Hidden Britain by Drone Series 1

In this episode the drones fly through a forest with a deadly secret, across Britain’s newest piece of land and into the hidden stately pile of an unconventional aristocrat.

The flight starts in Essex, where just 27 miles from Buckingham Palace sits a secret site that just a few years ago, didn’t even exist. Raised from 28 million cubic metres of mud from the River Thames this new area of England is home to the world’s most advanced container port. 3.5 million shipping containers a year pass through this port, moved by robotic cranes and carrying everything from iPads to Spiralisers.

Then they go off to Salisbury Plain and a MoD base where the public are forbidden. At its heart is a village not on any maps, where nobody has ever lived and where everything from the gravestones to the petrol station are fake. The drones dive in as a group of tanks storm the dummy village on a high intensity training exercise.

In Northamptonshire, our flying cameras are given access to a grand stately home usually closed to visitors. They’ll meet the Russian-born billionaire who bought this crumbling pile and spent £25 million returning it to its 18^th Century glory.

Also in this episode, we’ll discover a bunker in the heart of suburban London where Winston Churchill might have had to end his days had the war taken a different turn; a metal warehouse where an army of workers are making big money from our rubbish and a secret underground railway where parcels were the only passengers. We’ll find an abandoned air base which used to house nuclear weapons, discover the sleight of hand that transformed the south coast’s most exclusive postcode and fly to the Outer Hebrides to see a cluster of empty houses which have been frozen in time.

In this episodes the drones fly through a village erased from the maps, a supermarket without any customers and a platform in the ocean that claims to be an independent nation.

The flight starts in Scotland, where just a few miles from the Forth Bridge, the largest aircraft carriers ever built for the Royal Navy are under construction. Security in the dockyard is tight, but with each carrier weighing 65,000 tonnes and the flight deck measuring 4.2 acres, it’s hard to keep them under wraps!

Then the drones head to Nottinghamshire, to an unmarked building and a very different kind of military operation. Inside it looks like a supermarket, but there are no tills, no queues and you’re not allowed in. It’s not on any official list of stores and the only shoppers you’ll find here are professionals, working through the night to prepare your online shopping order.

From here they fly to the Kent coast where a WWII shipwreck still looms over the town of Sheerness. For when this ship sank, it was packed full of high explosives, and they’re still there. Our drones allow us to film closer to the wreck than ever before.  On the coast nearby we’ll meet local residents who are worried that nothing has being done to clear this time bomb in the Thames.

Also in this episode, the drones fly into an exclusive gated community in East London to discover its dark past.  They enter James Dyson’s top-secret research laboratory and a Wiltshire village whose residents were evacuated during the Second World War and never allowed to return. Finally we’ll fly seven miles out to sea to discover a platform in the ocean that has been fighting for independence since the Sixties. Sealand has its own royal family, stamps and currency. You’ll need a passport to visit and the residents aren’t afraid to defend themselves from would-be invaders.