This is episode 3 of our Heritage Harbours short series, celebrating the Heritage Harbour initiative which seeks to protect and revive historic ports, docks, canals and waterfronts that still retain a genuine working maritime character.

Today we're in Bideford and neighbouring Appledore. For centuries these twin ports have been among the most important maritime communities on England's west coast. Bideford grew rich through overseas trade, exporting woollen cloth and importing goods from across the Atlantic and Europe. In the seventeenth century it became one of Britain's principal tobacco ports, its merchants closely connected with the emerging colonies in North America. Nearby Appledore developed as a centre of shipbuilding, producing everything from wooden sailing ships to modern commercial and naval vessels. Together, the two towns tell a remarkable story of maritime enterprise, innovation and – best of all I think - resilience.

That story continues today. While the age of sailing ships has passed, North Devon is once again looking to the sea for its future—through shipbuilding, green technology, marine conservation and heritage. This episode explores how those different strands come together.

We begin aboard the historic steamship Freshspring, where we meet John Puddy. As founder of the Steamship Freshspring Trust, John has led the rescue of one of Britain's most significant surviving post-war steamships. We talk about why preserving working ships matters, what they can teach us about Britain's maritime past, and how heritage can inspire future generations.

We then hear from Hannah Nash of the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere. Her work focuses on protecting the region's extraordinary marine environment while balancing the needs of wildlife, local communities and the maritime economy. We explore how conservation and maritime heritage can work together. Our third conversation is with Jack Partridge, an apprentice at the shipbuilding company Navantia who feature in one of the biggest shipbuilding stories of recent times – this is Spain’s state-owned shipbuilding company who recently acquired Harland and Wolff, one of the most important names in British shipbuilding history.

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This is episode 2 of our Heritage Harbours short series, celebrating the Heritage Harbour initiative which seeks to protect and revive historic ports, docks, canals and waterfronts that still retain a genuine working maritime character.

For this episode we've travelled to Exeter one of Britain's most remarkable maritime cities. It may sit miles from the open sea, but for almost a thousand years its fortunes have been shaped by ships, merchants, engineers and the River Exe. .

Exeter began life as the Roman settlement of Isca Dumnoniorum around AD 50. The River Exe connected the settlement with the coast and provided an important transport route inland. But Exeter's real maritime success came in the medieval period, when it became one of England's wealthiest provincial cities through the export of Devon wool and fine cloth to Europe. Merchants imported wine, salt, timber and luxury goods, while busy quays, warehouses and customs houses transformed the waterfront into the commercial heart of the city.

Yet Exeter's prosperity depended on one thing: access to the sea. Over time weirs built for fishing and mills made the River Exe increasingly difficult to navigate. By the sixteenth century larger vessels could no longer reach the city. Exeter faced losing the very trade that had made it prosperous.

Instead of accepting decline, the city fought back. In 1566—when Elizabeth I had been on the throne for less than a decade—Exeter opened one of England's earliest engineered ship canals. It was a remarkable feat of engineering that restored access to the sea and transformed the city's fortunes for another three centuries. The canal was later enlarged to accommodate larger ships and remains the oldest pound-lock canal in Britain still in use today.

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For thousands of years, Britain's story has been written around its coastline. Long before there were motorways or railways, the sea connected our towns and cities, bringing trade, people, ideas, conflict and prosperity. Every harbour, from the great commercial ports to the smallest fishing coves, has played its part in that story. Yet many of these places are changing rapidly. Traditional industries have declined, working waterfronts have been redeveloped, and the pressures of tourism, climate change and rising sea levels mean that the future of many historic harbours is far from certain.

In this short series we'll be exploring the work of Heritage Harbours UK, the charity dedicated to recognising, protecting and promoting Britain's historic harbours and ports.

This isn't simply a story about old buildings or ancient dock walls. Heritage Harbours UK is interested in something much more ambitious: preserving living maritime heritage. These are places where fishing boats still leave before dawn, where boatbuilders continue centuries-old skills, where quaysides remain working spaces rather than open-air museums, and where communities still define themselves by their relationship with the sea.

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When Charles Darwin set out on HMS Beagle on a voyage that would change science forever and our understanding of the natural world, at his side was the Royal Naval surgeon Benjamin Bynoe. This episode tells the story of Bynoe's fascinating life.

A skilled surgeon, collector, explorer and naturalist, Bynoe treated the sick, gathered scientific specimens from across South America, the Galápagos and Australia, and quietly helped lay the foundations of Darwin's revolutionary ideas. Yet history has largely overlooked his remarkable contribution.

In this episode, Dr Sam Willis is joined by Liz Laidler, Bynoe's descendant and author of Darwin's Invisible Friend from Barbados, to uncover the life of a man born in colonial Barbados who went on to become one of the Royal Navy's great scientific explorers. Together they explore life aboard HMS Beagle, the realities of naval medicine, collecting specimens in some of the world's most challenging environments, and the collaborative nature of scientific discovery. It's a conversation about exploration, empire, medicine, natural history and the forgotten people whose work helped change the world.

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In this episode of our naval fiction series, we step beyond the age of Nelson and into the turbulent world of the late nineteenth century—a period when sail gave way to steam, wooden warships became ironclads, and naval technology advanced at a pace that left entire generations struggling to keep up. It was an age of empire, innovation and uncertainty, offering one of the richest backdrops imaginable for maritime storytelling.

