Facts, fascinators and firsts
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Some facts
- East London's Beckton Sewage Plant – all 280 football pitches worth of tanks, troughs and waterways – is one of the largest in Europe.
- On an average day, Britain's water pipes carry 16 billion litres of water – enough to fill 18 million bathtubs
- At the peak of the working day Britons send over 5000 texts
- 109 square miles of British countryside is just used for landfill
- Between 7 and 10am, 36m Britons will be on the move commuting to school or the office
- The average road user will spend over six months of their life stuck in traffic jams
- The English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world: on a typical day over 400 vessels travel through the Dover Straits, the biggest of which weigh up to 150,000 tonnes and take 3.5miles to come to a stop
- Every day more than 7,500 civilian aircraft crowd Britain's airspace, carrying more that half a million passengers
- Merseyside's Ellesmere Port refinery loads an output of 11 million litres on to waiting tankers every day
- Over three quarters of a billion pounds in hard cash is transported around the roads of Britain every day. Driving one of the vans is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country with sometimes 15 attacks a week.
- There are more than 500,000 HGVs ploughing the nation's motorways
- Every day the nation's rubbish trucks collect more than 82,000 tonnes of refuse
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Some fascinators
- Adam Crick spends his whole life in helicopters. He is one of 12 aerial linesmen patrolling electricity power lines up and down the country using a thermal imaging camera to check for hot spots which could cause a fire and subsequent power outage. Between the team, it takes three years to check the UK's lines and then they start again... just like painting the Forth Bridge. But Adam admits that when he first started, the rollercoaster effect of looking at power lines turning in all directions while flying around them meant he did have occasional use of the sick bag...
- Stephen Jefocate works for the National Grid and his daily job revolves around the theme tune for EastEnders: this is the critical point of his day when millions of TV viewers head to the kitchen to switch on the kettle – and the electricity system is assaulted by a massive surge in demand. Steve's job is to gently turn the dial, drawing on reserves from Snowdonia, Scotland and sometimes France, ensuring there is just enough power in the system to ensure everyone gets their cup of tea.
- London's Chief Planning Officer, Peter Rees, keeps the city's medieval alleyways, with their coffee houses and bars, free from modern re-development because he's convinced that one thing is as powerful as money at keeping the city working – gossip.
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Some televisual firsts
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For 91Èȱ¬ One, the Britain From Above team have harnessed cutting edge, previously unseen GPS and satellite data brought to life using the best CGI technology to graphically illustrate:
the movement of every plane flying over Britain within a 24 hour period; the trace of a fleet of London taxis traversing Central London; the movement of every ship over 300 tonnes passing through the English Channel in a day; the movement of rubbish trucks in Westminster; the geographical activity of telephone exchanges as they are made in real time; the internet connections originating in Britain and spanning across the whole globe; and, aerial thermal imaging shots of deer and other wildlife on Lulworth Range.
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On 91Èȱ¬ Two viewers will see the past and future brought to life through both unprecedented archive access and thoroughly modern CGI forecasting including:
- The Lawrence Dudley Stamp Land Use Survey of 1934. This was the first comprehensive land use survey of the whole of Britain ever undertaken. It became the basis for the agricultural revolution of the 1940s which effectively saved Britain from starvation during World War II, and subsequently underpinned the further transformation of Britain's rural landscape in the following decades from small-scale labour intensive to the massive agri-business we see today. The survey was designed by geographer Lawrence Dudley Stamp in order to identify every single parcel of land in the country and, because of money restrictions in the 30s, 250,000 schoolchildren from 10,000 schools across the country were recruited to complete it. Most of the original hand-coloured sheets were destroyed during the Blitz, but enough originals and copies survive to tell the amazing story of Britain's rural revolution, and this is the very first time they will have been seen on TV.
- Cityscape's architectural forecasting. Cityscape are a London-based design company who visualise the grand designs of architects like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. Their job is to create 3D renditions of London's latest skyscrapers for the approval of planners, investors and the public, showing in the most stunning architectural visuals ever seen how the latest mega-structures will sit in London's crowded skyline. After a brief appearance in an early series of The Apprentice, this is the first time their cutting-edge work has been featured on TV in its own right.
- The RAF's and Luftwaffe's aerial archives. One of the most overlooked and hitherto underused archive resources this country possesses is a vast collection of aerial survey photographs undertaken by the RAF during and after the war. When archaeologist Chris Going compiled this incredible collection of images and matched them to both German wartime spy shots and modern equivalents, a series of astonishing revelations unfolds – the changing shape of London, the scale of Britain's agricultural revolution and the lost world of her industrial heritage. This is the first time these aerial surveys have been compiled on a national level and the first time their hidden secrets have been revealed on TV.
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Over on 91Èȱ¬ Four the production team have been given unprecedented access to Zephyr, the latest generation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UVAs) developed by British aerospace researchers at Qinetiq.
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The UAV is beloved of military commanders for long range observations. The problem with conventional models is that they are expensive, noisy and have very short flight durations.
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The usual alternative is an imaging satellite, except satellites take a single still shot a few times a day, take years to develop and launch and cost tens of millions. Zephyr promises to break all these barriers and totally revolutionise earth observation from above.
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Using pioneering technology, the engineers at Qinetiq have developed a super lightweight, unmanned aircraft based on carbon fibre and mobile phone technology that, with its solar powered electric motors, can stay aloft indefinitely, beaming back live moving imagery of the earth in real time.
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Zephyr is still in development, but trials – seen here on TV for the first time with unprecedented MOD approval – show the potential of this observation platform is almost without limits.
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Notes to Editors
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Britain From Above is accompanied by a book of the same name, written by Ian Harrison and published by Pavilion. It will be available in September 2008, price £25.
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The complete series of Britain From Above will be available on DVD, produced by 2Entertain, from 8 September 2008.
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