Six Minutes on...

youtu.be/e4SBIHGdluc On the sixth of January 2009, the last 199 Woolworths shops in Britain opened their doors for the final time. Woolworths had taken ninety-nine years to build. It took six weeks to disappear.

youtu.be/9hubD24RlDg?... You could once walk from Norfolk to the Netherlands

youtu.be/Rb3nQ0UZnyc Christmas 1839, the ground above the sea at Bindon, East Devon split open, and tens of millions of tonnes of rock slid towards the sea. This coast has been falling into the sea for thousands of years. Every fall destroys a little more of it, and every fall reveals something new.

youtu.be/gsnxLB9s9bs An iron post in a birch wood near Peterborough was set level with the ground in the 1850s. Today it stands about four metres clear of it. The post didn't rise. The ground fell.

youtu.be/QFoQbTOpPxU On 15 October 1940, a delayed-action bomb exploded inside Broadcasting House during the Nine O'Clock News. Listeners heard a muffled thud. The newsreader kept on reading.

youtu.be/QyJCo0mhH_o On a hill above St Austell, someone once sprayed four words on the wall of a house: Kenwyn. Do not demolish. It was the last house in Greensplat, and it came down anyway. For about 250 years, mid-Cornwall has been dug for one soft, white mineral.

Listen to a supermarket. Every beep is a barcode being read, more than ten billion times a day. This is the story of the barcode, from four lines drawn in the sand on Miami Beach to the QR code that may be about to replace it. youtu.be/QagSurNC0VE?...

Ask who invented the computer and you'll get a dozen answers. Most of them are true. It depends on what you mean by "first". youtu.be/L3AuR8OcbMo?...

Ten thousand years ago you could walk from Norfolk to the Netherlands. This is the story of Doggerland, the lost country under the North Sea, and how it slowly drowned. youtu.be/X95SyK_86R4?...

Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire…" For almost a hundred years the Shipping Forecast has been read the same way, in the same order, late at night on BBC Radio 4. It began with a shipwreck. youtu.be/87ddMKXnMPo?...

Under London runs a river you'll never see. This is the story of London's sewers, from Roman drains and the Great Stink of 1858 to Joseph Bazalgette's Victorian tunnels and the new £4.7bn Thames Tideway super sewer. youtu.be/3yUpl0O-M-I?...