Titans of Power: How Three Cities Ruled the World

[Music] 400 years ago a village by the name of Amsterdam set out to conquer the world invented capitalism as we know it and became the richest city on the European continent there was this sense among the Dutch that whoever you were you could have a piece of the action you could um be involved in this great economic activity of your Society 100 years later London its main rival took its place the greatest trading power in the world London endured terrific hardships but went on to become the world's largest city and invented the megalopolis of Tomorrow's

World when the railways crashed through the poorer areas of London people were just dispersed they were swept aside might say meanwhile New Amsterdam had now become New York it was under British rule the city cut itself free and entered the Fry at the outposts of technical Revolution New York became the vertical City and created a whole new horizon for itself you watched day by day as this Stone structure Was being built in the middle of the river and and it got bigger and bigger and [Music] bigger today we admire the beauty of the city's houses

and the charm of its canals but there's much much more to Amsterdam than [Music] that it marks the starting point of a great adventure that of the rise of liberal capitalism the expansion of worldwide Commerce and the emergence of the global City a combination of circumstances that has rarely been seen in human history and one which changed the face of the world [Music] Amsterdam was still just a small town of less than 30,000 inhabitants a town of small consequence in terms of the European continent on this spring morning of 1594 near Dam Square which has

been the heart of Amsterdam since its very Origins 10 men held a meeting [Music] the meeting took place in one of the participants houses a certain Martin spill a brewer by [Music] Profession around the table sat men whose businesses traded wood salt and Herring products which Amsterdam had become a specialist in their ships were however excluded from the trade of pepper and spices with South Asia the most lucrative product [Music] around because this form of trade was run by Portugal which owned a huge number of trading posts along the route to Asia serving as stopovers

for its trading boats and as bases for its warships on the day in question it was this very Monopoly that was at the heart of their discussion and the idea is we can attack the Portuguese Monopoly on trade with the Far East uh and they realize that by this time the city of Amsterdam has developed uh it's got money it's got these people with this kind of expertise they've been building ships so in other words all the ingredients are coming uh into place each of the men present that morning had already amassed a fair amount

of capital but it was nothing compared compared to what they'd soon known And the veritable Empire they'd contribute towards founding among them was Dirk Vanos one of the city's most dynamic Traders originally from antp he was a refugee like many of the men who attended this meeting they moved to Amsterdam following a conflict that had been ravaging this part of Europe for the past 25 years on one side was William the silent who was championing the cause of the Dutch [Music] Protestants on the other side was Philip II of Spain an uncompromising Catholic and one

of the most powerful men on the continent When the Northern provinces revolted he put them to fire and [Music] sword but am Dam and the Netherlands finally gained their independence whereas antp and Flanders remained under his control antp was at that point the main commercial city in Europe the richest city in the continent a primordial source of Taxation for Philip II and his Kingdom however the king of Spain made a bet which would cost him dearly they knew that one way or another you couldn't lock up all the merchants uh money is mobile so they

perhaps uniquely said to those uh the inhabitants of an worp there is a choice you can either stay with us you have to convert to Catholicism if you're not yet a Catholic but you could also leave and you have 3 years to liquidate your assets and take them with you half of the inhabitants of antp who were often more enterprising chose to leave many of them left for London or Germany but ultimately chose to settle just 200 km from their city of origin in Amsterdam the richest among them bought themselves a house in the small

medieval town but those who couldn't afford to do so built their own homes outside the city walls on agricultural land there would soon be dozens of thousands of people here waiting for a better [Music] solution For these refugees it was the start of a new life and when a chance presented itself they weren't going to miss it they sit down with their cartographer they've got all the people there and they work out a system of how they're going to do this they're a route they're going to go what ships they'll need and they form a

company which they call the compan fanfair which translates as something like the company for Far Away lands it's fair to say that this small group were well prepared a man named Cornelius dealman was sent to Lisbon in Portugal where he would work for several years and spy on the leading Market players he knew what he was doing and despite his lack of experience he was designated by the group as the leader of this [Music] Expedition the total amount invested was 300,000 Dutch gilders an enormous amount even the richest traders in Amsterdam didn't have these kinds

of sums available in cash a house in Amsterdam cost around 5,000 dut guilders and that would get you a very beautiful house so they needed to involve a lot of traders in order to raise such a sum of money certainly dozens of Traders were Involved as investors in this initial campaign of hans's three ships 249 crew members nobody in Holland had ever undertaken a voyage this far moreover should they cross into hostile territory the Portuguese could at any moment intercept the Expedition and destroy their ships plagued with scurvy and rebellions the voyage did not go

well and hman had to stop over for several months in Madagascar before setting sail for Asia and ultimately reaching Bantam on the island of java nothing was left to chance during his stay in Lisbon halman realized that this was somewhere where he'd be able to buy pepper and [Music] spices but when he reached his destination he was met with disappointment the sulan who initially greeted him warmly took him [Music] prisoner how man escaped and after several Journeys on August the 14th 1597 he returned to [Music] Amsterdam more than 2 years later about 80 of the

original 200 and some people make it back they look like Skeletons and they've got just a few really a few sacks of pepper and spices in their hold uh so by any logical means this is a complete disaster except those that handful of men who backed The Voyage realized they had done it they had actually gone the wholeway there somehow or other gotten their hands on some of the spices and came back so they'd beaten the Portuguese uh and they realized then that this was an opportunity this was this was going to work Amsterdam now

needed to gather enough resources that it would need for its global Ambitions it needed ships lots of ships and as quickly as possible and it just so happened that in 1594 that is to say 3 years before helman's return to Amsterdam one man found the answer his name was Cornelius cornelison and he owned several Mills in the village of alge near Amsterdam Cor I Corel Zoom was a great inventor he helped Holland harness wind power until this point soaring planks of wood required several men and lots of Patience but this all changed when cornelus Cornelson

developed the crankshaft this revolutionized ship building production the crankshaft is actually a very simple invention that converts a circular movement into a vertical [Music] movement with this new technique it was possible to produce planks of wood which were mostly used for ship building 30 times faster than before this consider lowered production costs and sped up the ship building process which made the production of ships large ships much cheaper and you have to remember this was happening at the end of the 16th century the patent dates back to around 1592 to 1594 in other words exactly

at the time when the Dutch set off on their huge Explorations at first The Invention met a lot of opposition and many Shipyard workers refused this piece of innovation but within a few years its usage became more widespread and Holland's advantage over its foreign competitors was Overwhelming Amsterdam was now the leading Shipyard in Europe and that's where they mass produced the best trade ship of its time the five years that followed were full of excitement more and more expeditions were launched and many shipping companies were founded 75 ships were sent to [Music] Asia and the

ships start coming back loaded with these incredibly valuable spices and this is really the moment that the Dutch Golden Age takes off there's a scene that's described by several writers where when these first ships come back all the church bells are ringing because this is just this you know awareness that something really big has [Music] happened these Expeditions brought back 9 million Dutch gilders which equated to the total sum of Holland's national debt the debt amassed during the war against [Music] Spain that was they couldn't Carry On This Way forever because all these companies would

eventually start competing they all wanted to travel to Asia and buy spices the prices in Asia started climbing which nobody was happy about and the second problem was the Portuguese and Spanish who didn't want to relinquish their spoils to the Dutch they needed to be a well organized and centralized company with a monopoly of the market and one that would be able to defend itself against the Spanish and Portuguese and so the Dutch East India Company the vo was created it's a key date in the history of capitalism as well as that of Amsterdam one

morning in April 16002 Dirk Van o transformed a room of his house into a temporary office for the Dutch East India Company of which he'd just been nominated a director whoever wished to could buy shares of this new company there was this sense among the Dutch that whoever you were you could have a piece of the action you could um be involved in this great economic activity of your Society 1,143 people seize this opportunity not just Traders but also joiners Bron Smiths and all sorts of crafts people and even seven people who worked as housekeepers

it was a sample of society in Amsterdam at that time A total of 3, 680,000 Dutch gilders were invested Ed in this new Shipping Company a huge success for the first operation of its kind in the history of the economy DK van a and his house in this moment when these ordinary people came walking into his house to buy shares of stock might have an outsized place in history because this is the you could say the moment that capitalism was born but there was a problem the investors were used to investing in a single Voyage

they had to wait and when the ships returned they'd get their money back and could either choose to continue or stop investing but with the VOC in 16002 they were told you can invest but for 10 years your money will be held for 10 years and 10 years was much too long for many small investors the VOC found the solution on a small Bridge which can now be found outside the exit of Amsterdam [Music] Station this area in the early 17th century was home to the city's port and its many ships which were ready to

set sail out to sea on the old bridge the one nearest The sea those who wanted to sell their shares of the VOC would meet those who wanted to buy them but the weather in in Amsterdam wasn't always accommodating and on rainy days people would meet inside the St Olaf Church a Catholic Church that had been abandoned during the Protestant Victory and since left to the traders of Amsterdam who'd come from Scandinavian countries this place to some extent became the first stock exchange to exist in human history [Music] the process was you did your exchange

on the bridge or in the church and then you walked to the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company and you had to get signatures and stamps and so that that um sealed the deal that made that made it official the Dutch East India company headquarters are now part of the University of Amsterdam it was the first headquarters in the world with its offices managers and board of [Music] directors the edifice is the work of hendrik Deiser the leading architect at that time he's the one they called when a stock trading activity increased they decided

to build a proper Stock Exchange hendrik deiser had two models to work with the stock exchange in ANW and its copy the stock exchange in London but antp was in enemy territory so HRI deisa went to England here only merchandise was traded company shares did not yet exist but the architecture was interesting and Henrik deiser used it for inspiration once back in Amsterdam he built an edifice based on the same model its location is no coincidence the new Stock Exchange was built right in the center of Amsterdam a Stones Throw from the city hall a

sign that finance and politics would work hand in [Music] hand in Amsterdam unlike London merchandise was being exchanged but so were shares of the Dutch East India Company in this regard the Amsterdam stock exchange became the first in the history of global [Music] Economics the stock exchange was inaugurated in 1611 meanwhile a truce was being signed between the Dutch Republic and Spain temporarily relieved of the burden of its War debts the city would finally have the resources to expand [Music] in the space of 30 years 10 square km were dug up around 100 Bridges were

constructed and 3,000 houses were built with 30,000 inhabitants in 1585 and 105,3 years later Amsterdam would soon be the third largest city on the European continent the next part of this story took place in London at the Heart of the City the business district back then much like now it was a city of Traders too in the early 17th century London had not yet undergone its Urban Revolution it was still a city in the Middle Ages well it was actually a very small place compared to London we know Now a tiny fraction of the scale

of of the city as it exists in the 21st century even in the 19th century the city is currently a crucial Financial Hub and not many people live there but back at this time in history most of the population of London was still mostly living here and the city was the area confined to the old medieval walls which had been built on top of the old Roman walls so really a very small space what we call a square [Music] mile a place that was made up of medieval houses packed very closely together essentially um of

