Catch up TV

Series 12: 10. Newmarket to Walsingham

Michael Portillo is in Suffolk on the last leg of his 1930s Bradshaw’s inspired tour of East Anglia. He begins at the home of British horseracing, Newmarket, where he learns of the interwar success of a jockey turned trainer and helps to care for a famous ex-racehorse.\n\nAt Ickworth House near Bury St Edmonds, Michael gets a taste of life below stairs during the 1930s and is put to work preparing a 'plum betty'. With a taste for sweetness, Michael takes the train to Downham Market to explore how sugar began to be refined from sugar beet at Wissington in 1925.\n\nBack on the Fen line, Michael is bound for King’s Lynn and Wells-next-the-Sea, where he boards the exceptionally narrow-gauge Wells and Walsingham light railway. Arriving in Walsingham, Michael discover that until Henry VIII’s Reformation, this small village was one of the great Roman Catholic shrines. During the 1920s and 30s, there was a revival in pilgrimage to Walsingham, and a new Anglican shrine to the Virgin Mary was built.

Source: BBC 2