One Foot in the Past

This week, presenter Kirsty Wark investigates why churches are a law unto themselves when it comes to conservation. And Loyd Grossman weighs up the evidence in the great British pebbledash debate.

Magazine series in which Kirsty Wark is your guide to the people and issues that shape Britain's heritage. This week Lucinda Lambton unveils her very personal selection of heritage heroes, starting with Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the man who masterminded the London sewage system.

This week: the threat to what has been described as the greatest power station ever built; meet the Gibsons, who discovered to their cost that their Welsh dream home was sitting on a site of major historical significance; and singer Marianne Faithfull retraces a very personal journey along the Ridgeway.

This week: Number 7 Blythe Grove - the suburban semi that time forgot, now rescued by the National Trust; how history has buried Britain's unsavoury role in the slave trade; and the fashions and fascinations of the nation's ruins.

This week: is London's crumbling Albert Memorial doomed to stay under wraps, without the funds to restore it? Denis Healey returns to a childhood haunt - Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire. And Loyd Grossman explores the pleasures and pitfalls of living with a listed building.

This week: restoration or innovation? Controversial plans for the future of St George's Hall, Windsor Castle; Lucinda Lambton salutes another heritage hero; and a visit to Northern Ireland's latest multi-media visitors' centre at Navan, the ancient mound in Armagh. With Kirsty Wark.

This week's programme includes an exclusive visit by Lucinda Lambton to the gothic wonders of Sir George Gilbert Scott's Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station in London. It is currently receiving a million face-lift and may possibly open as a hotel again if St Pancras becomes the terminus for the channel tunnel. With Kirsty Wark.

In the last programmes of the series a report on Scotland's controversial programme of cleaning historic buildings, and how a castle can pay its way.