Timber there are some new structures amongst them but it was very much a medieval city very old-fashioned the city was separate from the royal power the sovereigns needed money lent to them by Traders who would in return receive a certain degree of Freedom England's Great fortunes had their home there in 1534 when Henry VII split from the Roman Church he seized all the Catholic monasteries until this point they occupied 60% Of the city's space the king redistributed this among his courtiers and so when the king appropriates that welfare for himself you have a change in

ownership of the property of more than half of the buildings in the city of London and they move from conservative landlords who are the churchmen to go-ahead entrepreneurs the merchants who are buying the church property as investments in a period of maybe 50 years London becomes a place which is actually filled with extremely wealthy people living in their own very large uh houses and these people uh spent the winter months in London with their wives and their wives wanted to go shopping and shopping is absolutely the key to what happens to London it becomes this

extraordinary imporium where people come and buy and sell and buy and sell high value luxury goods at the start of the 17th century the city of London was therefore a rapidly developing commercial center but it was still far behind Amsterdam and When the two cities came up against each other the city of London would come up [Music] short back then much like like now in the city business people often have confidential information disclosed to them especially in pubs where eavesdroppers would often overhear [Music] conversations pubs are places where people meet pubs are the social hubs

and business centers need social hubs as much as residential areas work is primarily a social activity [Music] the British unlike most other nationalities drink standing up rather than sitting down if you're sitting at a table in a French cafe all you hear is the gossip of your friends you can never quite hear what's being said on the next table which is always far more interesting than what your friends are saying in a British pub no such problem because you're standing up you can easily get close enough to the other group to hear what they're saying

and you can switch off from what your friends are saying which you already know anyway Strategic information could fall into the wrong hands which is exactly what happened in late summer of 1608 and this changed the fate of London Amsterdam and even the whole of America that morning a certain Henry Hudson had a meeting in the offices of the musy company in a little Street of the city called budge row the musky company was specialized in trading with Russia and it's not the first time Henry Hudson had put himself in their service Henry Hudson had

spent many years undertaken many voyages to try to find a short route to Asia on two occasions Hudson tried to find the right route the first one went via the North Pole which obviously didn't work and the second attempt went via the far North Coast of Russia and wasn't successful [Music] either I think of him as kind of like a uh I don't know Steve Jobs or or someone like that of his era who you know people started to look at to him as someone who knows whether or not he did know and and we

know today that he did not but he you know what you had to do was you had To guess you had to say I'm going to put all this information together and my next guess is that this is the best way this time Hudson had a new idea instead of traveling towards the east they'd have to cross the Atlantic and the American continent that's what he was explaining to his employers however inside the building nothing happened as he'd expected not only did they refuse his offer but they showed him to the door that said this

incident didn't go under unnoticed a 62-year-old man Emanuel van metan quickly sees the opportunity as the Dutch Consul in London he'd look for every piece of information and he had spies he paid people to find out information one of the things that he was following was Henry Hudson and he found out very quickly that the musky company had fired Henry Hudson and so he approached him and said come to Amsterdam we'll fund you London had just missed an amazing opportunity because Hudson was quickly Persuaded and a month later he sailed to [Music] Amsterdam he comes

to Amsterdam and there are different accents there are different uh languages there are there's different it's the very moment when they are building their first Stock Exchange and starting the idea of expanding this canal grid so it's all just happening in this in this um multi-ethnic polyglot Society is something that would have been very strange to him Hudson discovered a new world a mixed population with many refugees unlike his city of birth in Europe intolerance is official policy and if you're in London basically you're English you know this is still that moment when you know

that that kind of identity is is intensified and and uh codified by law almost here there was no king or absolute power but a republic formed of seven provinces they all had to reach a compromise for any big [Music] decision when the city became Protestant the Catholic churches were converted into the general places of worship but there were Still many Catholics in the city they represented a third of the population and their faith had not been [Music] banned their churches were simply no longer visible they were now in individual homes there were 66 churches like

this during the Dutch Golden Age everyone knew that Services were held every Sunday but they were tolerated at a time where Europeans were killing each other for religious reasons this was proof of a greater openness and it's a legacy that Amsterdam passed on throughout the Golden Age across the entire world so Hudson goes into the courtyard of this uh now legendary building which was the um headquarters of the East India Company meets with the directors and they hammer out an agreement by which they will fund his voyage on one condition however Hudson would not head

West as he' proposed but would find a short cut to Asia through Russia they for their own reasons insisted that he try a Northeast passage he had tried that and Failed he was convinced that wouldn't work um but from one line in the contract we know that there was tension and the line says something like Hudson will think of taking no other route than a Northeast passage which suggests that he was saying no no no we we want to go Northwest we want to go Northwest and they were saying no no no we want you

to do [Music] Northeast in May 1609 as he set sail for Russia the seaf farer was under no Illusions as to his chances of success but he had other intentions having only just arrived in Norway and facing the difficulties they'd encountered he persuaded his crew to do a U-turn and to head towards America the Indians so we're told mentioned a waterway that wound its way far into the depths of the continent Hudson looked for it along the north side turned around and finally found the river mouth he made his way down this river which would

later take his name the Hudson River but after a few days of sailing he had to face facts it was a dead End so Hudson turned back on himself along the Route he met some Indian tribes some hostile others happy to trade and he saw lots of beavers whose fur was worth a fortune in Europe Amsterdam had not found the sea route it had been looking for but the city had set foot on the American [Music] continent the year Hudson returned was also the year Amsterdam underwent its [Music] transformation Amsterdam until that time was still

this little medieval city but from that moment they undertake this vast Urban expansion program a few years earlier a new District had popped up in the northeast of the medieval city many refugees from ANP had settled there the less wealthy were living on top of each other in the 3,300 small homes built outside the city walls they lay out a plan for a belt of canals A kind of U of canals that will wrap around down the medieval center of the city and the canals will be used to take the problem of water and convert

it to an advantage a team was put together to carry out this ambitious project and hendrik deisa was one of the men in [Music] charge and of at the start of the 17th century this construction company was formed of around 150 people Specialists Crafts People from various Fields Masons Carpenters sculptors and this number just kept growing and we know that in the mid 17th century it had between 600 to 700 employees there were huge difficulties because Amsterdam is built on marshy land whereas each building needs a solid foundation as such hundreds of ships traveled back

and forth to the the Swedish Port of Stanga to bring dozens of thousands of Tree Trunks to [Music] Amsterdam Amsterdam was transforming itself into a huge bristling construction site of wooden triangles on top of which heavy loads Were being hoisted and so this is how the posts necessary for the foundation of such construction were buried into the ground one post per meter across the entire city so I have often thought that you know if you were walking through Amsterdam in its golden age I think really you would have been struck by this sound of hammering

and of the piles being driven and driven because that was going on all through the century as this belt of canals was dug and these roads and bridges and and houses were being built the perimeter of the city wall was extended the refugee homes were demolished and two new districts emerged a residential district and on the outside was a commercial and residential area for those with fewer means it was the first town planning scheme in the history of European [Music] cities in the commercial area each profession had its own area [Music] whereas in the residential

areas it was forbidden to make noise and no polluting forms of Industry were [Music] tolerated here everybody Was free to build the house of their choice to the size and style of their pleasing there was only one restriction the house could only occupy half the surface of the plot of land [Music] and what's unique about the houses in Amsterdam along the canals is that each of them has a [Music] garden the inhabitants of Amsterdam who lived in these houses the wealthy Traders the bankers and men in power were passionate gardeners and wanted create palacial Gardens

at the heart of the city and the Dutch way of Designing these Urban Gardens was characterized by their different designs there were boxwood hedges plant beds topy original Plants there were also statues benches Garden Pavilions everything you'd find in a palace Garden could be found here but on a smaller scale in a smaller space [Music] On the ground floor of the house there'd be a reception area next door would be the office where one's business would be run with one or two employees upstairs was the family space family in the strict sense of the term

as we know it today before that European homes tended to be much more um mixed you may have extended family there might be servants or or borders who are renting rooms the Dutch Canal House and this again reinforces this new notion of what an individual is and not just an individual but what a family is this new kind of sensibility which I think most of us consider now today to be part of Our Lives the Dutch Canal House was intended to be for a man and his wife and their [Music] children the Dutch have this

word kazite it means uh cozy intimate uh a place of [Music] Domesticity you read the tales of foreigners who walked along the canals in the mid 18th century they seem surprised that there are so many high value houses and no Sovereign they are also surprised that this architecture is not solely used for the houses of Rich individuals but that even simple Public buildings are built this way too orphanages retirement homes [Music] they thought it's really quite astonishing and they even thought it's a bit excessive to design public buildings like palaces Amsterdam would now start exporting

this revolutionary societal design to the other side of the Atlantic [Music] 1623 marked the creation of the Dutch West India company which had a monopoly over trade with the Americas a year later it invited volunteers to its headquarters in Amsterdam to join its New Colony it's the golden age in Holland and it's hard to get settlers so they are advertising and they have this this multi-ethnic society and as you would imagine would happen it's people who are at the Bottom Rung of the society who are willing to who you know they're the ones who have

nothing to lose who say okay I'll join young people in their 20s a boy for each girl all from french-speaking Flanders now Belgium in 1624 a few dozen volunteers signed up for this American Adventure at that point Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic were without contest the world's leading commercial [Music] power however on the other side of the North Sea London was building up its forces it's secret textiles a force born 250 years earlier in terrible circumstances [Music] the greatest epidemic in European history the Black Death half of the English population were wiped out in the

space of a decade but it was at this point that the English economy discovered sheep farming before the Black Death there was a very high population the uh economy was geared towards agricultural produce to feed this population but after the Black Death uh there was what they called a Dar of people there were very few people and there was a lot of land and so the economy changed and they made use of the huge amount of land by switching the economy from this agricultural economy to sheep Farming wool supplies were gathering in London and for

the next two centuries the city Traders exported it particularly to Amsterdam and Holland where a great number of some of the best Weavers on the continent were working now this was all very well exporting wool was very good it was a cargo that made good profit but there was a way to make even more profit and that was to not only send wool abroad to allow people to make cloth out of it but to make the cloth yourself and then sell that with its increase added value in the mid 17th century London finally decided to

take the next step the Weavers of Holland were invited to move to the English Capital as well as French Protestants the hugonotes [Music] among them were many textile Craftsmen London thus seed the seeds for its future [Music] industry they settled in the east of London near to the city of London and Close to the port where they had arrived from the continent they built houses with weaving Lofts at the top of the houses with large windows and plenty of daylight to operate their looms for making cloth and this early development of the cloth industry in

the UK was what really allowed the economy of London to take off which produced the great wealth that led to it becoming a financial center [Music] the Weavers formed the initial Hub of the future East End the major industrial district of the 19th century and the port in London saw its activity increased tfold in a space of 50 years the population of London more than doubled by the mid 17th century it had amassed 500,000 inhabitants the medieval city grew Beyond its confines and rapidly spread towards the West in the direction of Westminster Westminster where the

king reigned and he saw urbanization spraw beyond Control there were real anxieties about the expansion of London because it was this place of disease of Vice crime and the idea that the city might expand might get bigger was an incredibly woring thing for that reason in his Palace in whiteall the king dreamt of a different city a city devoted to Royal greatness the example to follow according to Charles the is the banqueting house one of the wings of his Palace [Music] with its classic design the building was used for great Royal ceremonies it was built

by his father King James I the King featured in these ceiling paintings done by rubben in person celebrate Glory the two sovereigns made life difficult in London by imposing all all sorts of regulations they wanted to force it to [Music] change but they had a problem unlike uh European monarchies where the Monarch you know genuinely had the um the power to completely remodel um City centers James I first and Charles I first were completely dependent upon Parliament and the city of London Government had a complete strangle hold complete control over the nature of the city

and so their hands were tied London became one of the bones of contention between the King and Parliament and the conflict contributed to the Civil War which devastated England in the mid 17th century Charles I Was Defeated sentenced to death and decapitated on 30th of January 1649 in front of the banqueting house the palace he' so dearly loved and recommended as an example Le to be [Music] followed it was a terrible period but the city emerged richer and more powerful than [Music] before because this is when the first Banks set themselves up in London and

financial business became a formal profession until this point things had been done in an informal manner mostly in settings like pubs a rich Tradesman would sit at a table from which he'd hold business [Music] meetings a person who wanted to borrow money would come up to him accompanied by another person who'd act as a [Music] guarantee and the rich Tradesman if he deemed them suitable would Lend them the money they'd requested but this practice changed after the death of Charles [Music] the a few months after his execution Oliver Cromwell became Lord protector a sort of

dictator and allowed Jews to return to England they'd been deported several centuries beforehand [Music] as such Jewish Bankers moved to London from Lombardy in Italy they chose a Street in the city center now called Lombard Street and set up their offices [Music] there these were the first office blocks such as we know them today however the newcomers still maintained a Vestige of the old practices this type of sign which all English pubs worthy of this name would hang outside and would be named after pubs and coffee houses had done this for a long time they'd

