at this and I said, "Hang on.

"This is the archaeology of the upper parts of the Abbey."

So, we duly had all the bags out

and eventually, we had nearly 4,000 bags of rubbish

brought out from those vaults.

And they produced the most remarkable collection

of artefacts.

This included over 30,000 pieces of ancient glass,

some beautiful 13th-century painted and decorated glass,

14th- and 15th-century glass,

some Victorian glass,

a lovely angel, a Victorian angel, was amongst them.

So, a mixture, plain glass,

decorated glass, but a great deal.

And it's wonderful

because the Abbey has very little mediaeval glass

and here we have this great cache of material

under the floor.

But not just glass.

For example, things that people had posted

through gaps in the floorboards.

You know how children drop toys and things through.

Well, it included four tickets

for the coronation of Queen Anne.

We go from having no known tickets

of Queen Anne's coronation to four.

You know, and of course, individually written

and signed by the chapter clerk

and then stamped with the Abbey seal

and you were told,

"Present this ticket at such and such a door on the day."

It was wonderful.

You know, a coronation that took place

at the beginning of the 18th century

was suddenly brought to life

by having the tickets that the people used there.

Narrator: Some of the 30,000 fragments of stained glass

were made up into a new window

and the finds were added to from the Abbey's own collections

to create a gallery unlike any other.

And a staircase rising through seven floors.

Ptolemy narrates: It's a pretty tough challenge at first glance.

But of course, in fact,

much of the work is done for you already

by laying simple realities of the commission.

The staircase has to be of a certain width

for the building regulations.

And then of course, we have the site

which was all completely surrounded by the Abbey,

by the chapter house etc.

So we have very little space to play with.

There had been some initial sketches

that had been produced at a sort of feasibility stage

of different lifts and staircases

next to each other.

But it seemed to me

that the process of going up the stairs

needed to be beautiful.

i.e. we needed to find very, very shallow stairs

so that the process of rising up would be moving and interesting.

Also, the view as you go up the stairs

was in many ways more beautiful and more interesting

than sitting in the lift.

We wanted to encourage people to actually go up the stairs.

And it's seven stories

so that's quite a big thing to encourage them.

[gentle instrumental music]

Narrator: Westminster Abbey survived the Blitz,

even that night on 10 May 1941

when the House of Commons across the road

was destroyed in a fire storm.

It occupies such an important place

in the public's consciousness

that any architect charged with adding to it

might take fright.

But Ptolemy Dean, in creating a new staircase tower

to reach the completed Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries,

recognised that the key to success was restraint.

No machine-made windows for him.

12,000 leaded panes made by hand.

No bling.

His creation wouldn't challenge the work of Wren and Hawksmoor.

It would compliment it.

It wouldn't hide

but it would respect the existing fabric of the Abbey.

And Ptolemy Dean's love and study of churches

has been employed here,

Cues he picked up around the country

and in Westminster Abbey itself.

The rotated square of course

is also the shape of the windows

on the Henry VII Chapel,

where you've got the same shape.

There's 50% of the rotated square.

We have it on the Westminster Retable.

We have it in the windows.

We have it on the rear in the Faith's Chapel.

We've got this rotated square pattern everywhere.

It's a Westminster thing.

And then of course, when it comes to the roof,

well, the rotated square gives you the roof form

but then has to be sufficiently steep

to fit in with that wonderful world of pinnacles

and buttresses and buttress caps and roof caps

that we've got here at Westminster already.

And there's no point saying,

"You've got to have a flat roof and a flat, slided,

"modernistic intervention in this place."

This thing has to fit in

and play by the rules of Westminster,

which is verticality, verticality,

verticality and verticality.

The sort of deeper precedent of it,

once you have your rotated square

and you start drawing that on the train,

by this time you've passed Tunbridge Wells.

You know, it's a very exciting moment,

except I have to get off nine minutes later

so, you know, it's rather hopeless at that point.

But you're drawing these lines

and you're beginning to see that this thing could happen.

So, we went rushing up to Ely.

Ely was a really important precedent for us.

We have here at Westminster a central crossing tower

that does not have any kind of lantern at all.

It's got a very shallow roof.

But it had been suggested that there had been potentially

an Ely-like lantern here at Westminster as well as Ely.

So, something like that.

So we got the Surveyor of the Fabric at Ely Cathedral

to let us go up and she very kindly did.

And we went up and looked at the Ely structure.

And of course, the Ely structure is oak clad in lead

with rain water pipes in there,

there's sort of vertical piers,

to create that wonderful lantern.

And that of course was a great inspiration for us

because when it came to making our rotated square,

we did not have the room to make great big huge stone buttresses

that would be flying out.

We would be touching the English Heritage-owned Chapter House

which we couldn't obviously touch.

And we'd be smashing into the walls of the Abbey itself.

