Making History

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence follow history’s lines and linkages to uncover connections and compelling stories.

This week - Supply Lines

Presenters: Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore the stories revealed by history's lines and linkages to uncover connections and compelling stories.

This week - power lines. Tom makes a beeline for the Science Museum to find the first ever transatlantic telegraph cable, and discovers a recording of a Paul Robeson concert marking a historic moment in telecommunications.

Iszi goes pylon spotting and hears about a pioneer who helped found the Electrical Association for Women.

Producer: Craig Templeton-Smith

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence follow history’s lines and linkages to uncover connections and compelling stories. This week, with the imminent arrival of a new Royal baby, Tom and Iszi examine bloodlines - from some of the Queen’s own surprising ancestors, to the vagaries of dog breeding.

Adam Rutherford discusses how DNA testing has informed the study of history and the programme asks if race really is a question of genetics, or a cultural construct.

With Donald Trump’s Mexican wall back in the news, Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence follow history’s lines and linkages to discover how Britain’s borders have been used to separate communities.

Tom travels to Offa’s Dyke to find out how the 176-mile-long, 8th century earthwork divided the Anglian kingdom of Mercia from Powys.

In Belfast, the so-called peace lines are barriers that often cut across streets separating nationalists from unionists. But now a new scheme is under way to neutralise their effect. Making History examines how Belfast is changing.

And, crossing the border - how the development of passports formalised frontier control.

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence follow history’s lines and linkages to uncover connections and compelling stories.

As the new HS2 rail link between London and Birmingham begins its first construction phase, Tom joins the railway archaeologists who’ve been excavating one of London’s ancient graveyards along the new line.

And, further down the communications corridor, the programme explores the history of protest in the face of transport progress.

Also, with centuries-old woodlands being displaced by new roads and railways, we look at Britain’s ancient sylvan history.

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence consider fascinating and multi-faceted aspects of history.

The new series of this long-running programme focuses on lines - historical and historic lines and routes that may be physical or conceptual and that criss-cross our geographical and cultural landscape. It looks at why and how they came about and discusses what they offer us in our understanding of our past and present.

Programme 1. The Prime Meridian - the journey from Stonehenge to Jazz

Tom Holland is a writer and historian who has written a number of popular and successful works including Dynasty and Rubicon.

Iszi Lawrence is a comedian and broadcaster who's appeared on Making History as a guest but is now the new co-presenter.

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

Tom Holland is joined by the history podcaster and stand-up comedian Iszi Lawrence.

In Britain's recent past, a long hot summer has often coincided with racial unrest on our streets - 1981 is perhaps the most notable example. But while we remember events in Brixton, Toxteth and Tottenham, have we forgotten the tensions in Southall during the 1960s and 70s which, some argue, paved the way for better race relations in the UK? Lovejit Dhaliwal visits a Heritge Lottery project in Southall re-examining the importance of the town's Youth Movement.

King Edmund of East Anglia lost his life in a period of our history when the country we now know as England was still being defined. He was our patron saint until the 14th century but now he's largely forgotten - and so his is resting place. Historian Dr Francis Young has a hunch that he's still in Bury St Edmunds, not in a church but under a tennis court.

Fifty years ago, a programme that some know as 'dieselisation' reached its climax on Britain's railways and saw the end of steam in public service. Many mourn the passing of steam trains but, as Helen Castor found out on a trip to Swindon, keeping these beasts going was dirty, dangerous and laborious.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Helen Castor is joined by Flora Samuel, Professor of Architecture in the Built Environment at the University of Reading.

Tom Holland and Dr Matthew Green take a trip down the Thames to Thamesmead, an overspill "new town" that received its first inhabitants fifty years ago this month, but which is better known as the location used by Stanley Kubrick in his dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange. But was this brutalist solution to London's slum housing doomed from the start, or were some of the ideas of Le Corbusier and those who influenced the design of this place fairly similar to the better accepted work of Ebeneezer Howard and the Garden City movement?

Iszi Lawrence is in Fitzrovia with writer, broadcaster and Victorian historian Kathryn Hughes to find out why the lack of public toilets meant women were so inconvenienced in the Victorian and Edwardian period. What lay behind the then-accepted notion that women shouldn't "go" in public?

Monks in Leicestershire are brewing up a storm, the first batch of a new Trappist ale. But what's the historic connection between abbeys and brewing?

Producer: Nick Patrick

Tom Holland presents the history programme which connects the past with today.

Enthusiasts for Victorian church architecture are furious that the pews designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in Bath Abbey have been dismantled and removed and are to be sold. Supporters of the plan say that it will create a huge space which the Abbey can then use for community events. Of course, back in medieval times most churches had no furniture, so why was it introduced and what can it tell us about the people that installed and sat on it? Iszi Lawrence visits Somerset to find out more.

It's the season of village fetes, country fairs, music festivals, cricket and world-class tennis and everyone is more than usually interested in the weather forecast. We think of this as a very modern service and are amazed even at the accuracy of meterologists during the planning of D-Day in 1944. But weather forecasts have been made for centuries and those making them knew more about the science behind them than we may think. Helen Castor visits Merton College Library in Oxford, which in the fourteenth century was the Met Office of its day.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Helen Castor is joined by Professor Lucy Robinson from the University of Sussex.

A new exhibition at the Barbican in London features the photography of Dorothea Lange who is best known for her coverage of the dust-bowl depression of mid-west America in the 1930s. Many of her now iconic images were actually staged - but does that alter their historical importance? Helen takes in the exhibition with the historian of race in modern America, Dr Melissa Milewski.

The 70th anniversary of the NHS at 70 is being marked across the BBC. In one of the more unusual ideas, Radio 3 are creating a symphony from the sounds that are commonplace in the health service. The inspiration for the piece comes from the "radio ballads" back in the late fifties and early sixties, produced by Charles Parker and featuring the music of Ewan McColl. Olivette Otele is a French-African historian who had never come across these radio programmes - so what can she glean about life in Britain sixty years ago by listening to them again?

And Tom Holland has a song of the road too. He's in Cambridgeshire, in the middle of Britain's biggest archaeological dig, where the A14 meets the A1 and a new historic landscape is being revealed.

Producer: Nick Patrick