always had a picture outside a picture of the king or picture of a castle or something more unusual and so it is in Lombard Street that to this day we see a collection of signs hanging from buildings that Look very much like pub [Music] signs they don't have any words on them they are the world's first logos so when we see the Cat and Fiddle over a building in Lombard Street this is because it was the visual symbol of the company the bank that operated within very much as had been the case in the days

of Pub banking in the space of 50 years the city had carried out its transformation from a commercial center it was now becoming a financial [Music] Hub England now had the means required for its Ambitions and a first war soon broke out between London and Amsterdam to take control of certain sea channels but Amsterdam continued to grow an incredible success which aroused Keen interest from all around [Music] 400 years ago a village by the name of Amsterdam began its mission to conquer the world invented capitalism as we know it and became the richest city on

the European Continent there was this sense among the Dutch that whoever you were you could have a piece of the action you could um be involved in this great economic activity of your Society 100 years later London its main rival took its place the greatest trading power in the world London endured terrific hardships but went on to become the world's largest city and invented the megalopolis of Tomorrow's World when the railways crashed through the poorer areas of London people were just dispersed they were swept aside might say meanwhile New Amsterdam had now become New York

it was under British rule the city cut itself free and entered the Fry at the outposts of technical Revolution New York became the vertical City and created a whole new horizon for itself you watched day by day as this Stone structure was being built in the middle of the river and it got bigger and bigger and bigger [Music] [Music] what's so special about the DNA of New York is that unlike other American cities other American development it doesn't start with religion it doesn't frankly start with idealism it doesn't start as an experiment in Let's uh

leave leave a place where we're being persecuted or we can't fulfill our identities let's go do something idealistic uh perhaps even utopian no what is New York about New York is about making money what is unique about New York is that it was expressly founded as a commercial place by a commercial entity the Dutch West India Company they were here to trap beavers and send the pelts back to Europe New York was a place to capture animals and turn them into money spring 1624 Amsterdam's first settlers make their way to America on board are 15

young boys and 15 young girls some of whom became couples during the journey upon arrival they split into four groups four tiny colonies each separated by several 100 km and it was one year later in one of these colonies that the destiny of this handful of adventurers would change dramatically The Colony jaes had trade relationships With the mahikan tribe who were at war with the IRA [Music] tribe so they came to the defense of their business partners but they fell into an ambush and five of them were killed in this time of tragedy a new

leader stepped in his name was Peter Min as a means of protection he ordered all the colonists to gather [Music] together from then on there would no longer be four isolated colonies but one single settlement which they named New Amsterdam the settlers decided to settle on an Island located at the Confluence of Two Rivers at the heart of a huge Bay sheltered from the harshness of the ocean they had access to sources of clean water which meant it was quite easy for them to build a small town at the time the site was used as

a hunting ground by the lenar Indians which theyd named manah the island of many Hills and so one day manah became Manhattan it was this land bursting with potential the Peter mwe and the Amsterdam settlers exchanged in 1626 for a few items the value Of which is estimated at 60 Florin in other words the equivalent of 2 weeks pay if you're doing history you got to slow down peel back the layers and get down to these people at this moment and what they thought they were doing nobody was looking ahead 200 years later or 300

years later or 400 years later when a you know a one-bedroom Co-op would sell for a million dollars or something like [Music] that they know perfectly well that the Indian idea of property ownership is not their idea of property ownership it's kind of a defensive Alliance so we'll allow you to live here too and if you're attacked we'll help you and if we're attacked you'll help us a fortified camp and a small village the settlers finally had a solid base however for 10 years The Colony wasn't able to expand and this is largely down to

the West India Company who wanted to control everything the West India Company insisted on running this Colony as a monopoly so any money to be made it's through them so everybody is a West India Company employee [Music] And it's failing and the and the people who are making money are Smugglers or prostitutes those were kind of that or Pirates these are the main you know uh successful businesses so to speak in Amsterdam the situation was becoming worrying in 1640 at the West India company headquarters the managers finally decided to open trade to whomever was interested

and what starts to happen then instantly is these successful Dutch trading companies would send one of their sons to New Amsterdam and they would set up a branch office and because the Dutch Republic is a ethnically mixed place the settlers are ethnically mixed 15 years later the population of New Amsterdam had multiplied by five and now exceeded 4,000 inhabitants the small village had become a small City and a smaller model of the great Metropolis across the other side of the ocean brick houses and canals which made it look rather like the Dutch [Music] Republic of

course all of this has long since disappeared with the exception of the narrow streets of New Amsterdam which can be found at the Southern tip of Manhattan the famous New York Canyons where the skyscrapers seem to touch each other are the legacy of the Island's first European inhabitants almost 400 years ago on this new continent a colony so small in size was vulnerable so a wall was built along its northern Edge this protection was not against the Indian tribes but against new Amsterdam's two English neighbors while in Europe War was breaking out between England and

the Dutch public Boston and Philadelphia were a threat they needed to protect themselves [Music] from 50 years had passed since the start of the Dutch Golden Age Amsterdam's belief in its future was Resolute and this building is the best expression of that belief [Music] a few years previously the Old Town Hall a legacy of the Middle Ages had burnt down in A fire its replacement was built entirely out of stone in a neoclassical [Music] style built on a foundation of 13,656 Timber piles its construction was a real achievement [Music] in the middle of the town

hall is a huge Central Hall called the burgar the citizens Hall everyone has access to it both the rich Traders and those with modest means [Music] middle embedded in the marble floor of the Citizen Hall are two planispheres symbolically when the inhabitants of Amsterdam walked into this huge space the world would be at their [Music] feet the city of Amsterdam is portrayed as a female goddess who Reigns benevolently over the entire planet [Music] [Music] the beneath the citizens Hall in the building's basement level was Amsterdam's Financial core this small room was the central bank which

held access to the city's gold reserves thus acting as a safe for the city and its inhabitants the city therefore dominated global trade with the average income per inhabitant three times greater than in other large cities on the continent and with this money came all sorts of possibilities this money meant it could complete the huge Urban project it had started 40 years previously between 1650 and 1670 the canals were extended by several kilometers and hundreds of houses were built it was one of the largest developments to take place in Amsterdam during the Dutch golden age

and it was no doubt the most successful at this point large families were opting for a more sober architecture which never goes out of style with stone facades that stand the test of time an architecture that distanced itself from the early Amsterdam when the beginnings of merchant capitalism had only just emerged now the city was entering into an era of maturity [Music] the age of conquests great adventures and new fortunes was mostly over in 50 years real Empires had been established not only in trade but also in finance and Industry [Music] the history of this

house the biggest private house in Amsterdam tells us the story of one of the dynasties that reigned over the economy of the Dutch [Music] Republic a family that within two generations created a truly multinational entity whose base was located in Sweden where they produced iron and traded [Music] weapons the house belonged to to the trip Brothers their Uncle Elias had started from nothing upon his death his personal Fortune was worth 1 million Flor which is the equivalent of 4,000 years worth of an average salary his successors Louie and hendrik trip continued to grow the family

fortune and it was they who built the house which Was in actual fact a single facade that concealed two adjoining houses the trip Brothers sell to anyone who is willing to pay including the uh enemies of the Dutch Republic the Dutch had a lot of enemies and if you didn't sell to the enemies there wasn't that much business left to do but the other reason is that interestingly the authorities in the Dutch Republic are aware of the fact that do business with everybody brings in Revenue so ultimately it supports the Dutch State and if they

wouldn't buy those arms from Dutch Merchants they would go somewhere else and that would support perhaps the enemies of the Dutch [Music] Republic good [Music] [Music] the town hall was a place where only families from Amsterdam could work but the trip Brothers Were from a village located about 50 km outside they were therefore excluded this largely explains the position and height of their house its existence was an act of defiance against the city's political authorities Amsterdam had now spread to four times the size it was in the early 17th century and its population had exceeded

200,000 inhabitants as Europe's thirdd greatest City it was well aware of its power but London was laying in wait and it was ready to overtake its [Music] [Applause] rival as such on the 8th of December 1664 New Amsterdam became New York this state the city we know today was formed with its mix of populations and unwavering commercial [Music] ambition with utmost secrecy the English had sailed towards New Amsterdam taking the small City's inhabitants and Governor by total [Music] surprise Peter Styers had led this Dutch Colony on the other side of the world For 17 years

he knew his enemies well they were his neighbors and his best clients for many years before this point the English colony in Virginia when they were shipping things to England they would send them to New York Harbor and have the Dutch do it because the Dutch could do it cheaper they they could do it faster they just had developed for over a couple of centuries they had developed systems um for for handling these things up against the four English ships and their powerful artillery New Amsterdam didn't stand a chance and so Peter serson had no

choice but to invite his enemies into his own [Music] home however despite this blatant show of strength the English conceded practically everything to the small City they just conquered and it's an interesting document because if you read it Point by point you wouldn't know it's like these are the conquerors and these are the conquered because it seems more like a negotiation between two equals the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were allowed to keep their properties trade as they wished and retain their right to decide on matters Concerning the city and the trading ships that sailed over

from Amsterdam would still be [Music] welcome when there's a takeover you have in your mind this notion that you know these people leave and these other people come in they all stayed and even 20 years later notaries in the Dutch Republic are writing documents to send people settlers Dutch settlers to the Colony and they're still calling it New Netherland like they don't want to think about it you know and just to jump ahead centuries like in the 19th century when the Great Waves of migrants come from Europe to America by and large they come into

New York Harbor and they first make footfall on Manhattan and they look around and they see what's now this teeming Society with people speaking different languages and worshiping different faith and they're all struggling to get ahead by what we would call upward Mobility and they say well this is America you know but it wasn't America the rest of America wasn't like that it was New York and it was New York because it had been New [Music] Amsterdam in 1643 while New Amsterdam only had a population of 500 one visitor recounted that 18 languages were being

spoken [Music] there this mix within a population was passed onto the city of New York and that's what gives it its identity to this day the initial Mark made by New Amsterdam is no longer visible but it is ever [Music] present in this regard Harlem Finds Its route in the small town of Harlem near Amsterdam Broadways is in bradv which means wide Road in Dutch Brooklyn is named after Brolin another Dutch City Coney Island comes from Conan Island which means Rabbit [Music] Island and Staten Island comes from Staten Island the state general the governing body

of the Republic in the Dutch golden age in New York the spirit of Amsterdam and London had in some ways fused giving America a very unique City [Music] and this is also why it's important to understand the story of Peter Styers who straight after his defeat left for Amsterdam to report back to his Superior Styers showed up at the West India company headquarters to Defend his decision to hand over the colony to the English once exonerated he decided to head back to New York where he spent the rest of his life in his house where

he'd signed the famous Treaty of [Music] capitulation the two years that followed England's seizure of New Amsterdam were horrific for London and its population in 16 1965 the plague killed 100,000 people and the following year was the great fire London then was a city of thatch Timber plaster all building materials that are very [Music] flammable the previous couple of Summers were very dry so London was this Tinder Box ready to go s b you the great church was one of the only buildings to escape the Flames it was in these rather dramatic circumstances that London

took its first step into [Music] modernity I think it's really difficult today to get any sense of how catastrophic The Great Fire of London actually was particularly as when it started it seemed like it was just Another one of the hundreds and hundreds of fires that happened every year and that were dealt with and put out and controlled and even after the fire had been raging for 24 hours it wasn't really understood what it was going to mean for London people were moving their goods further to the other side of the city people were putting

their goods in St Paul's Cathedral in the uh illusion that they would be safe uh in there and of course they weren't the fire broke out in a bakery on the night of the 2 to third of September 1666 and then it subsequently took [Music] hold although it only claimed nine victims more than 100,000 inhabitants saw their houses reduced to ashes and it burned until Wednesday the 5th of September and destroyed a third of the city in that time so I try to conceptualize what that would mean to inhabitants that moment if you think of

a third of London now was destroyed it's that kind of magnitude of event the fire had done what the Kings of England had never managed To do the medieval city had disappeared it could now be replaced with a new city I think nobody really understood what to do next you know there was no manual they could go and get off the shelf saying catastrophic fire page 47 this is what you [Music] do there was a real vacuum of uh of power and into that vacuum came two very powerful um interests one was the commercial interest

which said just get up get going we just can't afford to mess about we've just got to get on and on the other side was an opportunity you had to move quickly half the population of the city were camping out in areas that had avoided the fire what should be rebuilt a new city what should it look like one man had the answer to each of these questions his name was Christopher Ren he was a brilliant mathematician and a very talented architect Ren was a close friend of King Charles II he'd known him since they

were [Music] children the year before the king had sent him to Paris in what was in some ways a spying [Music] Mission There he met benini the architect behind the Vatican who would be asked to design a new facade for the louv palace and ren says in a letter that he writes back I brought back all Paris with me on paper big trunks full of books sketches drawings prints Maps these were all BR brought to London and we have to imagine him undoing this big trunk and putting the papers out on a table in front

of Charles II and saying we could do this we could do this we could do this Christopher Ren was in Cambridge where he was teaching when he heard about the fire he immediately traveled to the Royal Palace to meet Charles II Ren had prepared for this for a long time and couldn't wait to seize upon such a dream opportunity and so before the king he unfolded his plan for a completely new city totally un English because all uh of London's previous history had grown up through the individual acts of entrepreneurs and Merchants and individuals here

was something that was being proposed that would be imposed by the state Christopher Ren wanted to eradicate the traces of The medieval city and build a capital formed of large squares and wide Avenues a royal Capital not similar to the large cities across the continent this was an absolute catastrophe because clearly anything that was going to be State directed was going to take ages to implement and therefore was going to interrupt the important business of making money and of course the people who wanted to make money won because London has always been about making money

