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Michael Portillo travels through the Britain of his youth from London’s Docklands and East End to the ‘city within a city’, the Barbican.

At Tilbury, he traces the arrival in 1948 of the Empire Windrush, bringing over a thousand passengers from the Caribbean to work in Britain. Taking the Docklands Light Railway to the Royal Docks, he visit one of the capital’s oldest industrial sites: Tate and Lyle’s huge sugar refinery.

In Limehouse, Michael recalls the Labour Party’s landslide victory at the post-war general election of 1945 and hears what drove prime minister Clement Attlee to strive for social change.

Michael heads next to what was one of the largest bomb sites in London. The 40-acre mound of rubble was transformed during the 1960s and 1970s into the Barbican, a huge residential estate with schools, shops and an arts centre.