Saltaire Victorian village - Bradford, Yorkshire, England. UNESCO World Heritage Site

Saltaire is a Victorian model village within the City of Bradford Metropolitan District, West Yorkshire, England, by the River Aire and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. UNESCO has designated the village as a World Heritage Site, and it is a so-called Anchor Point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage.

History

Saltaire was founded in 1853 by Sir Titus Salt, a leading industrialist in the Yorkshire woollen industry. The name of the village is a combination of the founder's surname with the name of the river. Salt moved his entire business (five separate mills) from Bradford to this site near Shipley partly to provide better arrangements for his workers than could be had in Bradford and partly to site his large textile mill by a canal and a railway. Salt employed the Bradford firm of Lockwood and Mawson as his architects.[1]

A similar project had been started a few years earlier by Edward Akroyd at Copley, also in West Yorkshire. The cotton milling village of New Lanark, which is also a World Heritage site, was founded by David Dale in 1786.

Salt built neat stone houses for his workers (much better than the slums of Bradford), wash-houses with running water, bath-houses, a hospital, as well as an Institute for recreation and education, with a library, a reading room, a concert hall, billiard room, science laboratory and gymnasium. The village also provided a school for the children of the workers, almshouses, allotments, a park and a boathouse.[2]

Sir Titus died in 1876 and was interred in the mausoleum adjacent to the Congregational Church. When Sir Titus Salt's son, likewise Sir Titus Salt, died, Saltaire was taken over by a partnership which included Sir James Roberts from Haworth who had worked at the mill since the age of twelve, and who would travel to Russia each year, speaking Russian fluently. James Roberts came to own Saltaire, but chose to invest his money heavily in Russia, losing some of his fortune at the Russian Revolution. He endowed a Chair of Russian at Leeds University and bought the Brontë's Haworth Parsonage for the nation. He is mentioned in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Roberts is buried at Fairlight.

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[PianoLove1968]

Nothing compared with all the 1800s buildings in Liverpool!

[billzrockin09]

A singer called Natalia Kills is from Bradford.

[N4BBYX]

Could you please correct the spelling error *Bradford as i would like to use this video for my website.

[VictorianSchool]

Good to see this. I've been to Saltaire, but this video refreshed my memory. I love Victorian architecture.