A real-life drama played out on Dartmoor during the course of last year. Rita Webber, a widow, finds herself obliged to put her family farmhouse up for auction. In the following weeks she discovers things about her home which she had never suspected and which bring about a most unexpected outcome to the sale.

For 250 years the streets of Spitalfields, next door to the City of London, have provided a haven for a succession of refugee and immigrant communities. Intense overcrowding gave the district a reputation as one of the worst slums in the East End, and its splendid Georgian houses succumbed to decay. The latest wave of incomers are artists, historians, architects -- enthusiasts bent on transforming the derelict houses into highly desirable residences.

The Calder Valley in West Yorkshire is scattered with 19th-century textile mills -- vast, magnificent, and mostly redundant. The greatest leap that's ever been taken by mankind, the Industrial Revolution, began here in the north of England. But just as Egypt's pyramids were once quarried for their stone and the temples in Greece were demolished, today the mills of the Pennines are suffering a similar fate.

The citizens of Manchester built no less than 76 churches during the Victorian era, but only 24 of them are still standing. When David Wyatt arrived in Salford he found his church about to be demolished. Today, after years of painstaking restoration, it survives as an inspiration to groups of Christians in parishes all over Manchester who are struggling to keep their churches open for worship.

Portsmouth Dockyard, with its ring of massive

This film, shot before and after a 1984 fire gutted York Minster's south transept, looks at the problems of conserving the whole city of York within its medieval walls. York people are possessively proud of their ancient city, but they want modern amenities like everyone else, and they are obliged to accommodate an ever-increasing army of tourists.