4×60’ for Channel 4

Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour

This landmark series will see the ever popular Kevin McCloud following in the footsteps of the most notorious aristocrats, artists and architects of ‘the Grand Tour’. Clambering amongst the greatest buildings, ruins and cities in Europe (Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens and Istanbul), he will uncover the dark underbelly of the Tour in the shady alleys and drinking dens along its route, and explore the Tour’s lasting legacy.

Each programme will see Kevin McCloud in a different part of Europe, following the typical journeys of successive waves of Grand Tourists. Starting with the earliest 17th century travellers  in Northern Italy (Prog 1), charting the high point of the Tour in the 18th century in Rome and Naples (where 30,000 British aristocrats thronged the Continent – Prog 2), then working his way through Sicily, Ancient Greece and Turkey (Prog 3) and ending with the last Grand Tourists of the early 19th century in the Alps (before the railway made tourism available to the masses), Kevin will chart how each age pursued both the sacred and the profane in their travels abroad.

Climbing up buildings in harnesses and catapults, snaking through mountain passes and volcanoes on horseback and by sedan chair, recreating the meals they took en route, and by taking along his own sketchbook with which to draw the sites in the manner of the age, Kevin will travel as they travelled and revel in the sights, sounds, tastes and smells that changed the way Britain lived.

Executive Producer
Dan Adamson

(Photograph of Kevin McCloud courtesy of Glenn Dearing)