ANNOUNCER: And now on BBC 1, Blue Peter.
- Hello. - Hello.
That was just a glimpse at Britain and Europe's top award-winning museum.
It's the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and it's at Telford, in Shropshire.
The bridge stretches over the river Severn and it was built exactly 200 years ago.
Ever since then it's been a landmark and a great tourist attraction
for one very special reason.
It's made of iron.
And it became so famous, this iron bridge, that it gave its name to the little town
that grew up along the banks of the river that it spanned.
A traveller coming to see it 20 years after it was built said,
"The Iron Bridge has a beautiful appearance on both sides and has proved very strong. "
Even before the bridge was built,
this quiet valley was called the most extraordinary district in the world
because the whole area all around was filled with dark, smoking chimneys
and the red hot furnaces of a vast, great ironworks.
And it all started in a very simple way.
This is iron at the start of its life.
In fact, this rock is called iron ore and the dark, brown bits in there,
that's the metal iron.
Now, to get it out, the iron ore has to be heated at extremely high temperatures.
The metal then melts, becomes molten, turns into a liquid and can be poured into moulds
which make things straightaway, or can be poured into bars where it can solidify
and later be reheated and hammered into shape.
But whenever you heat iron ore, if chemicals or gases get into it,
it makes the iron impure, it becomes brittle and it'll crack.
So it's pretty useless.
Three hundred years ago, the only fuel pure enough to smelt the iron ore
to make pure iron, was charcoal.
The charcoal was made by slowly heating piles of wood covered with turf,
till it burnt down to black sticks.
The charcoal sticks were heated again to very high temperatures
to fire the iron furnaces.
But so many trees had to be cut down that the Royal Navy protested and said
there would soon be no more wood left to make ships.
It was expensive and wasteful and produced only small amounts of pure iron.
But in 1700, the situation changed when a man called Abraham Darby
had a revolutionary idea.
He experimented heating coal in a closed furnace
in a very similar process to charcoal burning.
The heating drove off all the impurities and he ended up with something he called "coke".
Now, Darby discovered that coke was every bit as efficient as charcoal for smelting iron.
And what's more, there was tons of coal to make the coke right here beneath his feet.
One of the reasons why this valley was called Coalbrookdale.
There was an old abandoned iron furnace here which Abraham Darby took over in 1709
and went into business.
He was the first of the great family of Darbys of Coalbrookdale.
They called themselves ironmasters and one of their names is inscribed here
on one of the furnaces.
The family grew over four generations.
Abraham Darby I, II, III and IV,
just like a royal dynasty.
And they ruled this valley just as if it was their own kingdom.
The first Abraham Darby started in rather a small way,
making iron cauldrons and pots.
But soon he enlarged both his ideas and his ironworks
and people began to visit Coalbrookdale.
One amazed visitor described the scenes.
"The immense furnace stood in the centre of a large area
"walled around each side of which was a colossal pair of bellows,
"which excited an immense heat and had to be kept up night and day. "
The coke was loaded into furnaces and heated with iron ore.
An enormous wheel worked bellows to make the fire even hotter.
This was called a blast furnace.
Then the furnace was tapped and the liquid iron poured out.
A century after the first Abraham Darby came to Coalbrookdale,
the work of the mines, blast furnaces and steam engines
was going on day and night.
One visitor was appalled by the sight.
(MIMICKING MAN) "Coalbrookdale wants nothing but Cerberus
"to give you an idea of a heathen hell.
"The men and women might easily be mistaken for devils and fairies.
"And the entrance of any one of these blazing caverns for Tartarus."
Abraham Darby's discovery was as important a breakthrough
as Concorde or the Apollo spacecraft.
So much iron was made, so much traffic came in and out of Coalbrookdale,
that new roads had to be made.
And a petition was even sent to Parliament asking permission to build a new bridge.
The river was very narrow so no space could be taken up
by supports in the river itself.
And the sides of the gorge were so steep, they would not take supporting arches.
So the bridge had to be a single span, stretching right across.
Abraham Darby III,
the grandson of the first great ironmaster,
he took charge and he decided he'd build the bridge entirely out of iron.
This was a complete innovation.
Many people were afraid iron would snap under heavy loads.
But Abraham Darby had his way.
And in November, 1777, 200 years ago,
work started on the Iron Bridge.
The span was 31 metres
and the centre point was 16 metres above the normal level of the river.
"I suppose it will all be cast in the dale for cousin Abraham will have the whole direction,"
wrote one member of the Darby family.
And indeed, the ribs for the bridge were cast at the Coalbrookdale works,
less than two miles away.
They took the whole four months' output from one blast furnace.
The main structure went up quickly
and on New Year's Day, 1781, the Iron Bridge was open to traffic.
It had cost £2,737, four shillings and fourpence.
Tourists flocked to see one of the wonders of the modern world.
After this success, the Coalbrookdale works became bolder
and produced more and more things out of iron.
It was the plastic of the 19th century
and it became fashionable to see how many things could be made out of it.
From coat hooks to cast-iron pictures.
This is the Shropshire Canal, along which coal and iron
were carried from the mines and foundries all around.
Strings of tugboats, 20 of these at a time, fully-laden, were drawn along the canal
by heavy horses walking along this towpath.
In the valley down below there, 207 feet below, lies Coalport and the Coalport Canal.
And it was that canal that took all these loads to the factories all over the country.
But there was a problem.
How to get the loads from the barges and tugboats up here
down to the Coalport Canal below without having to unload them all the time.
So in 1788, the canal owners launched a competition, in their words,
"To find the best means of raising and lowering heavy weights from one navigation to the other."
And their final solution was this.
The Hay Inclined Plane.
The tugboats were floated onto wheeled cradles
and a steam engine hauled them out of the water.
Then, partially balanced by an empty boat coming up from the canal below,
the loaded boat was winched down the slope, along the rails, back to the bottom canal.
It took only three and a half minutes to pass a pair of six-ton boats
between the upper and lower canals.
That incredible invention was fully operational by 1793.
And it was in use for more than a century.
And really, it was inventions like the Hay Inclined Plane
that kept Coalbrookdale in the forefront of British industry
for almost 200 years.
And, in fact, in the year 1800,
there were more steam engines operating within a five-mile radius
of the very spot I'm standing in now,
than there were operating in any area of the same size, anywhere in the world.
Coalbrookdale saw the invention of coke smelting, the first iron rails, the first iron bridge,
the first iron boats, the first steam railway locomotive in the world.
It has been called the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.
Now, it looks like a ghost town.
Times change, new processes were invented, coal was discovered in other places.
About 100 years ago, industry began to slip away from Coalbrookdale,
as this place began to decline and decay.
Coalbrookdale was just a name in the history books
and nobody came to see it anymore.
Then years later, many people felt it would be a great shame
if the area that played such an important part in Britain's industrial history
should be forgotten.
They started to dig out the old furnaces and to set up the rusting steam engines.
They planned a huge museum, not like most museums,
with all their exhibits behind glass cases in huge rooms.
This one was to stretch over miles of open countryside.
And it does.
And last year, The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust was named Museum of the Year.
Now thousands of tourists come here every year
to look on in amazement at the old ironworks, the Iron Bridge, the river Severn,
just as those tourists did, who came here when all this was new, 200 years ago.