Dan Cruickshank: At Home with the British

Episode 2

The Terrace

Dan Cruickshank explores our love affair with the terrace - the home that more Britons live in than any other. We love it because it has proved brilliantly adaptable, encompassing the Victorian parlour and modern open-plan living with equal ease. Dan is in Toxteth, Liverpool 8. Famous for the riots that ripped it apart in the 1980s, Toxteth has a far richer and more varied history than that one tragic episode. Liverpool was the ultimate Victorian boom town, turned by trade and industry from provincial powerhouse into the second city of empire. 100,000 terraced houses were built to accommodate its vast workforce, with huge numbers in Toxteth. From a high of Victorian industry and immigration to a low of postwar decline, Toxteth's terraces have seen it all - even the 2015 Turner Prize, awarded for their remarkable 21st-century regeneration.

Episode 3

The Flat

If modern Britain lives in a terrace house and loves a cottage, it cannot make its mind up about the high-rise flat. Is the skyscraper a blot on the landscape, or the answer to the national housing crisis? For Dan Cruickshank, the idea of living high above the city streets really is the future once again. 21st-century London is the site of an extraordinary building boom. Hundreds of residential high-rise towers are being built at record speed, many hugely controversial, as private developers cotton on to what social housing idealists realised 60 years ago.