My guest is Antoine Vanner, creator of the acclaimed Dawlish Chronicles, a thirteen-volume series following naval officer Nicholas Dawlish through a rapidly changing world of iron warships, diplomatic crises, espionage and imperial rivalry. We discuss why the Victorian navy remains such fertile ground for fiction, how real historical events—from China and Constantinople to Korea, Sudan and Paraguay—shape his stories, and why the decades before the First World War were among the most dramatic in maritime history.

Drawing on a lifetime spent working across Africa, the Middle East and beyond, Antoine explains how personal experience informs his writing, helping him capture not just the mechanics of naval warfare, but the realities of leadership, danger, politics and human resilience. Along the way, we explore Victorian geopolitics, technological revolution, moral ambiguity, literary influences ranging from Dickens and Thackeray to Trollope and Gissing, and the enduring appeal of naval fiction itself.

This is a fascinating conversation about history, storytelling and an era poised between the world of sail and the modern age—a world where the future was arriving at full speed and nobody quite knew where it would lead.

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What begins as the story of a shell collector quickly becomes something far more intriguing…

In this episode, we explore the remarkable life of Vernon MacAndrew, a wealthy naturalist, sailor and photographer whose passion for collecting seashells carried him across the maritime highways of the British Empire.

Following in the footsteps of his famous naturalist grandfather, MacAndrew transported his own yacht to the Red Sea and the Philippines in search of rare specimens. Yet among his photographs are not just shells and beaches, but Arab leaders, camel-mounted fighters, Hashemite flags and senior British officials operating in one of the most strategically sensitive regions of the world. Was he simply pursuing science, or was something more going on?

To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dartmouth historian Jonathan Turner, who introduces a newly discovered archive of more than 5,000 photographs and reveals how MacAndrew's travels illuminate the connections between maritime exploration, natural history, photography, imperial power and global shipping networks. We also visit Dartmouth Museum to examine some of the spectacular shells MacAndrew collected, objects of extraordinary beauty that open a window onto the cultures, environments and sea routes of the early twentieth century.

From the shores of Aqaba to the reefs of the Philippines, this is a story of curiosity, adventure and empire—showing how something as seemingly modest as a shell collection can reveal an entire maritime world.

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In this episode we uncover some fantastic stories of English sailors being caught up in the Spanish Inquisition. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Theresa Tinsley, who explores in detail how, between 1558 and 1604, more than 400 subjects of Elizabethan England found themselves in contact with the Inquisition. Fabulous records survive which detail their experiences and testimonies, and which provide a fresh perspective on this crucial period of religious divergence that occurred in a world bursting with new maritime trade and exploration. The varied experiences of merchants, sailors, diplomats, and prisoners of war highlight cases of persecution, conversion, and a healthy bit of religious ambivalence. By exploring the actual workings of the Inquisition in detail, it encourages us to question the cruelty and scale of the Inquisition's actions against the English, rumours and myths which fed anti-Spanish propaganda at the time, and which continue to colour our perceptions today. In particular we hear about how the Spanish Inquisition worked in ports - hotbeds of suspicion because of the cultural exchange that inevitably happened there, caused by hugely varied populations of converts, foreigners, enslaved people and displaced populations converging. Theresa has written about all of this in a fabulous new book called English Encounters with the Spanish Inquisition: Faith, Nationhood, and Heresy.

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Today we're exploring one of the most secretive and dangerous arenas of the Cold War, the silent world of submarines. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Paul Brown, whose new book explores the tense underwater cat and mouse game that played out between global superpowers during decades of nuclear brinkmanship, from covert missions beneath arctic ice to near catastrophic encounters hidden from public view for years. This is a story of technology, strategy and the extraordinary people who served in these vessels, knowing that just one mistake could trigger a global conflict. We hear about the research behind the book, the real-life drama that inspired it, and why the legacy of Cold War submarine warfare still matters today. Paul’s Book is called Secret Warriors, British Submarines in the Cold War.

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In this episode we explore a part of maritime history that has too often drifted beneath the surface: women who served at sea in the First and Second World Wars, and who died for their service. To find out more, Dr Sam Willis spoke with Nina Baker, author of a fabulous new book exploring the lives of those women. Nina has created the first complete list of all of these women and has written detailed profiles for those who were Scottish, bringing their stories to light for the first time. These are women who travelled and worked to survive, but disappeared doing so. By tracing those lives, Nina's work says a great deal about what their absences reveal about all sorts of things: danger, memory, class, migration, and of course, the human cost of maritime life. We hear about the research behind the book, the voices history chose to preserve, and of course, the ones it allowed to sink beneath the waves. We also explore why those stories matter now, and how recovering them changes the way we understand both the sea and the societies built around it. And just to make this episode even more interesting, if it's in any way possible, Nina herself has a great story: She became one of the first women navigation officers in the British Merchant Navy, a pioneer in opening up access to seafaring careers for women. She rose through the ranks of an industry that for centuries had been male dominated. She also shares some of her early maritime experiences. Her book is called “Supposed Killed or Drowned by Enemy Action at Sea” Scottish Merchant Navy women who died as a result of enemy action in the First and Second World Wars.

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