PlayITV1, April 2008
Click on the image to watch the exclusive video clip
From John Clare’s Northamptonshire countryside to George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the gap between rich and poor, the railway whisks Melvyn Bragg on to Birmingham – the epicentre of the industrial world.
His journey takes in the medieval town of Coventry, gutted by the Blitz, and on to the modern multicultural city with Meera Syal, Benjamin Zephanaiah and Jonathan Coe and onto the heart of England to Shakespeare’s Stratford - by way of Ambridge!
The tour then finds a landscape park at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire and a village, Bourneville, that failed to be the worker’s Paradise that had been imagined.
Hear the words of working men and women who lived in the Midlands and actually built the towns and villages, laboured to shape the landscape, and left their own largely neglected chronicles.
Contributors include: Simon Russell Beale, Cat Deeley, Sam West, Emma Watson, Josie Lawrence, Richard Griffiths, Jasper Carrott, Keith Barron, Benjamin Zephaniah, Jonathan Coe, Meera Syal, Christopher Lee.
View images taken from the making of the show across the literary heritage of the Midlands