London was invented by the Romans to make money the city was therefore rebuilt on the outline of the old city but with brick houses it was the birth of a modern city a city that now found its calling 132,000 houses were burnt only 4,000 houses were built back and so London begins to change from being um a place of dense population to a concentrated trading center as for Christopher Ren although his City plan didn't come to fruition he was put in charge of rebuilding St Paul's Cathedral at 111 M high it was the biggest building

in London and the biggest in Europe at the time even today the cathedral is a symbol of the city the old medieval city of London which having Disappeared in the great fire later became the first business district in the history of Economics at Ren's been realized we would have been a beautiful Parisian city useless for the function of being a world financial center a city which was so Grand so beautiful so complete so perfect it couldn't continue to change and be adapted the great constant in London's history is the constant of [Music] change as London

has never been planned it can can easily be rebuilt and remade it is in a constant change in its physical form as well as in its technology and its forms of doing [Music] business from a disaster London had invented a new Urban form and so the failure of Christopher Ren's design of his perfect city opened the way for the city we know today as London as a city became more and more commercial it became a less fashionable place to live and so the rich and the fashionable moved out to the west and there they were

able to build larger houses houses that had Gardens and houses that instead of being crammed in on these narrow Streets were set around large carefully planned squares the model of using squares came about 40 years before the great fire with the creation of coven Garden an Italian style square a Tuscan style church and a collection of [Music] houses a very successful project that inspired all the aristocrats who owned property in and around London the square therefore became a good way to make one's [Music] Fortune the principle was as follows the king gave a piece of

of land to one of his courtiers said courtier or one of his descendants would develop it and consult an entrepreneur the entrepreneur would take care of everything Gathering income from the houses they' built and would pass back a share of it to the courtier this continued from generation to generation for a century at the end of which the courtier's family would regain full ownership of the land they could then decide to use another another entrepreneur who'd build more houses and return a share of the income back to the landowner or their [Music] Descendants it was

through this ingenious system the West London that is to say the Chic districts were able to develop the square was a very clever invention because at least initially the people who lived in these houses were uh extremely wealthy they may well also have owned as well as their house in a square a vast country house somewhere in the country with many rolling hectares of of land so they wanted their townhouse to look Grand in the 18th century they were no longer squares but little parks that sat in the middle of these districts small very select

parks that were only accessible to the occupants of the houses facing them by creating uh what we call a Terrace which is a row of houses together and approaching it you feel if the Terrace is designed as a single structure as if you are approaching a great palace but in reality you approaching one Slither of a great palace your servants live Downstairs and upstairs in the attic and in the sandwich in between lived the family and so the squares and these great Terraces were very popular with the rich because it gave them a sense of

status uh a sense they were living in an impressive Palace where in reality they were living in a very manageable residence in the city these types of property projects were mainly aimed at Aristocrats to begin with but it wasn't long before the upper middle class took an interest too and naturally the rest of the middle class wanted to copy [Music] it the aristocratic developments of these great squares set a fashion and the fashion trickled down so whilst the aristocrats lived in very big tall Terraces maybe six seven stories high with huge squares covering maybe a

couple of hectares the middle class uh uh the Clarks the um the the the people who working in the city had slightly smaller houses which were built on a very similar principle on smaller squares with slightly narrower streets here a simple developer could Buy some land build and then rent out houses the first to do so was called Nicholas barbon as a person he was incredibly difficult ruthless ill-tempered uh would not let anything stand in his way he trained actually as a doctor of medicine in Leiden and he returned to London at this moment after

the great fire when it was emerging as this new place reborn this this newly emergent modern [Music] city he saw building very much as a commercial Enterprise he was the first speculative developer and he found uh as many possible ways to save money himself barbon did everything in sequence the stairs the plaster moldings the chimneys and the window frames in doing so he amassed a considerable fortune and was soon being imitated by dozens of other developers this is how London started growing at a frantic Pace it was on its way to becoming the most widely

spread and highly populated city in the world and it kept repeating the same Urban model again and again the square model which it had invented following the tragedy of the Great Fire of [Music] 1666 London was the rising power Amsterdam was the established power and France was to be the referee for this merciless rivalry in 1672 the Hall of Mir did not yet exist but it marks the memory of a conflict that shook Europe and changed the history of these two cities forever London and Amsterdam had already been met with two Wars and until now

the Dutch Republic had always won the battle 3 years earlier the Dutch Navy had even invaded England and had crept up on the enemy Navy along the towns most of them had been destroyed [Music] ever since the English had dreamed of nothing but Revenge Louis the 14th saw this as an [Music] opportunity the king of England Charles II was his cousin he admired the king of France and his absolute power the two men were on good terms and formed an alliance in DOA in early spring war broke out and for Amsterdam the situation was very

dangerous England had Formed an alliance with Paris but also with the communes of mster and cologne danger was therefore coming from all directions the French troops entered Dutch territory they moved quickly to positions very close to Amsterdam it looks as if Amsterdam itself might be conquered by the French that didn't happen but a major part of Dutch territory was occupied by Foreign forces really for the first time since Independence one of the problems that the Dutch have in the 1670s is they have to maintain a huge Army to fight Louis the 14th that Army uh

is about 100,000 soldiers possibly even more and this implies that every 20 Dutch men women children 20 of them together are paying for one soldier and that becomes impossible to sustain the Dutch Republic finally won the battle but the country emerged from it exhausted as for its opponents it was better luck next time 16 years later the same scenario seemed to be [Music] transpiring Louis the 14th supported James II Charles II successor to the throne of England so it was therefore possible to establish a military alliance between the two countries but their enemy was a

determined Man William of Orange was not a king but a symbolic character within the Dutch Republic of which he was also the Army [Music] chief his family tree alone was a perfect synthesis between the Dutch Republic and England William was the grandson of William the silent who a century earlier had won the war against Spain to which the Dutch Republic owed its independence Charles the of England the king DEC capitated in 1649 was his [Music] grandfather his wife Mary was the daughter of the current King of England at the time James II The Man Who

hoped to Ally with Louis the 14th to annihilate the Dutch Republic was therefore his [Music] father-in-law these very close connections to London were a great asset and William used it to his advantage [Music] with great secrecy he mounted an extraordinary Armada 500 warships crossed the [Music] sea he takes a large Invasion Force across 25,000 men as well as 60,000 Copies of a pamphlet in which he says this is not an invasion I am English William of Orange claimed that he was defending the country's interests against its own King James II whose diabolical advisers had imposed

an arbitrary government on the population and the argument worked James II King of England fled to France and when William reached London dressed in white to signify the purity of his intentions he was applauded and received the support of parliament the deal is that William together with his wife Mary become the new sovereigns of England for Parliament the deal is that they will have the final say on all important issues Parliament granted William and Mary the Bill of Rights and the habus Corpus which for the very first time established the limits of a sovereign's power

and respect for individuals freedom this episode was later called the Glorious [Music] Revolution the royal couple were crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1689 and ruled together for a decade after which the Dutch Republic and England now United Around their two sovereigns were able to resume their independence but within the space of a few years William managed to incorporate his own little country's values into his new kingdom individual rights tolerance a moderated government system by the time both sovereigns died these values were already perfectly [Music] instilled this all cost the Dutch Republic very dearly it was

an another financial burden for a country already in substantial amounts of debt at the beginning of the 18th century Amsterdam was still a large capital city but its heart wasn't in it one clue indicates that the times were changing painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age had been one of the great passions of the Dutch Republic whereas until then throughout Europe art had been the privilege of princes Aristocrats or very large families here it had been de critized [Music] [Music] Amsterdam was the birth of the individual everyone wanted to Showcase their existence Or their profession like

a jeweler or their daily life if you look at the journals and Diaries and letters of travelers from other parts of Europe they would come to Amsterdam and be on the Dom or another market and they would be find it amazing that you would see a fish seller and a vegetable seller and then you'd see an art seller right next door and then you would see ordinary people going and buying these paintings and the paintings would not be of a saint or something like that they would be of ordinary people doing ordinary things like selling

vegetables or or you know a woman pouring milk into a bowl or something like that [Music] none of them are important today but all of them have a Wikipedia page today all of these people these portraits hang in in the louv or the reiches museum or the Metropolitan Museum and it's because of this it's because they're the first people who looked at themselves the way that we look at ourselves the war of 1672 was a Terrible blow which impoverished the country and ruined many art [Music] lovers verir now a celebrated painter had no more customers

he started facing financial problems and he never got back on his [Music] feet however there were some who set off for [Music] London velt the younger and Elder for example two Marine painters famous for their strikingly lifelike paintings depicting scenes off the coast of the Netherlands found their new customers in England of course it would be really nice if we could say on a particular day the Dutch Golden Age came to an end but that's not the way it works Amsterdam's decline was the product of a slow degradation but in 1715 the Dutch Republic took

a decisive step which reduced their credit and dissolved their power the Dutch Republic defaulted on its debt it was only temporary but it was a step too far this is something that only happened to Royals so there was a kind of an idea in the Dutch Republic among all those bankers and people who put their money into the public De that you had monarchs who had flimsy characters and therefore they defaulted on their debts but in the Netherlands you had this solid institution made up of uh businessmen who knew what they were doing it wouldn't

happen to us that was the kind of feeling and then it happened to [Music] us and so this is also the start of a debate that takes basically all of the 18th century where people are saying what did we do wrong and how can we get back into Paradise but Paradise had been lost Amsterdam was now a city almost like any [Music] other it's in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that this story Finds Its end Amsterdam had had its golden age in the 17 century two centuries later New York experienced its Gilded

