Titanic: The Mission

Channel 4, with the expertise of engineers Dave Wilkes, Brendan Walker, Yewande Akinola and Luke Perry, is to rebuild parts of the Titanic. Titanic: The Mission is a new five-part which provides a history of British industry at its peak and gives an insight into the age by delving into the lives of the working class men and women whose manual labour created perhaps the most famous ship in history.

When the RMS Titanic embarked on her maiden voyage in April 1912, she was the largest, heaviest, most expensive and most luxurious man-made moving object on the planet, and it was built by hand by the most skilled labour force in the world.  She represented the pinnacle of the industrial Edwardian age and her onboard machinery, engineering and craftsmanship signalled the high water mark of British manufacturing.

Titanic: The Mission sets out to rediscover the noisy, clunking, tactile joy of British manufacturing operating at full flow when, just four generations ago, our forefathers made epic and beautiful machines with their bare hands.

To bring this history to life, a team of modern day engineers, working from Titanic's original plans and using original methods and material, attempts to rebuild iconic structures from ‘The Ship Magnificent.' From a 30ft section of the steel bow to components of the Gentleman's First Class Smoking Lounge and a third class cabin, to casting Titanic's 16 ton bow anchor these builds will form the backbone of each episode.

This is not a retelling of the story of Titanic, but the story of the people who created it, and to use this as a means to view the highpoint of Edwardian craft and industry, when Britain made 70% of the ships afloat in the world. In doing so, the series explores the everyday lives, conditions and passions of the men and women whose blood and tears went into the building this greatest maritime legend of the twentieth century.