Throughout the 18th century Liverpool was controlled by men … who made up the Corporation. It was a closed shop of cronies, unelected sons who … looked after the town’s needs but chiefly they looked after their own. ibid.
The 16th century Italian genius Andrea Palladio: an important principle of Palladian buildings is that they are bound by symmetry, geometry and numbers in firm proportion. ibid.
Clearly in the 1740s the slave trade was nothing to be embarrassed about. ibid.
Liverpool’s Lyceum was Europe’s first lending library, designed by Thomas Harrison in 1802 this fine little building has fine strong bones – Greek bones at that. ibid.
Liverpool was fast becoming the Athens of the North. ibid.
Their handsome Portico Library (founded 1806) … Just 100 yards from the Portico is the Royal Manchester Institution. ibid.
St George’s Hall: One of the hall’s most glorious features is its Minton floor, a mosaic of over 35,000 clay tiles. ibid.
Half of its children were dead by the age of ten. ibid.
Leeds’ budget £200,000: enter Cuthbert Brodrick. ibid.
In a golden age of civic architecture the North created buildings that expressed the fashions and the philosophy of the day. But behind the grand facades there are human stories: personal conflicts, private passions, lives and loves set in stone. These civic buildings were bankrolled by proceeds from the Industrial Revolution which turned modest market towns into vast modern cities. Jonathan Foyle, People’s Palaces: The Golden Age of Civic Architecture II: The Gothic Revival
A pointed arch – that’s the central motif of Gothic style; the rest is just variations on its theme. ibid.
The vogue for medievalism combined with concern about the architectural health of the nation would see Gothic move beyond ecclesiastical architecture to become a suitable style for the North’s great civic structures too. ibid.
Manchester: They opted for a fashionable Gothic design by local architect Alfred Waterhouse … designed to suit a committee and Waterhouse made some compromises which Ruskin may not entirely have agreed with. ibid.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel: the man who built Great Britain. He designed the world’s fastest railway, its longest suspension bridge and its biggest ship. Over 150 years on from his death ample evidence of his genius remains. But behind his elaborate creations lay an equally complex and private man, plagued by his own personal blue devils. Brunel: Building a Great Britain, Channel 5 2020
The Great Eastern is an example of both Brunel’s ambition and his commitment to innovation. Almost 700 feet long, weighing 18,000 tons, she was six times longer than any other ship previously conceived. ibid.
It’s also an example of his lifelong overconfidence and his determination to exert complete control. The giant ship exposed the conflicts simmering within its creator. ibid.
Mark [father] Brunel spends five years in America designing everything from a theatre to a cannon factory. ibid.
The battle between Grand Ambition and the fear of failure, between supreme self-confidence and gnawing self-doubt raged unabated in Brunel throughout his late teens and early twenties. ibid.
The Clifton Suspension Bridge showcased Brunel the engineering radical. ibid.
A project [GWR] that would change the nation for ever … For an ambitious young engineer like Brunel, this new technology [rail] was rich in possibilities. ibid.
‘The time is not far off when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45-miles-per-hour – let me try.’ ibid. Brunel
The SS Great Britain is a technical triumph but never realises her potential commercially. In September 1846 a catastrophic navigational error sees the ship run aground. ibid.
In the six months after the new V&A museum in Dundee opened, half a million people walked through its doors … a signature building by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma on Dundee’s waterfront could trigger the regeneration of this city spoiled by insensitive development in the 1960s. The Art of Architecture s1e3: Kengo Kuma ***** Sky Arts 2020
[Shackleton’s] Discovery came home to Dundee in 1986 around the time Kengo Kuma first visited Scotland. His impression of the landscape particularly in the cliffs stayed with him and 30 years later would influence his design of Scotland’s newest building. ibid.