Age by the 19th century late 19th century the industrial era New York is this Powerhouse and it's filled with these extremely wealthy men who who become obsessed with art and culture and of course European art and culture and they are now suddenly buying up Europe and Sending their representatives to Europe to uh buy up its history and they're bringing it to America and founding these museums so they can in effect look back on their own roots on these very wealthy tycoons from the 16th and 17th centuries who were their forebears the prince of sugar the

baron of Railways the king of abbatar or the creator of the first department stores in America these huge collectors bequeath these masterpieces to museums around New York [Music] City by the end of the 18th century Amsterdam had fallen off the pages of this great story London and New York now stepped out in [Music] front on both sides of the Atlantic two rival Powers would now dominate the world and face the challenges of [Music] modernity two fast evolving cities shaken by both industry and new technologies two cities in their extreme forms both extreme poverty and immense

fortunes they went on to present the megalopolises we know today [Music] [Music] 400 years ago a village by the name of Amsterdam set out to conquer the world invented capitalism as we know it and became the richest city on the European continent there was this sense among the Dutch that whoever you were you could have a piece of the action you could um be involved in this great econom activity of your Society 100 years later London its main rival took its place the greatest trading power in the world London endured terrific hardships but went on

to become the world's largest city and invented the megalopolis of Tomorrow's World when the railways crashed through the poorer areas of London people were just dispersed they were swept aside you might say meanwhile New Amsterdam had now become New York it was under British rule the city cut itself free and entered the Fry at the outposts of technical Revolution New York became the vertical City and created a whole new horizon for itself you watched day by day as this Stone Structure was being built in the middle of the river and it got bigger and bigger

and [Music] bigger at the end of the 18th century Amsterdam the leading global trading power finally had to accept defeat Industrial Revolution and demographic explosion London would become the dominant power for the following [Applause] Century but New York had followed hot on its heels and caught up within a few decades now competitors the two cities were to be the first to face the impact of [Music] modernity 21st of September 1776 while the war of independence raged New York was Up in Flames half of the city was reduced to Ash it was disastrous but also heralded

a fresh start since its very Foundation New York had never stopped growing but once the city was freed from British rule it underwent a remarkable development over the decades to come it literally engulfed the island of Manhattan Manhattan had an interesting Landscape in fact the name Manhattan derives from the Native uh word for manaha which means the island of Hills Manhattan was the island of hills it was a rolling landscape no mountains and no deep valleys but high hills many of them Rocky it was a beautiful place but that is not what the Commissioners had

in mind there were three members of the commissioner's plan for the street and Road layout for New York Simeon dwit surveyor General the only professional in the team John Rutherford former Senator the greatest land owner in the state of New Jersey Governor Morris one of the founding fathers of the United States He took part in the drafting of the American Constitution in 1807 they were tasked with planning the layout for the future city of New York four years later they invented the famous grid pattern this marked the starting point For a huge expansion which ultimately

made New York the economic capital of the United [Music] States at the turn of the 19th century New York had two key competitors Boston and Philadelphia it's at this point that it took the upper hand its Traders were selling raw materials and buying manufactured products in England and got involved in the trafficking of slaves between Africa and the southern states of the US this is how they came up with the idea of offering their clients a completely new service in Philadelphia or Boston or in London at the time the standard way of trading was to

wait until a ship was full and then send it across the Atlantic and it go across the Atlantic and wait at the other Port until it was full and come back the New York Traders therefore proposed a different and much more efficient service their ships would set off at a set time whether or not their holds were full or empty this way their customers would know exactly when the ship was leaving And when it would arrive with their cargo this method couldn't be r and so New York gained a definitive advantage over its competitors and

that's not all by sailing North up the Hudson then winding up a canal to the Great Lakes region the city was able to Fashion itself a path of traffic deeper into the country and therefore toward its plentiful natural resources it was a sizable challenge because it stretched a huge distance almost 600 km the Erie Canal was the first major construction project in the history of the United States people were very skeptical they were concerned about the amount of money that was being borrowed and it was just not not a sure thing at all uh it

turned out to be a fantastic thing and within just a few short years the total revenues being collected along the Erie Canal were more than enough to pay off the Deb the Erie Canal was a small Revolution for New York because until that point it had been difficult or even impossible to travel around such a vast [Music] area from this point onwards it was now much easier to transport wood Furs and soon coal and Agricultural production to New York all the items that would be necessary for its trade and Industry Philadelphia was the real competition

here Philadelphia tried to build a canal to go west but but west of Philadelphia are mountains and so they started later it was more expensive to build because of the mountains that meant that the tolls had to be higher so the Philadelphia Canal went bankrupt while the New York Canal just prospered and grew you could call the Eerie Canal a kind of vacuum a suction and pressure PP that allowed New York to withdraw produce from within the country and distribute imported products back into the country so that made the city completely unavoidable in the material

sense of the word you absolutely had to pass through it the Erie Canal was officially opened in 1825 and gave the New York economy a considerable boost just as the city was being planned and the famous grid pattern started taking shape both projects were intricately linked because two of the three members of of the Street and Road layout commission for New York Governor Morris and Simeon DeWit were also involved in the design of the canal and this Mission took up a great deal of their time with time running out on their street commission they basically

punted which means they cast about for some plan that exist resisted that they might adapt to their purposes because they hadn't really come up with a plan of their own upon searching through the archives they came across some work done by a man called Casmir GK GK had drawn up the plans for plots of farming land in the center of Manhattan in a location that was at the time worth almost nothing through these common lands he designed three Avenues perpendicular roads and 140 plots each measuring two hectares boom there it is there is the Manhattan

grid it comes directly from the commonlands grid and what the Commissioners did is simply expand it explode it out from there and so as if by chance the great grid pattern was born a pattern without which New York would not be New York many other cities would have their Planned core and then as they expanded they would plan additional subdivisions and add additional streets so you never really knew what was coming up next New York in 1811 lays out this grid that extends almost all of the island of Manhattan all the streets were at right

angles there was a standard plot size all the plots were roughly the the same size The Avenues were roughly the same size the streets were roughly the same size it made every piece of real estate more tradable more buildable more developable more marketable and it made the real estate market very rational 12 Avenues 155 streets the city was about to transform itself into a real estate Kingdom but before it could do so the island of Manhattan was yet to be conquered nature posed a significant hurdle the land on the idol was very Rocky and its

Rolling Hills were not compatible with the desired grid pattern and so New York set to work on a gargantuan project breaking up the rocks and flattening the hills the old Old Farms were now a thing of the past and were destroyed one after the Other this is how decade after decade the city crawled relentlessly further [Music] north Manhattan was divided into almost 2,000 sections of houses or what are now known in New York as blocks these in turn were divided into a few dozen section sections which were very narrow and deep each designed to accommodate

an individual house and small garden but investors immediately started buying several plots at a time and the land became a simple commodity and what that of course leads to is speculation that I'm not buying the property with this notion that I'm going to live here forever and I'm going to pass it on to my child and he's going to pass it on to his child and it's going to be about the great matrimony of the United States none of that it's about I buy this property and uh and other people buy properties it becomes a

a a desirable area and then I'm getting rid of it as fast as I can to buy more property someplace else you create a kind of regular system and I can just sell it off I don't have to like be describing every pros and cons of This piece of property I just sell it off to you like it's like it's a car off an assembly line long before the Wall Street Stock Exchange which later made New York the financial capital of the United States property was the driving force behind an extraordinary type of growth the

auctioning of plots in New York was a windfall for speculators and so the first Great American fortunes were [Music] earned the temple for this new passion was the Traders Stock Exchange it was located on Wall Street but at a different address to the one that exists today there all sorts of Commodities were exchanged but land in the city of New York was the most sought [Music] after it was here that John Jacob Aster began his career speculating on the property market and earned the first Great American Fortune before anyone else he realized that the city

was going to see a huge surge in its population and he was subsequently proven right there were 100,000 inhabitants in 1810 but 800,000 50 years later in that time the price of land had unsurprisingly increased By more than [Music] tfold within a few decades the steamroller behind Manhattan's great grid had erased everything with one [Music] exception Broadway is really to my mind uh the grids Saving Grace it creates these irregular angled intersections with the north south Avenues and these are graceful Urban oases the only instances anywhere in Manhattan of any irregularity Broadway the great Avenue

of today follows the outline of a former Indian pathway the city plan of 1811 should have erased it but it provided access to a great number of ranches the owners of which ultimately demanded that it be left in place two centuries later it was one of the most famous Avenues in the world without Broadway Madison Square and even Time Square would not have [Music] existed Broadway is the legacy of a time when New York was still a little city on the other side of the world before the start of the 19th century it was already

heading towards the great Metropolis we know today The East End the Eastern side of [Music] London at the turn of the 19th century as the British Empire began to grow products from around the world started arriving in the East end but London's Port was was not ready for such an influx of goods it was simply known as the pool of London where hundreds of ships would M to load or unload their cargo a multitude of small vessels would continuously come and go on the temp's [Music] banks you have to imagine this dense congestion of craft

mored in the tidal Temps rising and falling on the tide and transferring their goods to the warehouses which still within living memory lined most of the bank of the river the tital range of the temps is something like 8 m so an enormous surge of water flowing in and out of London London would have to invest massively to rise to the challenge this led to the construction Of the docks ports along the temps that enabled ships to empty or fill their holds much [Music] faster each of them specialized in a different type of trade it

might be Timber it might be grain it might be meat it might be sugar it might be rum and the flow of raw material from the Empire and from World Trade into the docks then generated a huge industrial complex and that was really the basis of the East End the East End was now England's leading Port far ahead of Liverpool and it had more factories and workshops than Manchester what you had was narrow streets lined densely with warehouses and sometimes with overhead passages which crossed the street and carried the goods to another set of warehouses

on the other [Music] side you can still see that pattern the warehouses have been converted now into luxury dwellings but you can still see the physical pattern in rothery and in whopping a huge number of people from Ireland and Continental Europe had come and settled in the East End which in itself became England's second largest City subsequently the railway was built first came the train then the underground London was undergoing a revolution a revolution more violent than ever before [Music] anybody who had any money in the 1840s 50s 60s 1870s even plunged their investments into

Railways this was the way to make your fortune and as that happened these individual projects funded by individual investors brought Railways into the city stopping at individual terminuses and by uh the 1850s there were as many as 19 ter dotted around the outside of London and someone then had the brilliant idea of joining cleaning up all these peripheral Railway stations with an underground Railway long before electricity steam trains would go through tunnels which had vents in them to let the smoke out they were the first underground trains ever invented and the underground Railway solved the

problem because it enabled you to get on to one station in the north to get on the Underground Railway and to move round To get into another station on the East but the destruction it caused was [Music] enormous in the 19th century the way you built a railway was to get a private Act of Parliament that gave you the powers to drive your Railway through other people's land to purchase their houses and to build your stations and your goods yards [Music] when the railways crashed through the poorer areas of London people were just [Music] dispersed

people would be renting by the week or by the month um the home that they lived in they wouldn't have long-term leases they wouldn't have security of tenure they wouldn't have [Music] ownerships the landlords of the buildings were quite happy to make a few pounds by throwing out their tenants and selling the plot to the railway company or selling a lease to the railway company to build their Railway through and the poor people were just totally disregarded they were swept aside you might say [Music] And these people are moved they're not rich enough to move

far and so they move into more slums making them more intense and creating worse and uh poor [Music] areas many parts of London change dramatically in their appearance and there's a famous dor etching of the East End of London with Railways on brick arches and uh very low quality housing huddled in below with the Steam and smoke belching out of the Railway engines down into the residential property below this was one face of inner London the French illustrator Gustav D stayed in England on several occasions in the 1860s and Drew hundreds of illustrations dur was

one of those who discovered to their astonishment the most populated city in the world now undergoing significant change but London with its mass poverty industrial districts and slums was also the capital of the most extraordinary [ wealth the prince Regent Future King George IV was a very flam boyant figure at the time one of London's most famous streets is named after him having been designed by John Nash his favorite architect it started at the prince Regent's Palace in Calton house it was the dividing line between the poor and wealthy neighborhoods the east of region Street

were the slums on the other side of region Street was the fashionable uh West End Picadilly circus and Regent Street they were and still are some of London's great [Music] emblems and so region Street divided London socially but it also created the first really architecturally homogeneous piece of architecture brilliantly designed following the social fault lines of London very picturesque very elegant very fashionable very commercially successful and very unusually for London stimulated by state action it's now a neighborhood of brick buildings located in South Manhattan overlooking the East River Cherry Street a place that underwent one

of the most spectacular Transformations in New York during the first half of the 19th century George Washington the first president of of the United States had a house there so it became one of the most fashionable streets in the city but in the 19th century everything changed in New York Mass immigration economic growth Urban explosion the face of Manhattan transformed population growth was so rapid all through this period of time there's some DEC ades in the 19th century where we had hundreds of thousands of residents where the population in just one generation [Music] doubles all

