We would all love to live in a cottage. It is the national fantasy - thatch on the roof, roses over the door, fire in the grate. Dan is in Stoneleigh in the beautiful Warwickshire countryside. The village has barely changed in 500 years, its cottages perfectly preserved. But even better, there is a treasure trove of documents in the local abbey which reveal centuries of daily life in extraordinary detail. Whether it is the pub owner fined for serving poor beer, the widow told to pay for her new home with her best chicken, or the first glass windows in the village, this film charts the cottage's transformation from humble medieval hovel to modern dream home.
Dan Cruickshank explores our love affair with the terrace - the home that more Britons live in than any other. We love it because it has proved brilliantly adaptable, encompassing the Victorian parlour and modern open-plan living with equal ease. Dan is in Toxteth, Liverpool 8. Famous for the riots that ripped it apart in the 1980s, Toxteth has a far richer and more varied history than that one tragic episode. Liverpool was the ultimate Victorian boom town, turned by trade and industry from provincial powerhouse into the second city of empire. 100,000 terraced houses were built to accommodate its vast workforce, with huge numbers in Toxteth. From a high of Victorian industry and immigration to a low of postwar decline, Toxteth's terraces have seen it all - even the 2015 Turner Prize, awarded for their remarkable 21st-century regeneration.
If modern Britain lives in a terrace house and loves a cottage, it cannot make its mind up about the high-rise flat. Is the skyscraper a blot on the landscape, or the answer to the national housing crisis? For Dan Cruickshank, the idea of living high above the city streets really is the future once again. 21st-century London is the site of an extraordinary building boom. Hundreds of residential high-rise towers are being built at record speed, many hugely controversial, as private developers cotton on to what social housing idealists realised 60 years ago. Dan is in Bow in east London, charting the extraordinary history of one estate - the Lincoln. Designed in 1960 for the London County Council by a young idealistic architect, the 19-storey Lincoln was once the tallest residential building in London. Inside every flat were the latest space-age gadgets - a lift, a shower and a fitted kitchen. But the dream turned sour. The Lincoln became notorious for drugs and violence. There was even a brutal murder. It was the same all over Britain - the flat was a byword for deprivation and social exclusion. But then, just as everything looked lost, the Lincoln was saved and with, perhaps, the hopes of an entire generation for that most precious of things - a home. For Dan, as perhaps for Britain, 'the only way is up'.