So we devised a system

where we would make our structure lead-clad steel,

which would give us the precision

that the structural engineer needed

to get the verticality to work,

cladded lead

with our downpipes coming through those buttress piers.

And that of course gave us the Ely precedent,

albeit using steel rather than oak,

to make our new tower a reality.

So then, when it came to the windows,

of course, you look around here

and we have rectangular windowpanes.

Now, those caves, they're not diamond-shaped.

They are rectangular.

That arises, as does the structure in this space,

from Wren's great reconstruction of the Abbey,

that was begun in the late 17th century

and moved into the early 18th century.

He said, "If we do not spend money restoring this building,

"it will fall within 30 years."

And there was then a big public campaign,

funded by Parliament,

to repair and restore the Abbey.

And Wren set about reroofing the Abbey

with the lead flat roofs which we have

over these radial chapels.

They would've been initially in the French pattern,

chevette roofs.

Lead flats, very pragmatic, very functional.

Supported on these wonderful oak trusses which Wren installed.

Now, we knew that when we came to do our tower,

that if we had great sheet glass,

it would reflect the light

in a way that was utterly discordant

and that what we needed was to have that same pattern

of rectangular caves

that would ripple the light and give you that same twinkle,

that same twinkle that incidentally you also see

in the Palace of Westminster across the road.

Narrator: Oak was found in an English timber yard.

At one point, it was thought that French oak

would have to be used.

And it was cut in a way that minimises distortion as it ages.

It should last as long as Wren's 500-year-old timbers.

Ptolemy Dean and his structural engineers

also wanted to use English stone, not French.

But there was a problem.

We knew that this space is built of Reigate stone.

Reigate stone has not been quarried for centuries.

It's a terrible, soft stone.

It was the soft stone

that Christopher Wren had to largely replace

from the 1680s and '90s onwards.

It's hopeless.

But we have this need for Reigate stone.

And there was this rather marvellous coincidence

that Lord and Lady Hilton, who are friends of the Abbey,

have a patch of land in that mad crossroads

of railway at the M23 and the M26 and M25

near Reigate,

which had a sort of hole in the ground

where this Reigate stone was thought to have accumulated.

Now of course, we couldn't get that stone

in a commercial sense,

because we would've had to go through a whole quarry process.

But they simply said, "Just come along

"and we will let you just dig a few holes on our land.

"It's not commercial.

"We will give you any stone you happen to find."

So we had three days of people coming down there

and they didn't find it, didn't find it,

and on the last day, they found it.

They found this marvellous Reigate stone.

And we had that Reigate stone cut

and made for the new archway

to the gallery door on the side.

And it's a perfect match.

The whole story

and the fact that the Westminster Abbey outside

does not look like it used to look in the 1250s

because all the stone is different,

became clear to us.

So, when we were then making the lift shaft tower,

which was to be clad in stone,

a concrete shaft to be clad in stone,

we realised that it would be absolutely fantastic,

instead of just one dull, bland, simple selection

of a single stone,

we would band the stone with all the different stones

that we could think of

that had been used in the Abbey's construction,

starting at the very base with the sort of clunch chalky stone

used in the 10th century,

moving onto this Reigate,

which we managed to dig up underneath the M23/M25 junction,

moving up to corn stone from France,

of which there's quite a lot,

and then moving up to the Victorian and modern.

I was tempted to leave a row of breeze blocks

on the very top as a kind of celebration of the 1950s

but we didn't do that in the end.

But the reality is, that now when you go up the stair,

these bands of stone change.

So, if you're interested in stone,

you can firstly look down and see the exposed foundation

at the base and then as you go up,

you can trace all these different bands of stone

coming up to the modern age at the top.

That was all part and parcel of this thing

about trying to make the experience

of going up the stair as interesting

and as pleasurable as possible.

Narrator: It was this sort of confidence

that was required to complete one of the most unusual projects

in recent British architectural history.

It was important to assemble a team

whose members would work well together.

For this is not your typical build project.

And Ptolemy wanted a builder

who would treat this as a repair job,

just as Christopher Wren did before him.

It was that mental approach of treating the new construction

as if it was a repair project

which meant that the craftsmen

worked with each other rather than separately.

So, you couldn't just say,

"Right, you're building the concrete,

"you're doing the stone, you're doing the timber."

They had to work together.

So, we had teams of timber people

cutting and scribing things over the metalwork

where the metalwork didn't quite meet the concrete.

And it was the only way we could have built it.

I have to say, the collaborative approach

for the construction was one of the most wonderful things.

There was never an argument or never a disagreement

during the construction of this project.

It was just because everybody just got on with it.

And one of the things that has been so lovely

is also drawing whilst the thing is being built.

So I have a sequence of drawings

that I've made of the project whilst it's being built.

Including one taken from the same place

when it was completed.

So we have this sort of before,

all the way through the sequence, and after.