Parking in Baltimore becomes a slow-motion catastrophe. A narrow escape for the most famous building error in the book. A Manhattan skyscraper with a deadly design flaw. And a state of the art bridge with a balance problem. With big builds even the smallest mistake can be a huge disaster. From miscalculations to misunderstandings. These are the massive engineering mistakes that only an expert can hope to fix. When engineering goes wrong, news crews usually arrive after the dust has settled. But when the calamity is caught on camera, we get a unique window into what went wrong. Massive Engineering Mistakes s1e1, Quest 2020
Baltimore landslide: ‘And I can remember just seeing the vehicles goes down, and they’re sinking, and sinking, and in a moments we watched that whole sign of the street explode, and it hit like a mortar round, like boom!’ ibid.
Italy: the best known blooper of all time. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of the most famous buildings in the world. But just 30 years ago engineers came close to destroying it … The foundation is far from solid: the seven-metre tower sits on supports that are only 3 metres deep and surrounded by soggy ground. ibid.
New York: a skyscraper that was very nearly blown away. This tower hid a deadly flaw that could have devastated midtown Manhattan. Until a sharp-eyed engineering student saw the storm brewing … The new skyscraper straddled the church. Placing stilts under the sides not the corners meant they had to rewrite the construction rule-book. ibid.
London, England: a bridge that made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Bridges have been across the Thames for centuries. But twenty years ago a new iconic bridge left pedestrians with a very queasy feeling … The Millennium Bridge: a unique pedestrian-only crossing spanning the Thames. ibid.
In ancient Egypt a revolution is brewing. The most ambitious building project ever conceived sets off a chain of events that will transform the nation. Buried in the sands of Egypt is the tale of a powerful pharaoh who would become a god and revolutionise his country. This is the legend of the world’s first pyramid. Legends of the Pharaohs s1e1: Egypt’s First Pyramid, History 2021
Egypt’s pyramid-building age: 500 years during which some of the world’s most remarkable monuments were constructed, including the Great Pyramid of Giza. ibid.
When the underground burial chamber was complete, Imhotep turned his attention to the stone monument above … Imhotep would use stone masonry on an industrial scale. ibid.
After toiling for 19 years, Imhotep’s masterpiece was finished. He had succeeded in his mission, creating a magnificent and original tomb from stone … A pyramid that towered over 60 metres high, with sides over 100 metres long, set to contain 850,000 tons of limestone blocks. This engineering marvel still inspires awe today. ibid.
The story of Egypt’s pyramids is one of innovation and mysterious rituals. Backbreaking work and palace intrigue. Legends of the Pharaohs s2e2: Curse of the Pyramids
In the scorching heat of the Egyptian desert a stone mountain rises 100 metres from the sand. This is the Red Pyramid of Dahshur. Over 1.7 million cubic metres of stone. It’s the first flat-sided true pyramid in Egypt: the work of a powerful pharaoh called Snefru … Snefru built not one but three record-breaking pyramids. ibid.
All over the country Snefru recruited civil servants to enforce palace orders. Snefru would need to recruit manpower from the lower ranks, paving the way for a new social class to emerge. ibid.
On a remote stretch of the Somerset coast an army of 5,000 engineers and workers is embarking on the largest construction project in Europe. Their challenge: to build the UK’s first new nuclear power station for three decades: Hinkley Point C. The new power station costing more than £22 billion will have two of the most advanced nuclear reactors in the world. And generate enough electricity to power an average of six million homes. Building a nuclear power station is the pinnacle of modern engineering. Building Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Power Station I, BBC 2021
At its heart will set two uranium-fuelled nuclear reactors; they will generate 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to provide 7% of the UK’s power … Hinkley Point C should generate electricity for sixty years. ibid.
It’s just before Christmas 2019 and the team is more than three years into Hinkley Point C’s ten-year build. The first stage – to lay the station’s mammoth concrete foundations – is complete. Now the team is gearing up to work on the next phase – constructing the station’s storm-proof flood defence system, and the buildings that will house the critical core of the plant. Building Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Power Station II
Since this deal was signed, the cost of these fixed-price agreements for other low-carbon sources of electricity such as wind and solar have fallen sharply, with some recent contracts fixed at around half the cost of Hinkley’s. ibid.