The Flatlands - Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ
ONE episode summary
David Dimbleby heads east this week to the area of England
with the biggest skies of all.
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This part of Britain spawned more landscape painters per square
mile than almost anywhere else in Britain. A Picture of Britain celebrates
the British landscape which has inspired artists for the past three
hundred years.
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This week, David travels from Constable and Gainsborough country
in Suffolk to the Norfolk Broads, the Fens and the East coast.
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David ventures from the River Stour in Suffolk, past the idyllic millstreams
where Constable worked alongside his father as a boy,
and on to Sudbury, the birthplace of Thomas Gainsborough.
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From The Haywain to Mr and Mrs Andrews, this region has inspired some
of the most reassuring and romantic images of the British landscape.
Newmarket with its flat, fast turf and the world's champion racehorses is the
next stop for David.
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Here he sees the 2,000 racehorses training in the early morning mists;
has a flutter on the races; and learns more about the work of Stubbs,
the most famous painter of horses ever.
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He sails on to the Norfolk Broads: home of barges and windmills, where
it's easier to travel by boat than by car. He discovers the work of
the home-grown artists, John Crome and John
Sell Cotman, who couldn't easily travel to London, so found
inspiration in this cut-off region.
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Then on to the Fens - a land of fertile fields and canals and dykes
with The Isle of Ely rising majestically from the heart of it all. Here
David gets a fish eye view of the watery landscape.
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He swims in the River Cam, swum before him by the poets Rupert
Brooke and Lord Byron, and catches eels in
the River Ouse with the last known eel catcher in the region.
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Finally David will reach one of the most isolated and haunting places
on these islands - a corner of England unlike any other: the East coast.
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Here the remorseless sea, which eats away at the vulnerable coast,
has provided inspiration for composers like Benjamin Britten
and artists throughout the centuries - from the contemporary
artist Maggi Hambling right back to the greatest sea
painter of all time, JMW Turner.
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