Episode 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 18th 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.