LIZ McIvor became a BBC presenter quite by accident.

The 38-year-old has built a name for herself as one of the leading authorities in the north west in social and industrial history.

But Liz had no idea she had the potential to share her knowledge and enthusiasm with millions of people until she appeared as a talking head on Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys.

Liz said: “I was on it for just three minutes talking about railwaymen’s cottages. But a producer had seen it and had been in the market for somebody with a north west accent and wasn’t a middle-aged man. No offence to Tony Robinson but I think he was looking for the anti-Tony Robinson

“At the time we were moving a fleet of vintage vehicles so a gallery could be reroofed. So I was covered in various grease, cobwebs and dust and he called out of the blue to have a chat with me. We got into a three hour chat about the prospect of interpreting canals and it went from there.”

Liz was originally asked to present one episode of the proposed show about how Britain’s canal network developed during the Industrial Revolution.

But she ended up hosting the whole series of The Making of a Nation and, with around 3.8 million viewers per episode, it was so popular that she also presented the follow-up about how Britain’s expanding rail network was the spark to a social revolution.

Liz added: “With documentaries that are made in-house by the BBC they always prefer to have someone in the know – somebody who is an expert to be their voice for that particular subject. I think they’re right because it emits confidence in the subject.

“These are the people who know what questions to ask, know what bits have been covered before and what are the interesting stories. That is more difficult for a generic presenter to do.”

So what was it like to be thrust into the spotlight?

Liz said: “You do get used to it reasonably quickly. The first couple of weeks are a bit of challenge if you haven’t done it before. But after a while your interest in the subject takes over. You do sort of forget the cameras are rolling.

“Once you get talking to the people who you’re there to interview you often have to be interrupted mid flow to actually start filming. That was the only difficult thing because you can end up on a tangent with people because they share your interest.”

Liz will be among many like-minded folk who share her interests when she appears as special guest at the fifth Lymm Historic Transport Day on Sunday, June 25.

She added: “It’s amazing that in a short space of time the organisers have managed to raise the profile of this community, volunteer-run event. It’s quite a feat really. I’ve spoken to people about the event who don’t live anywhere near the area.”

Liz also thinks it’s only right that a village like Lymm should be celebrating its transport heritage.

The presenter, who filmed in Lymm for The Making of a Nation, said: “Lymm might be now considered to be a middle class, leafy affluent suburb. But that small village was on the route between cities even before there was a major transport network. And then of course once the canals and major trunk roads came along Lymm was in the right place at the right time.

“So in a way the fact that people want to live in Lymm now has everything to do with its transport heritage.”

Liz, who grew up in Didsbury, was inspired to work in heritage after she saw the ‘Lindow Man’ at Manchester Museum.

The preserved body was discovered in a peat bog at Lindow Moss near Wilmslow in 1984 and was on display in Manchester before moving to the British Museum.

Liz added: “There was a talk by what I now know must have been a young assistant curator – the type of person that you get to talk to school kids. He was talking about the fact this person must have been from the north Cheshire area. Somebody who had been here thousands of years before us and who we knew very little about personally.

“But we were able to find so much more from the way this person had been buried. He was so engaging and switched on and energised about the topic that he made me think that’s what I wanted to do in later life.”

Trips out with her dad cemented that interest.

Liz, who started her career as a curatorial assistant at Quarry Bank Mill and now manages the Co-operative Heritage Trust, said: “We enjoyed exploring things that were off the beaten track. We found old factories where no one was working anymore. You could just walk into a lot of them.

“Now in that area of south Manchester and Cheshire there has been a lot of redevelopment because people want to live there and there is a lot of investment in those places.

“But there’s still that element in some parts of the north west in towns like Burnley and Darwen where you can still go and look at old buildings and imagine what they were like when they were thriving, busy, smoky, sweaty places.”

n For more information about Lymm Historic Transport Day visit lymmtransport.org.uk