these people want to work in New York and live in New York and there's a limited amount of [Music] space Manhattan is an island rivers on both sides so the only place to go is up or to squeeze more people into every block and the people who invested in New York City land uh became expert in fitting as many residents as possible onto each one of those lots Cherry Street had once been an ideal place for living The Sweet Life but immigrants had started settling there in their tens of thousands and so a new type

of building emerged the tenaments they were perfectly adapted to Manhattan's divided structure and the blocks carved out for individual houses but not for such an influx of people instead of these little houses and their Gardens the tenaments filled each plot in its entirety initially a space was left at the back of the building but as Manhattan's population exploded they spread throughout the entire block leaving the occupants with no light or room to breathe you're talking about no bathroom facilities at all you're talking about privies in the backyard you're you're talking about what we would think

of as as you know absolute slum conditions but with the added feature that it's intrinsic to the architecture room is the right word these were not Apartments people of course had many children people are also taking in unrelated Borders or Lodgers to help make rent so you Might have in two small rooms uh uh 15 people living uh you know there would be a small area for cooking and then people are going to be sleeping in both rooms sharing beds uh there might be people sleeping on 24-hour Cycles you may have some people sleeping certain

times a day and then others sleeping at other times of day a lot of work was also done at home um especially in the Garment industry textiles might be made in a factory but people were often sewing clothes themselves working as tailor in their [Music] tenaments so there's a tremendous amount of activity these buildings were extremely crowded you might have um hundreds uh of people living in a single tenement building 20 ft wide by six stories tall there were 100,000 inhabitants in 1810 but 950,000 60 years later more than half of them lived in a

tenement and by the end of the 19th century this was the most crowded place on earth now that you might think that that's hard to measure but we have a pretty good idea of how what the population was of the other big cities in the world and There were more people people per square mile on the lower east side of Manhattan in New York City than there were in the most crowded parts of cities in Asia or in London which was a much bigger city at this time but not as crowded per square mile as

New York was the local authorities tried to bring in legislation but it only imposed minor changes at least until Jacob ree broke the taboo and revealed a reality that everyone until that point had chosen to ignore he was a Danish immigrant he had actually lived for a Time on the Lower East Side in a tenement um he worked for a newspaper and was a crime reporter and he made it his mission to try to reform the [Music] slums flash powder was invented in Germany and when Jacob Bree read about this in the newspaper he had

an idea proved to be a brilliant idea and he rode away and sent for some flash powder uh it was sent over from Germany and he learned to become a photographer he got a camera and and started going out and taking pictures of places like Gotham Court places like Cherry Street And he took hundreds of photographs and then he published a book in 1889 called how the other half lives and there were certain themes he liked to depict so there's lots of of photos of children um standing next to piles of garbage or very menacing

looking young men who might be part of a gang holding Big Sticks and looking very [Music] rough flash powder was essentially gunpowder this was literally powder that was ignited um uh using a long fuse that would result in a very bright very loud explosion so wherever Reese took photographs he had to find willing participants so it was a very manipulative and orchestrated operation but it was effective it worked it convinced uh mainstream New Yorkers middle class New Yorkers to support housing reform How the Other Half Lives the book by Jacob Reese was published in 1890

[Music] however it would be another 30 years before the worst tenaments were [Music] destroyed the first to go on Cherry Street were only taken down in 1920 almost a century after their [Music] construction hide Park one of the largest and most beautiful parks in the British Capital this is where almost by chance a small Revolution took place that would change the face of London but also that of New York it all started when Queen Victoria or more precisely her husband Prince Albert decided to organize a great exhibition and design a building for that very purpose

the problem was the building had to be relatively cheap it had to be constructed very quickly and it had to be able to be moved away at the end Prince Albert who's now commemorated by a Memorial located where the exhibition was held appointed a commission that refused all proposed projects as they were deemed too expensive or inappropriate at least until Joseph Paxton proposed the most ingenious solution [Applause] yet Paxton wasn't an architect but a gardener and in the gardens he worked on around the Chatsworth estate he designed green houses for growing tropical plants and of

course gardening is somewhere where you have to solve problems with the Limited materials you have around you in a relatively Quick Way a lot of Ingenuity is called for from gardeners and Joseph Paxton was probably the most ingenious Gardener that has ever lived to host a world fair Pax believed a giant Greenhouse would be the perfect solution all the parts required for its construction could be prepared in a factory the building's frame would be cast iron its roof would be glass it was the first building of this size to be open to the public and

totally pre-fabricated Personnel of about 2,000 men were able to construct the Crystal Palace in a period of eight months because of prefabrication because glass came in standard sized pieces and the components that contained and held the glass were also manufactured in factories and brought to the site ready made and ready for assembly even the drainage system was standardized so that the gutters were also part of the structure of the building and then The Columns of the buildings themselves the supporting columns were actually drain pipes to take away the water From the roof the whole thing

was very practical very engineered with its 6 million visitors the world fair was a huge success and it did not go [Music] unnoticed New York which already saw itself as London's major competitor refused to be outdone it immediately chose a location for its own exhibition on the site of what is now Bryant Park its Pavilion was also called Crystal Palace and the discoveries made there were very ahead of their time it was at this exhibition that Mr Otis demonstrated his latest invention he gave the order to cut the Rope holding the platform he was standing

on it stopped dead lifts could now be trusted it's danger free Otis yelled to the a struck [Applause] crowd it was the first leap in the race to higher levels which New York would soon be leading the second leap was taken 3 years later a bit further south in a neighborhood that Now no longer stands out due to the height of its buildings it was here that James Bogardus built his first prefabricated cast iron buildings Bogardus used the same method that was used for crystal palace in London but adapted it to a building of much

smaller proportions [Applause] his first building looked like an Italian Palace from the Renaissance period the difference being that its facade was not sculpted out of stone it was iron cast in a [Music] warehouse bardas designed three buildings like this one all in different styles and since his invention was so great it was immediately copied it led to the creation of a whole neighborhood filled with imitations of antique Italian or Parisian [Music] architecture these metallic Office Buildings which weren't yet skyscrapers were seven or eight stories high and they were extremely adaptable because they made it possible

to do what Kier referred to as free plans in other words a very flexible building that can be used For storage or offices nowadays you can use them as artists workshops they're the first buildings on this scale using cast iron frames that didn't need loadbearing walls it was four years later that one such building the hwart building with its revolutionary architecture was finally introduced to the lift today it has since been modernized but it was at this very very location in 1857 that Mr Otis installed his first vertical car a few people would get into

a car and be transported to an upper level they'd sit on a bench while the the Elevator Rose up slowly floor by floor those elevators are driven by steam engines or hydraulic lifts they're the technology is extremely primitive they're not electric motors making them move fast up and down electricity which would eventually make it possible to equip much higher buildings with lifts did not arrive until the end of the century for now Mr Otis's invention was being tested on a smaller scale and it was still just a simple Curiosity in 1870 Manhattan was still a

city made up of small buildings a fairly horizontal city a city in the middle [Music] making that year the summer was stifling and the stagnant water in the temps became a swamp with an unbearable stench it was a period called the Great stink the City's population had just reached Beyond 3 million inhabitants there was no sewage system pollution was a huge problem London was the first to tackle it members of the House of Commons who had meetings by the temps could no longer work some meeting rooms were inaccessible because the stench was so unbearable they

dowed curtains in chlorine and hung them in Parliament windows to try to alleviate The bad smells but also to disinfect them as it was still believed that bad smells carried disease the chancellor of the exj Disraeli was forced to leave a meeting room with a handkerchief to his nose practically gagging because he could no longer bear to stay in the room the Press were delighted and they wrote finally our leaders will do something they'll finally understand how our people have suffered for a dozen or so years next to this cess pit suak a few weeks

later Parliament voted in favor of building a waste water collection network but it dumped it into the temps only a few kilm Upstream of London and this is where in 1878 the Princess Alice crash occurred a cruise ship going up the river with 800 people aboard collided with a colier twice its size 600 people died many passengers fell in the water and it was so polluted that most of them were [Music] poisoned and that's not all 3 years earlier in 1873 the city had experienced a period of particularly deadly air pollution It was smog a

combination of fog mist and smoke from factories and coal fires in houses 800 people died in a matter of days witness accounts describe it as a multi- sensory experience of course like any fog it affected sounds and more so than other fogs it blocked people's Vision you couldn't see a meter in front of you it also affected people's sense of taste and smell it had a slightly acred taste to it a smell that some described as rotten egg or at least left an aftertaste in their mouth that's for sure and it was [Music] sticky it's

believed that the victorians often wore black because they had to protect their clothes one way or another because it was impossible to keep your clothes white or clean for long if you lived in London the fog caused Great chaos outside but it also made its way into people's houses in 1832 the wife of the Russian ambassador to London organized a huge ball and she recounted that in the room the ball was held in where people were dancing and spinning it was like They were up in the clouds simply cuz you could no longer see people

at the other end of the room because they were engulfed in Mist in the smoke that had worked its way [Music] in the fog also produced many interesting lighting effects and as such it intrigued and interested some of the top Impressionists including Monet particularly towards the end of the 19th century between 1899 and 1901 he made three trips to London specifically to paint these lighting effects there are also amusing letters he wrote to his wife in which he complains he complains that there isn't any fog especially on Sundays he complains when there's too much fog

because he can't see anything but that's what made Monet's job so exciting because that's what he wanted to paint the moment to paint an instant of a particular light a particular play on colors but but at the same time that kind of instant is sometimes so fleeting that it's hard to capture the London Fog was very quickly linked to criminality issues tourist guides recommended that people traveling to London take Great care because London was a city of crime particularly at nightfall when the fog began to rise it's particularly true of the poor the most dangerous

part of London which was the East End that's where after 1888 the famous Jack the Ripper murders took [Music] place this was in White Chapel not far from the temps where there was a natural Mist anyway but when the fog intensified it meant that the murders multiplied too December 1952 the worst episode of air pollution in the history of London a 4day smog which claimed over 10,000 lives Parliament finally decided to legislate cold fueled heating was banned London was finally taking measures against the smog a century after the first Deadly Ones had arisen [Music] the

first skyscraper in New York was neither a housing block nor an office block it was a bridge a bridge whose pylons reached over 100 m [Music] High For the First Time Brooklyn Bridge established a link between Manhattan and the rest of the world but for New York it meant much more than that before that New York had no Skyline it was a city without Grandeur nor height nor viewpoints but gradually as the bridge took shape New Yorkers found themselves in a new dimension [Music] if you lived in Brooklyn or if you lived in New York