And there's something so nice about having the record,

but it's the process of drawing it that's been such a pleasure.

Narrator: The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries

and the Weston Tower were finally opened

in the summer of 2018.

For the first time in centuries,

visitors to the Abbey could come up to a once secret space

under the roof, look down on the great nave,

come face to face with Charles II

in his robes of the Order of the Garter...

..with the effigies of English kings

made in wood and placed on top of their coffin.

But, thankfully for us, not buried with them.

And around this display

can be found Ptolemy Dean's attention to detail.

Part of our work was the renewal

of the floors of these galleries,

which is oak, all on a level.

But the more difficult thing was the hand rail

around the edge of the triforium,

and of course, everybody said,

"Well, it's a modern contemporary intervention.

"You must have glass balustrades."

We said, "Absolutely not."

Balustrading around the edge of the triforium openings

would have always shrieked,

"Oh, look, there's a contemporary intervention,

"a Heritage intervention,

"which has been designed to look as if it's invisible.

"But it's absolutely not invisible."

So we went back,

and that was another train journey, incidentally.

The breakthrough on the design of the handrail

happened on a train to Norwich.

And we realised that the handrail,

if it was made, firstly, of iron, blackened iron,

in fact, it's blackened steel,

could become like all those other bits

of detailed design ironwork in this place.

It just falls into the background,

because your eye just assumes it's already there.

So people who come into this space

and see our lovely sank foil design in metal,

which is what the handrail is made of,

with its oaking,

they just assume it was already here.

Narrator: What was the media reaction?

After all, Ptolemy Dean's creation

was a mixture of styles and materials,

not easy to describe.

The Engineer Magazine called it

"an inside-out display cabinet."

The Times said it was "a handcrafted gem."

And The Guardian called it "a Gothic space rocket."

It was very interesting how the press

were unable to quite pigeonhole the design of this thing.

It wasn't modern

but it wasn't entirely historicist.

It was something else.

They couldn't categorise it

and nor could they quite dismiss it.

It didn't accord to the standard protocols

of a contemporary architectural intervention,

which nowadays has to be sheet glass and steel

and all the rest of it.

You know, it's traditional,

and yet it's also very clearly of its time,

and I think that there's a lot to learn from that.

I never looked at this as being a major intervention

to Hawksmoor's Western towers.

Hawksmoor's Western Towers were completing a part of the Abbey

that had been left incomplete since the Middle Ages,

and he very interestingly,

Hawksmoor was incredibly deferential

to what he started with.

And in his own unique way,

created a gothic architecture

largely made out of classical details,

but a gothic piece that would complete the work of the Abbey.

So everybody here has conformed by the rules.

So our little access tower,

the modest, small addition made literally this year,

last year, of course, has to conform and play by the rules.

But we all feel, I'm sure Hawksmoor, Wren,

Barry across the road, evilly, they'll feel better for it.

Because the greater whole is more important

than our individual parts.

- The whole thing has been,

how can a visitor, and anyone coming to the Abbey,

get to understand the nature of the Abbey?

What its history, what its place is, in our national life.

And now, with this,

we are showing so much more of our treasure.

So that people can grasp the amazing story

of Westminster Abbey from the 10th century until now.

And where it sits within our national life.

It's rather exciting, really.

- This is a building Britain can be justly proud of.

Ptolemy has done the Abbey

and the country a magnificent service,

with designing this extremely inventive, wonderful building

that sits here so naturally

in amongst the rest of the towers

and buttresses and so on,

and looks part of the whole ensemble,

and yet you can see it is a modern building.

It is a truly remarkable achievement.

[uplifting string music]

Narrator: And what sort of experience has it been

for the Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey?

Looking through the windows

and seeing the chapter house different times of day,

you get light passing through the chapter house,

passing through two sets of windows,

through into our tower and casting incredible shadows.

Particularly in winter,

you get these incredible, serendipitous shadows and lights

and coloured glass colouring in

great coloured stains across our stair.

I mean, it's extraordinary.

It's what you didn't expect.

It's not what you could have ever designed even on a train.

Narrator: Next time...

In Scotland, one of the nation's best-known whisky makers

has built a new distillery.

Dropped into the hillside above the River Spey,

it's unlike any other.

It could be a structure from the Cold War,

or something out of James Bond.

A year after it was opened,

it's become a stop on the tourist trail,

and not just for the whisky.

The competition to design this most unusual of distilleries

was won by the London-based partnership

of Richard Rogers, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour.

And to Graham Stirk fell the task

of reimagining an age-old process for the 21st century.

- The whole point was the mystery revealed.

Suddenly, this distillery pops up.

And the mystery revealed was why we were very interested in...

The word we used in the presentation was,

"This is Jules Verne."

This is something where you find

a piece of almost Victorian engineering

buried and still functioning below ground.

And it was the contrast of the two

which was actually really, really important.

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