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There's a road in England older than the pyramids. 🏜️ You can still walk it today. 🥾 It's called the Ridgeway. Eighty-seven miles of white chalk along the tops of the downs. 🇬🇧 Five thousand years ago, traders carried flint axes along it. ⛰️ At that moment, there wasn't a single pyramid in Egypt. 🐐 A tomb of giant stones was already standing beside it. It's still there. 🪨 A Viking army marched down it to take Wessex. A prince barely in his twenties stood in their way. ⚔️ At school they teach you about Roman roads. 🏛️ They never tell you this one was three thousand years old when the Romans landed. 🤯 No king built it. 👑 So how has it survived five thousand years? 🤔 That's who we are. 🙏 Every Proud Of Us film is free, made by people who want Britain to know its own story. 🎬 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

In 2012, a man sat at a small desk in the middle of the Olympic stadium and typed four words. 🏟️ "This is for everyone." 💡 It was Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The man who invented the World Wide Web. 🌐 He could have made every person on earth pay to use it. 💷 He made sure it was free. 🇬🇧 He wasn't the first British inventor to make that choice. Not even close. ⚖️ 1796. A Gloucestershire doctor proves a way to stop smallpox, a disease that killed three in every ten people who caught it. 💉 He could have kept his method secret and made a fortune. He printed it for anyone to read. 📜 1812. Ninety-two men and boys die in an explosion at a pit near Gateshead. ⛏️ Humphry Davy builds a lamp that can burn safely in the gas. He's urged to patent it. He refuses. 🔦 His young assistant, a blacksmith's son, goes on to build the first electric motor. Then he shows the world exactly how he did it. ⚡ In Glasgow, a surgeon stops infection killing his patients. He publishes his method for every surgeon on earth to use. 🩺 In wartime Oxford, a team turns a mould into a medicine that would save millions. Their leader refuses to patent it. 🧫 You've heard their names. You've probably never heard the choice they made. 🤔 Look around your home. 🏠 The little round scar on your grandad's arm. The switch on your wall. The cream on a grazed knee. The medicine in the cupboard. The screen you're reading this on. 📱 They knew their inventions would change the world. 🌍 So they made sure the world could have them. 🙏 Ordinary people, just like you, helped make it happen. 🇬🇧 Every Proud Of Us film is free, because people like you make it happen too. 🎬 Will you help make the next one? ☝️ Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

Britain ran the slave trade. Britain sent seven-year-olds into the mills. And Britain ended both. 🇬🇧 How can one country be the villain and the hero? It can't. There were two Britains. One owned people. The other did the work. When slavery ended, historians counted every slave owner living in Britain. About three thousand, in a country of sixteen million. 📜 Bankers, merchants, lords and MPs. The other Britain couldn't vote them out: most men had no vote, and no woman had one. 🗳️ Take Samuel Greg. In 1784 he built Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, in Cheshire. By the time he retired, it was the biggest cotton mill in the country. More than half his workers were children. Many were orphans from the workhouse. 🧵 Four thousand miles away, the Greg family owned the Hillsborough sugar plantation on Dominica, worked by enslaved Africans. 🌴 The blankets they slept under were made at his mill. Orphan children here. Enslaved Africans there. Making money for the same family. So who stood up to them? In 1787 a young campaigner called Thomas Clarkson went to Bristol. ⚓ Thompson, landlord of the Seven Stars pub, refused to help trick sailors onto the slave ships. Instead he took Clarkson round the dockside pubs at night, at real risk to himself. The crew lists showed two slave ships to Africa had killed more British sailors than eighty-three ships to Newfoundland. Their stories helped turn the country against the trade. Manchester didn't even have an MP. So more than ten thousand people, about one in five in the town, signed a petition to end it. ✍️ In 1830 Richard Oastler heard about Bradford's mills. One boy of about ten worked from six in the morning till ten at night. Oastler wrote to the Leeds Mercury. He called it Yorkshire Slavery. 📰 In April 1832, thousands of mill workers walked to York to fight for their children. They called it the Pilgrimage of Mercy. 🚶 Against slavery, women went door to door. One petition in May 1833 carried 187,000 women's names. Not one of them could vote. 👩 Then came two dates. 28 August 1833: Britain signs the law to end slavery across most of the Empire. 🇬🇧 29 August 1833: the very next day, it signs the Factory Act. No child under nine in most textile mills. 🏛️ Neither law was a gift from the slave owners. Both were won by people with no vote, no money and no power. So next time someone tells you "Britain did this", ask them: which Britain? Odds are five thousand to one you come from the side that won. Watch the full story. 🎥 Be part of us. 🧵👈🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

Every day, you use the names of dead Britons. 🇬🇧 You just never knew they were people. Your wellies? The man who beat Napoleon. 🥾 Your mac? A Glasgow chemist who made cloth waterproof. ☔ Your plimsolls? An MP who fought the owners of overloaded ships. ⚓ The tarmac outside? A road builder from Ayr. 🛣️ Seven Britons. One ordinary day. They teach you the steam engine. Not that James Watt's name is on every electricity bill you pay. ⚡ The world runs on British names. It just forgot they were people. Watch the full story. 🎥 Their names are everywhere. Their stories aren't. Help us tell them: Proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