City you watched day by day as this Stone structure was being built in the middle of the river and it got bigger and bigger and [Music] bigger and soon it was bigger than the tallest buildings in either City and then it kept going so it became this oversized structure it seemed to dwarf the cities that it was [Music] connecting bridge building was not a science at the time engineering was not the science that we think of it now it was very imprecise it was an obscure art there were people that said I know had to

build Bridges and everybody else would say okay well I see you built one and it stands so you maybe know what you're doing but nobody really understood how they worked New York was a city of Engineers and John robling was one of its first great Representatives born in Germany he graduated from engineering school in Berlin his passion was suspension bridges his idea was steel [Music] cables you take slender threads of Steel and you twist them into a rope that's what robling the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge does and that's his first contribution is not the

bridge itself but this notion of a cable of of Twisted steel that's able to support unimaginable amounts of waste and then you turn to the gothic past and you build these masonry towers without internal steel that incorporate the voids of these towers incorporate not not not the solid part but the absence of building is is carved into pointed Gothic archways that look literally like a cathedral and you are doing nothing more than building a conduit of tra it would have been his life's Masterpiece however John robling died of his injuries following an Accident shortly after

construction began it was his son Washington robling who took over the project but Brooklyn Bridge would eventually shatter his fate too in order to lay the pylons the robings decided to use a brand new invention which had been tested in France it was called a [ __ ] the idea was to sink a huge Stone Tower into the river then blow compressed air into a box which would provide a space where workers could then [Music] dig but there the pressure was much higher than at the surface and a fast Ascent could be fatal many workers

lost their lives to the project and even Washington robling himself emerged [Music] paralyzed his wife Emily took over the project she was the first person to cross the bridge on the day it [Music] opened New York had pushed back its borders the City's population was at 940,000 in 1870 by 1900 it was 3.4 [Music] million this is how it became the first American Megalopolis London the biggest city in the world was now within its grasp [Music] [Music] 400 years ago a village by the name of Amsterdam began its mission to conquer the world invented capitalism

as we know it and became the richest city on the European continent there was this sense among the Dutch that whoever you were you could have a piece of the action you could um be involved in this great economic activity of your Society 100 years later London its main rival took its place the greatest trading power in the world London endured terrific hardships but went on to become the world's largest city and invented the megalopolis of Tomorrow's World when the railways crashed through the poorer areas of London people were just dispersed they were swept to

side you might say meanwhile New Amsterdam had now become New York it was under British rule the city cut Itself free and entered the Fry at the outposts of technical Revolution New York became the vertical City and created a whole new horizon for itself you watched day by day as this Stone structure was being built in the middle of the river and it got bigger and bigger and bigger [Music] [Music] Skyline [Music] [Music] [Music] Skyscraper the city hall was where New York skyscraper Saga first began at the end of the 19th century three major newspapers

set up their headquarters on either side the competition between them was was fierce the winner would be the one that went the highest 1876 the New York Tribune with its 11 stories was the tallest building in the world upon its construction 1889 the Times building to the Right was immediately overtaken by the New York World building and its golden dome the former was 15 stories high the latter had 19 stories while its two neighbors were built out of brick it was the first building in New York to have a skeleton made entirely out of steel

[Music] 15 years later in the same square home to the City Hall the Woolworth Building went a step [Music] further 241 M 57 stories it was Manhattan's first emblematic skyscraper not only because it was the highest tower in the city and would remain so for 16 years but because its style and outline stood out from all those around it this time the building wasn't owned by a newspaper but by one of the richest men of that time Frank Woolworth was the owner of a chain of single price shops named after himself everything was sold for

5 10 or 15 cents and in America at the start of the 20th century that Was a winning formula according to Frank Woolworth the skyscraper's construction was paid for by the little pieces of change accumulated in his shops in so doing upon its construction the Woolworth Building acted as a fantastic publicity stunt for Frank Woolworth himself and his company but Woolworth and his architect Cass Gilbert had another stroke of Genius an homage to Gothic architecture to European Cathedrals how is this upstart nation how is this upstart city going to take its place on the international

stage well it's going to do it by looking to the European past looking to the Masters looking to the cathedrals looking to the great works of monumental architecture so when the WW worth building is completed uh in the early 20th century and it's the tallest building in the world it's a gotha cathedral [Music] when you walk into the Walworth building you're aware of walking into a kind of Cathedral like portal which is um quite Monumental and then into a Lobby that makes you feel like you're you're in a magnificent church but it's rather scaled down

it's it's scaled um to The Human Experience and the lobby interestingly enough has a cruciform shave to it suddenly you're in a church and you recognize that you're in a church standing in the Nave I mean you get it with the transcept it comes across okay then you look at some of the decorative features uh and you see things that look gargoyle [Music] like but when you look at it closely you realize that that's not a griffin or something that's a person okay who's the person it's Woolworth and what's he doing he's counting nickels and

dimes you look at another one of these gargoyle like things you see that it's the architect he's memorialized himself and what's he holding he's holding the [Music] building the period in which the Woolworth Building was built was met with with large waves of immigration into the United States and therefore the arrival of dozens of thousands of European Crafts People they were the ones who created the mosaics and decorations in the entrance hall here it is the Divinity of work being worshiped and it's the goddess Of trade welcoming a visitor as they enter the [Music] skyscraper

the wolw building was just like a church but it was a church of the new world it's not about the power of the king it's not about reaching up to the heavens for God it's not about contemplation it's about rentable space where people are doing really ordinary boring jobs and yet it's a Cathedral of Commerce I mean that is the quintessential New York idea a Cathedral of Commerce like it's an oxymoron and yet in the hands of a talented architect like Cass Gilbert the WW worth building becomes absolutely seared in your brain as a memorable

work of art by the time the WW worth building opened its doors on the eve of the first world war New York had found its new dimension skyscrapers began sprouting up across Manhattan giving birth to a New Concept the skyline the urban silhouette this landscape soon spread around the world it was a demonstration of the city's Newfound power and its Global [Music] Ambitions never in human history had an empire spread so widely London dominated vast territories across four different continents thus becoming the Empire on which the Sun never sleeps the West End the neighborhood of

aristocracy and the upper middle classes began expanding significantly but here the latest additions were not external these London ter houses had stayed more or less the same since their initial Construction in the 18th century but now their Interiors were beginning to [Music] change the growth of the Terrace House in London coincides with the growth of consumption of individual families buying things and if you go back into the sort Of 17th century people didn't have many things in their houses because there weren't many things to buy but by the Victorian periods the whole notion of shopping

and buying furniture decorative items for your house had exploded the range of things you could get were absolutely enormous this was the first age in which relatively average person could afford to live in a house that was decorated that contained apparent carvings and high quality finishes because these were able to be mass-produced colors were being invented through the invention of new dyes and so these places became much more colorful and we were moving from a monochrome Society for all bar the very richest through into something where you had very ornate very colorful Interiors in buildings

and these little terrist houses as a result are unique because from the outside they're very Anonymous like an English person no no giving away of their character but the moment you go inside they were richly and individually furnished Based on this extraordinary explosion of shopping and consumption that that gripped London in the 19th century such Prosperity attracted growing interest and the population of London tripled between 1850 and 1900 reaching 6 million inhabitants by the turn of the 20th century the richest city in the world was also rif with inequalities the poorest people were concentrated to

pockets of poverty no part of the city was spared it was a time of Revolution it was in London that KL Mars wrote DUS [Music] capital in 1886 the West End riots broke out for 3 Days the violence spread through to the Posh neighborhoods it was at this point that a man named Charles Booth began his great project to avoid future overcrowding he thought it would be worth better understanding the population of London you have to imagine a typical Victorian businessman an immensely successful ship owner came from Liverpool came from Britain's second largest port in

Liverpool he used statistical analysis of trade flows of inventories of of prices and it was through his ability with applied statistics that he made his fortune and built the booth shipping line into the very successful company that it was in the 1880s Booth moved to London this time he'd use his mathematical skills to study the quality of life of the city's inhabitants it was a huge undertaking which he funded with his personal Fortune his teams of investigators went out with policemen the police were constantly patrolling the Streets of London there was no Street which they

didn't Patrol and there would be an investigator taking notes house by house of the condition of the property and the condition of the residents and then in the back room these data were tabulated and mapped mapped cartographically in these celebrated images of London colored in seven different grades of color to give you the social geography of wealth and poverty in London Booth's study published in 1902 is like a snapshot of a huge Metropolis in turmoil yellow for the wealthy red for Those living comfortably orange for mixed neighborhoods Light Blue for neighborhoods whose inhabitants or be

it poor had regular income dark blue for areas where people were in chronic want and black for those Charles boo deemed to be vicious and semi-criminal yes it's true there was a a broad gradient between the east of London London east of the Tower and the West End of London but as soon as you look at the maps you understand that the social geography is much much more complex there were concentrations of deep poverty very very close to the beautifully manicured Lawns of the Bedford estate [Music] and equally in the East End of London there

were respectable middle class families living in the middle of what was caricatured as as the jungle of the East End in his book Charles boo invented the concept of a poverty threshold below which he wrote a third of londoners were living [Music] 10% of the population of London he added had no chance of escaping this [Music] [Music] fate Central Park had been finished but around it almost nothing else had yet been built no houses and certainly no building buildings this neighborhood now one of the most luxurious in Manhattan was little more than abandoned [Music] Lots

so this is where the American economy's new millionaires were able to build their little castles which were called the [Music] mansions for about 30 years this part of the city became a playground for all kinds of eccentricities there were no more than a dozen or so of these incredibly large Mansions but certainly there were probably 50 to 75 very substantial large houses mainly on Fifth Avenue uh as well as on Park Avenue uh and then several hundred more smaller still substantial [Music] houses and so new yorker's nicknamed fifth th Avenue millionaires Row the new residents

were men from Industries such as Railways steel coal oil or Finance John Rockefeller who would soon be the richest man in the World he brought a pre-built house located a ston throw from Central Park the interior evoked all styles all eras and all continents [Music] Andrew carnegi the prince of Steel he built his own mansion on a plot spreading half a Hector which was a considerable plot size for Manhattan his house is one of the only ones to have survived alongside that of his business partner the co Baron Henry play frick it was tremendously expensive

Frick spent the equivalent of about $2.8 million to buy all of the lots and this is a time when there's not a whole lot of other building on upper Fifth Avenue yet and then he spent even more the equivalent of about $3 million to construct this monstrously large Palace uh to live in and then to display his collection of art it survived precisely because he designed the house to all also serve as a museum after his death and he made sure to leave enough money along with his collection to ensure its [Music] survival Henry Frick's

Mansion is an exception because as soon as the first world war was over these little palaces belonging to America's wealthiest individuals started to disappear one after the other in their place they built much taller buildings which were incredibly luxurious but much more profitable and glamorous the first to be completed was the famous Dakota these were palaces in the sky um you'd have a building of 12 or 15 stories that might only have 8 or 10 families living in it the apartments were usually arranged on multiple stories what in New York uh is called a duplex

format um so you would have uh an interior staircase within the apartment that sort of replicated the feel of living in a multi-story house in some cases you might even get a three-story [Music] apartment a developer would offer a huge sum of money to the owners of a mansion which they'd eventually sell thus giving way to one of these huge buildings but most of the time the owners made extra demands and some demands bent all the rules there was a woman named Marjorie Hutton she was the ays from a a breakfast seral company from The

Midwest and she was married to an investment banker uh they had built a mansion for themselves on Fifth Avenue and uh one day a developer came along and said we'd like to buy your house and to put up a new building and she agreed on one condition and the condition was that she be given a custombuilt apartment at the top of the new building and she was given an apartment that didn't precisely replicate the architecture of her house but uh to a certain degree did she had custom Furnishings rugs um a woodwork other things uh

that were replicated in the new apartment in addition she was given her own separate port cocher with her own private Corridor that connected to her own private elevator that took her straight up to the top of the building where she enjoyed three entire floors to herself in 30,000 square feet the largest apartment uh to my knowledge that has ever been built uh in New York City perhaps anywhere marjerie Hutton's apartment had 54 rooms and no less than 17 bathrooms a record that's never been beaten in New York even though several years later another apartment outdid

it Through sheer extravagance built in the new very chic upper Westside neighborhood it was owned by a man named William Randolph Hurst he owned the leading Media Group in the United States and he was a very original character to say the least he had a three-story uh triple height living room that was decorated like a Gothic uh Church uh with imported elements from Europe and then each room uh was decorated according to a different theme again uh using imported architectural elements so a French bedroom and uh you know an Italian study this that and the

[Music] other at that time the American economy appeared to have no bounds and the first world war had accelerated the United States Rising power this neighborhood was the fruit of years of recklessness and excess which was abruptly put to an end by the Wall Street crash in 1929 leworth 50 OD kilm to the north of the British Capital while New York was revolutionizing architecture London was inventing the urban structure of the future leworth is now a cute little suburb of around 35,000 inhabitants but it Was the result of a radical project a project dreamt up

by a man who saw the solution to the city's complex problems in nature his name was ebener [Music] Howard he saw the problem of poverty as a byproduct of the city and of density he wasn't interested in sort of social explanations or economic explanations it was the city itself that created uh social struggle and and discontent and unhappiness and nature the countryside a better balance between the Peace of the countryside the Tranquility of Nature and The Economic Opportunity of the town could be achieved if you rebuilt the town in nature this was his big idea

the Garden City this developed into what we call the Arts and Crafts movement the Arts and Crafts movement looked to vernacular cottages of the English [Music] Countryside the half timbered frontages the long roofs with their Eaves the Gable ends the open plan Interiors with the inel Nook Fireplaces wonderful wonderful arts and crafts Echoes of medieval building style this represented a return from the world of industrial production to the world of handycraft to the imagined equilibrium or Utopia of a medieval society in which work would be local people would make with their own hands the Garden

