Denham to Swindon

Beginning at London Marylebone, the last great Victorian railway terminus to be built in the capital, Michael Portillo embarks on a postwar exploration of Britain’s southern counties.

He travels to Denham in Buckinghamshire, where engineers are constructing a striking new viaduct, High Wycombe, a historic centre of furniture-making thanks to its abundant of beechwood forest, and Oxford, where he discovers the postwar origins of the charity shop.

In the Wiltshire countryside, Michael meets the head of the Soil Association and some of her saddleback piglets to hear how the organic movement was founded after the Second World War in reaction to the intensification of farming.