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Hello, in 1820s a barely educated engineer from Northeastern England needed to find a way to transport coal from the pithead to the river time. Horses weren't fast enough. In Scotland, 60 years earlier, James Water developed a modern steam engine.

The engineer's name was George Stevenson and he found a way to use what's engine to move the coal. And so, the railways were born.

Last week we traced the story of the growth of cities from their origins to their zenith at the start of the first millennium AD, when Rome's population reached 1 million.

And we followed the cities long fall and resurgence to the point at its height at the dawn of the 19th century when London's population finally matched that of ancient Rome.

In this final part of this two-part edition of In Our Time, looking at the development of cities, we're going to explore how Stevenson's invention transforms cities almost beyond recognition and take the story up to the present.

We meet to discuss the development of a modern city, a Ricky Badet, professor of urban studies at the London School of Economics, Tristan Hunt, the lecturer in history at Queen Mary College at the University of London, and Peter Hall, professor of planning and regeneration at the Bartlett School of Planning University College London.

Peter Hall, the railways were developed first through the northeast of England. How did that development occur and what consequences does it have?

The first job was to shift goods, particularly coal. And these were in necessarily short railways, culminating in the first steam-driven railway, the Stockton and Darlington in 1825.

Later on, though, the principles extended to moving other kinds of goods, particularly in Lancashire, the cotton industry was booming, and they needed to bring the raw cotton in from Liverpool to Manchester and their surrounding towns, and then shift the raw cotton out to the rest of the world, because Lancashire was a workshop at the world.

Hence, you've got the second railway, which is the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, but that, by a brilliant notion, almost as an afterthought, became also the world's first passenger railway.

We left the story last week at, in 1800, with London reaching a million, but not much different transport systems, not a great deal of difference from Rome, almost 2000 years before, 1800 years before.

What was the railway going to do?

The funny thing was that, brilliant as they were in connecting cities, these great engineers, and the capitalists who promoted the railways, didn't see the prospect for suburban commuter traffic.

The first station on Stephenson's line was at Harrow, about 11 miles out. The first station on Brunelles Line was at Ealing 6 miles out, and even then they didn't see the prospects.

They didn't promote commuter traffic. The person who really began to do this was a city of London solicitor, called Charles Pearson, who promoted the underground railway, and that's the line that was open in 1863, from Farrington to the city of London to Paddington, and connecting actually out on Brunelles railway, and that deliberately promoted suburban traffic from the start.

Just from hand, the railways are coming into the cities then, and we have these amazing statistics about, well you can tell us better, how many great stations came into London in such a short time in mere 30 years. Can you give us the many effects that that had?

Yes, the effect on the ecology of London is absolutely transformative, because the mid-victorian period is an era of laissez-faire, an era of competing private rail companies, all of them trying to put their own railway stations into London.

So we're going to have Euston and Kings Cross and St. Pancras and Malibone and Finchurch and Charing Cross, going on and on and on, each of them connected with private companies.

But what's so interesting is the cultural effect of the railway, because each of these railway stations is then also a cultural statement, many of them from provincial cities.

This is Euston, apart from a celebration of the power of the north. It's going to have a huge classical piece of architecture, the great Euston arch entrance to it.

What is St. Pancras, other than a celebration of the might of the Midlands? These are the cities, Manchester, Birmingham, who are driving the industrial revolution, and they want to sort of have their say in London.

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