Writer and historian Dan Jones navigates Britain's longest canal to be built by just one company, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Built to link the economically booming counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, this 19th-century superhighway was experimental for the time, and made Liverpool the busiest port in the world. In Burnley, the cotton capital of the 19th century, Dan visits the world's only steam-powered cotton mill, where enough cloth was woven each year to reach to the moon and back two-and-a-half times

• Dan Jones