City was built on former farming land which by its very nature was worth practically nothing but was enhanced by the new settlers at the center they established administrative buildings public services and businesses around these they built the residential areas then the industrial areas then the farming belt everything was accessible via a star shaped network of roads but Howard saw Beyond this and believed that the benefits derived from each Garden City would be invested in creating new small towns dotted around London that worked on the same basis The Garden City would have therefore offered a counter

model to the [Music] megalopolis ultimately this approach only worked once but Howard's invention immediately CAU people's imagination and acted as a basis to create from scratch a city so this was workers housing of a very very different sort with a garden at the front a garden at the back a street Verge planted with cherry trees a lot workers Gardens for growing their own food set in a small town surrounded by an agricultural belt producing fresh food for the town owned by the municipality owned by the people themselves at the time most residents in leworth worked

within the Garden City many of them were employed at the spirella factory the biggest one in leworth which was set up inside a very innovatively designed Building here most of the workers were women they manufactured what was very sexy underwear for the early 20th century spirella saw itself as a model business and its employees received far superior perks to the average British worker on the top floor of the factory they had their very own space there they'd engage in all sorts of activities gymnastics Gatherings of all kinds concerts and dancing obviously like all colonies they

had to attract colonists and the colonists that they attracted tend ended to be progressives they tended to be people who like ebener Howard believed in social experiment so it's in leworth Garden City that we see the first extensive experiments in wearing sandals in dress reform in [Music] vegetarianism in uh sleeping out of doors at night people had bedrooms with overhead gantries in which their bed could be swung out so they could breathe the fresh oxygen straight away the leworth phenomenon a new City surrounded by Nature started gaining interest Beyond England's borders Paris Brussels Berlin and

even Tokyo each in turn tried to develop their own garden [Music] cities London the first Metropolis in history had just invented its antidote in the decades that followed ebener Howard would help transform cities around the [Music] [Music] world by the early 1910s there really was a new scale for the skyscraper not just in terms of height but also in um the lot coverage and the girth and the blockiness of buildings that contained an enormous amount of floor space and the best example of that is the Equitable building 164 M 44 stories nowadays the Equitable building

is much like dozens of other office buildings in Manhattan however New York partially owes the way it looked today to this very [Music] [Music] building 48 lifts for 50,000 employees that now in Manhattan is quite ordinary but when it opened in 195 15 it was rather [Music] revolutionary the equitable's neighboring buildings were considerably smaller And in the narrow roads in South Manhattan its arrival was not well received depending on the time of the day almost uh four block area of lower rise and older buildings had been cast into the shadow of this uh Titanic structure

stealing their light stealing the value of the the sunlight that was used to illuminate the space lights at that time the bulbs of Lights burned very hot and they they didn't really give off very much light so light was a a heat generator uh Windows had to open in order to ventilate the space so buildings were much more dependent on natural sunlight and the wind in order to create a habitable workspace Manhattan therefore had to find a way of building higher without upsetting neighboring buildings and it was George bedet Ford who found the solution his

idea was City Planning regulations which were adopted in 1916 and these were his instructions first of all vertically you could build the equivalent of the width of the Street or Avenue bordering the building then you draw a straight line From the middle of the road that way you get a base structure which you can build on but with setbacks depending on the neighborhood residential or commercial the main facade would sit at various Heights and one last feature was that on 25% of the plot you could build as high as you wanted [Music] this was the

recipe behind the Empire State Building and hundreds of other skyscrapers in Manhattan and although this is purely a sort of technical formula that's about preserving light and air one of the interesting things is very quickly it helps give shape to a whole new style of architecture in the city a kind of zigurat style of architecture [Music] those kinds of recessive mountain or cliff-like projections give this very distinctive New York look the zigzag that really kind of has a a Jazz Age quality because the way that light and Shadow begin to develop in those uh right

angled spaces get a kind of frenetic energy that you see when you see it in black and white photography and when you see it in shade and Shadow in the city many of Manhattan's most famous buildings were the result of the 1916 Regulation they all seem to be part of the same family and yet they're all different 120 Wall Street with its stairlike shape the New York telephone building and its unorganized silhouette the American Radiator building and its stepback [Music] roof or even the Chrysler Building and its rocket Shake [Music] roof these were all built

within the space of around 15 years meanwhile America was undergoing a period of huge economic growth in the wake of the first world war dozens of buildings were now transforming Manhattan's Urban Skyline thus making it instantly distinguishable from others in the 1920s the rise of the stock market and the rise of the skyscraper were companions in fact you might think of the graph of the rising stock market much like the rising uh profile of of New York's Skyline with Peaks um and then valleys during uh times of recession because skyscrapers are always connected to markets

with the exception of the Woolworth Building The number and height of skyscrapers in New York is well married to the growth of Wall Street but with a slight delay while the stock market was crashing in Autumn 1929 the krysler building was already under construction and work was just about to begin on the Empire State Building it was the apotheosis of this era of great skyscrapers 85 Stories the tallest the big and the [Music] fastest the technology of its construction was really not exceptional the steel skeleton had been used now for almost 20 years uh it

has a kind of Kit of parts of Steel beams and uh columns that are held together by rivets that workers and teams of five constructed uh with the enormous amount of uh of effort and heroism when you see the photographs of the steel workers and indeed all of the workers on on the site but what was really extraordinary about the Empire State Building was um first its scale and then its speed of construction and the Really The Genius of the Empire State Building was the construction management [Music] skyscrapers time is money uh you borrow money

in order to construct the Building so the shortest amount of time you have that money borrowed and the quicker that you turn it into rentable space the more profitable the building will be and the Empire State building was built much faster than any skyscraper of its time one story per day on average through the summer of 1930 the Empire States Construction took little more than a year but when it opened only a quarter of its offices had [Music] tenants the king of buildings had arrived at the wrong time it would only become profitable 20 years

later long after the second World War [Music] the Blitz the Intensive bombing of London by the German air force from September the 7th 1940 every night was a living hell London was an unmissable Target for the luffa it was a Target 12 M across it is still you must remember the largest city in the world it was bigger than Kolkata at the Time it was a vast Target since 1900 London had doubled in size with its 8 million inhabitants it was a lowdensity megalopolis that was its great strength in this horrific ordeal the intense period

of the blitz lasted for a relatively short time between September 1940 and may 1941 in that period there was bombing every night 160 bombers on average coming over the worst night there was 580 tons of high explosives dropped a quarter of a million people were made homeless their homes just disappeared the psychological effect was enormous the sirens sounded everywhere the entire population went down into the [Music] shelters but in fact in this low density city of 8 million people the impact of bombing was fairly localized so we can see areas of very very dense bomb

damage side by side with large areas of London where everyday life carried on as normal in the first first few weeks London's docks and its industrial districts as well as the city its Financial core were targeted as a Priority but over time the megalopolis was affected as a whole the blitz killed 30,000 people it changed the face of Britain's Capital forever what is I think so important about the history of London is has been its ability to renew itself [Music] physically and when we look at the blitz we are simply looking at a repre of

what happened when the railways [Music] came what happened when the great fire came it was an opportunity to start again to revitalize the commercial economic Financial infrastructure of the city at the end of the war the city was but a shadow of its former self it had to write itself a new story it's well known what happened next the city caught a second wind when Margaret Thatcher deregulated the financial markets this decision greatly boosted not only activity but also the planning of the old city of London the original core around which the English Capital had

begun Expanding in the 17th [Music] century the medieval city which had become an increasingly specialized business Hub is where the metamorphosis was accomplished I became the city planning officer in 1985 as the government was announcing the deregulation of financial services this meant that the city of London was going to be opened up to competition and that Banks from all over the world were going to be able to trade in London now we needed to incorporate computer operated trading on large dealing floors in each of the banks buildings that required a very different type of building

and therefore a decision was taken that the city would have to go tall would have to build Skys scrapers the city needed to go vertically because it could no longer build on any other [Music] way the influx of financial markets was now growing beyond the city's limits so London's old docks began changing in [Music] appearance the disused docks were converted into a business hub [Music] they were the pride of London in the 19th century abandoned after the second world War they' now found a new [Music] use but the very concept of skyscrapers actually reached beyond

the city of London's borders for the first time too The Shard 241 M High contains offices but also Luxury Apartments it's a new Urban Trend one that started in New York where it's currently changing the [Music] city of course since the 1930s and its symbolic buildings hundreds of glass buildings have been built in Manhattan but none of them have led us to forget the great starts of its Urban Skyline they will always remain iconic New York buildings objects that form an integral part of its identity in the future however there may be serious challenges a

whole new kind of skyscraper they're called the super TS [Music] 425 M 88 stories high this one is currently the tallest skyscraper in New York and it's a luxury residential [Music] Tower the super ts are curious yet Exquisite objects whose origin dates back over a century ago to when Cornelius Vanderbilt the American Railway King decided to build the grand Central Terminal the Terminus for his railway lines Building Services keto please report to a taste in New York first Grand Central is above all a great architectural feat but here the real novelty isn't the main Concourse

it's the underground platforms and their use which one of the original Engineers came up with [Music] William WI [Music] [Music] all the big cities in the world now use this method however in New York The concept of air rights developed into something [Music] else take the famous St Patrick Cathedral on Fifth Avenue for example since it had no intention of giving way to a skyscraper it sold a property developer its air rights in other words the space above it which it owned in exchange for said airspace it re received a small fortune the same principle

applies to all buildings that fall beneath the authorized limit in their District they can decide not to build on the extra space they're entitled to build in and sell it to a promoter who can build above the authorized limit elsewhere when you sell the air rides you're selling that unbuilt space to a new developer who then is able to go to the city and said I bought 20 stories and literally the developer then gets to add that volume to the uh volume that he is already able to build so if he's able to build a

30 or 40 story building and he buys 20 uh stories from surrounding properties he's now able to legally build 60 stories this concept has now been applied to much bigger Skyscrapers there are customers Keen for this new type of Tower and technology has made huge progress engineering today enables you to build incredibly tall on a very small plot of land so you can buy a plot of land that's 75 ft by 100 ft and build a tremendously tall building there's really no limit you could go half a mile high the first Super tall tower was

designed by Christian Dean Park a French architect his apartments are the most expensive ever to be sold in Manhattan views have value and this is the trophy of the New York apartment to walk out of the elevator into a domain that belongs to you and you alone to see this commanding view of the Horizon stretching in all Dimensions there is no um greater expression of power and possession than a view of Central Park than exclusive singular place even though the singularity of it is repeated 80 times in the sky um until you get to the

penthouse with all the floors underneath 157 was reported at just over $100 Million there are others that have sold for $87 million $90 million I mean almost inconceivable amounts these new buildings will remain a simple curiosity unless they're multiplied in years to come revolutionizing New York's Urban Skyline a once fairly uniform landscape is giving way to an irregular and chaotic Horizon as an expression of the new Financial World Behind skyscrapers in Manhattan some of that market demand comes from people who have generated enormous Fortunes in countries that have uncertain Futures so you have people with

a lot of money from Russia and the Middle East in Asian economies where there are some very very wealthy people so they want to invest in New York City real estate and they're essentially just using those buildings as a a place to park their money in New York an era is coming to an end soon the kings of Manhattan will no longer be Office Buildings but residential skyscrapers whose apartments are often second [Music] homes fortunes from around the world will dominate the [Music] skyline it's a strange reverse Situation for this city whose main aim has

has always been to conquer the world [Music]