Pictures: Shropshire's John to star in great Victorian bake-off

John, 35, is the fifth generation to be involved in south Shropshire family business Swift's Bakery, and he is about to be seen in a three-part BBC series getting a taste of the conditions that his forebears would have lived with every day.

The first episode of Victorian Bakers will be shown on January 5, and John is one of four bakers from around the country taking part.

Each episode will cover a different time in history, starting in the 1830s when bread was vital to the survival of the nation and absolutely everything was done by hand, through the tough times of the industrial revolution in the 1870s, to the dawn of modern baking at the turn of the century.

Swift's Bakery was set up in 1863 by Jon's great, great aunt Harriet Swift, who was making more money from her baking than her labourer husband was earning from the land.

Today the business, which has its headquarters in Clee Hill, near Ludlow, still involves fathers, sons, brothers and wives, operating two bakeries and five shops in the area, as well as supplying local hotels, restaurants and pubs. But Jon said he had no idea he'd been entered to take part until he was contacted by the BBC – as it was his wife Jayne who responded to an email from the Craft Bakers' Association (formerly the National Association of Master Bakers) about possible candidates to take part.

He said: "She saw the email and knew that I would be good at it because I'm interested in history anyway and I love our own history, that we are as old as we are. "But I'm not a front of house person, really, I prefer to be behind the scenes. So she replied to the email and entered it without my knowledge."

He said the first time he spoke to anyone from the BBC was when a woman called asking for a little about the history of Swift's Bakery, which he initially thought was just for a magazine article. "Then she asked if she could video conference me, which I thought was a bit odd," he said.

"By this time my wife was tapping on the window and laughing – it turned out I'd been selected for the show." He said the experience of baking under re-created Victorian conditions was particularly poignant as it was a reflection of his own family's past, one that the Swifts owed their own livelihood to today.

"It was the best experience I've ever had in my life, except for getting married," he said. "It brought to life what my family went through. "But it was also terrifying. The whole country was so completely dependent on bread that it didn't matter what we did to the bread, people would eat it."

He said in the 1840s people were starving to death in Britain and all kinds of things were put in the bread to make it go further. "It was the lowest point the baking industry ever got to, we were literally killing people and killing ourselves just to make the product," said John.

"My family would have been there, facing those moral decisions, asking 'Do we put chalk in that flour?' and so on." By the industrial revolution things had got "horrific", he said, with bakers working 40 hour shifts and covered in coal dust from the ovens that inevitably got into the bread.

"When people talk about being being 'on the bread line' I now know exactly what that meant. If you had bread and a full belly you could go to work, if you didn't you would go to the poor house and probably die," he said. But by the turn of the century things were looking up.

"That's when the baking industry started to drag itself out of the quagmire, and it started to feel a little more familiar," he said, as the dark days of the industrial revolution began to pay off with modern tools and techniques.

"Plus you had all these different flavours and new ingredients coming from across the Empire," he said.

Filmed in Peterborough, London and at the Black Country Museum, Victorian Bakers will air weekly on BBC 2 at 8pm from January 5.