Saltaire

• Official Name: Saltaire
• Location: West Yorkshire, England
• Type: Cultural
• Year of Inscription: 2001

Saltaire is a preserved industrial village in Yorkshire, England, dating back to the late 1800s. It provides a clear depiction of the philanthropic paternalism that flourished in parts of Great Britain and America in the nineteenth century, where socially minded businesspeople designed entire industrial complexes to benefit the health and well-being of their employees. The design of the community surrounding the salt mill became a model for the later concept of the garden city.

In addition to the mill, the site included worker housing, a dining hall, a hospital, a school, a congregational church, an almshouse for elderly individuals who needed care, and a park. While Saltaire was built later than New Lanark and some other industrial villages with a similar focus on providing a good standard of living for its employees, it nonetheless became a model for other philanthropic villages in other parts of Great Britain, the United States, and Italy.

The mill remained in operation in some form until the 1980s, when the mill machinery was removed. With few exceptions, Saltaire’s original structures were nearly intact, providing a very well-preserved example of the type of industrial village that played a key role in the Industrial Revolution. Because of its historical importance, Saltaire was added to the list of United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites in 2001. It remains a town where people live and work. The mill has been converted into shops and an art gallery, along with an area where people can learn about the mill’s history.

History

Saltaire was built by Titus Salt in the mid-1800s. Salt was the only spinner of alpaca wool in Bradford, Yorkshire, England. He owned six mills, including the salt mill at the heart of Saltaire. The village took its name from its founder’s surname and the River Aire, which powered the mill.

Salt was apprenticed to a wool stapler, or a wool dealer, when he was seventeen years old. Over time, he learned more about the wool trade and ultimately joined the family wool business, Daniel Salt and Son. After he married in 1830, the family lived near the poverty-stricken portion of the town of Bradford. This, along with his congregationalist Christian religious beliefs, may have been the impetus for Salt’s concern for the well-being of his workers.

Over several years in the mid-1800s, Salt owned and operated several mills. Then, in 1851, he commissioned the construction of a new mill that would eventually encompass the operation of all his other mill facilities. He chose a site in Bradford in West Yorkshire between the River Aire and the Midland Railway. It was large enough to allow Salt to centralize his operations, making the business more profitable and easier to oversee. The new Salt Mill would have the capacity to start with raw materials and produce thirty thousand yards of good quality wool fabric every working day. When it was completed in 1853, the mill provided jobs for three thousand people.

Salt was already a wealthy man when he established Saltaire. Many who had achieved similar success invested their profits in large estates for themselves and their families. Salt chose a different path. He decided to build an industrial village that provided more than basic housing for his employees. Shortly after the mill was completed, Salt commissioned the construction of cottages, each with a front yard and a lavatory in the yard. Gas for heat and other purposes was provided by the mill, as was water. By 1854, many cottages, boarding houses, and shops had been constructed, and more than one thousand people were living in Saltaire.

Perhaps because he recalled the squalid conditions of the houses near Bradford, Salt ensured that those in Saltaire were nice in appearance and neatly laid out in rows on the streets. He was convinced that life should be more than work and survival, so he constructed a school, a library with a reading room, and a church for worship. Bathhouses were made available, along with a gymnasium. Educational speakers were routinely brought in for the workers’ benefit. The town eventually had a park, concert hall, and fife and drum band program for the resident boys. A hospital, an almshouse, and other facilities tended to every reasonable need of the workers and residents of Saltaire. By 1871, the village had a population of more than four thousand. Construction of new housing continued until 1875.

Salt’s efforts earned him the respect of his workers. When he died in 1876, his funeral procession from his home in Crow Nest, Lightcliffe, to the congregational Church in Saltaire took hours. The mills between his home and resting place were mostly closed, and it is estimated one-hundred thousand people, many of them millworkers, lined the streets to watch as Salt’s procession passed by. He was buried in a family mausoleum at the church.

After Salt’s death, the mill was run by his youngest son, Titus Salt, Jr. The younger Salt shared his father’s social and business interests and continued running the mill as his father had. He also commissioned the construction of a new school of art and science as a memorial to his father. Salt, Jr. considered education important, and the schools in the town even before he took over their operation. When he passed away in 1887, he was most remembered for his fervent efforts to educate the residents of Saltaire.

Following the death of the younger Salt, the mill’s operation was taken over by James Roberts, who had trained in the wool trade since childhood but focused most of his business interests in Russia. This meant he lost some of his resources during the Russian Revolution in the early part of the twentieth century.

The mill and Saltaire fell into the hands of the Bradford Property Trust in 1933. The trust initiated some changes, mostly upgrading the gas and other utility lines, removing outdoor lavatories, and removing some of the houses that were no longer needed. The mill itself remained in use until 1986. Shortly thereafter, the building was purchased and repurposed for a variety of other uses, including a gallery featuring the work of British artist David Hockney, several manufacturing companies, and a collection of smaller shops, restaurants, and cafes.

Significance

Saltaire is an extremely well-preserved example of the philanthropic industrial villages built during the 1800s. Since it remained in constant use and was never abandoned, its structures were kept in good condition. This enabled the mill and the village around it to remain in use well into the twenty-first century. It also allowed a glimpse into a time, place, and way of life that no longer exists. The village of Saltaire was also a prototype for what later became known as garden villages, or planned, self-contained communities with between 1,500 and 10,000 houses with ample green space in and around the area.

Sites need to meet at least one of ten criteria to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Site List. Saltaire meets two. It is a well-preserved example of an industrial town from the nineteenth century, with near-perfect authenticity to the original town layout. Saltaire demonstrates both an important interchange of human values and an architectural style that was representative of the era. It also represents the importance of the textile industry to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting social and economic development it brought about while also reflecting the growing paternalistic viewpoint of many of society’s wealthy businesspeople of the time. This gives evidence of the universal significance of these types of villages and how they reflected the development of future societies.

A World Heritage Site designation affords a level of protection to the sites that receive it, helping to preserve them for future generations. The protections generally extend to a buffer zone around each site as well. In the case of Saltaire, this designation could prove especially significant. Saltaire is under the management of the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. This council and another group, Action Airedale, proposed a bypass in the late 2000s that would impact the site’s buffer zone as well as the Saltaire site itself. If permission was granted, the bypass would go through the buffer zone on both sides and underneath the village, beginning by the mill and coming out near the church where the Salt family burial site is located. The purpose of the proposed bypass was to alleviate traffic in the area. However, the fate of the bypass remained uncertain through the 2020s because it could impact the integrity of the UNESCO-protected site and because of a lack of funding.

Bibliography

“Explore Saltaire.” Visit Bradford, www.visitbradford.com/explore/saltaire. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Kitchen, Ruby. “Celebrating Saltaire's Status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Titus Salt Exhibition to Explore Founder’s Mark.” Yorkshire Post, 13 May 2021, www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/heritage/celebrating-saltaires-status-as-a-unesco-world-heritage-site-in-titus-salt-exhibition-to-explore-founders-mark-3234411. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

“Saltaire Collection.” Saltaire Collection, www.saltairecollection.org. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

“Saltaire.” UNESCO World Heritage Convention, whc.unesco.org/en/list/1028. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

“The Saltaire Village Website, World Heritage Site.” Saltaire Village, saltairevillage.info/Saltaire‗WHS‗01‗Saltaire.html. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.