The sustain of the organ juddered to a halt as the hymn ended. The bare handful of worshippers in the Saltaire United Reformed Church lowered themselves back into their pews as the minister began to speak. Not wishing to intrude on the service I retreated back into the porch and looked once more at the bust of Sir Titus Salt displayed there. His alabaster eyes stared out, farsightedly, towards the doors to the town he created. But it was the heraldic animals bracketing the bust’s pillar that really caught the eye. “Is that…?” my wife began. “Is that… a llama?”

I’m a child of the north of England. The hulking silhouettes of textile mills populate my psychogeography. They are everywhere I look – converted into plush flats in the city centre, abandoned and derelict on the outskirts of town, on rare occasions sometimes still thrumming with business. And the Pennine Hills, ‘the backbone of England’ provide a nice delineation of their former purposes. To the west, Manchester and Lancashire looked through the port of Liverpool to the ocean and cotton was king. But to the east, the cities of Yorkshire remained true to their historic trade in wool. And yet here, in Saltaire, just outside Bradford, I was confronted with an anomaly: the age old traditions of wool weaving harnessed to a decidedly trans-Atlantic speciality. For Sir Titus Salt grew rich milling the wool from angora goats and – as the dedicatory statue of the man in Roberts Park has it – ‘alpaca goats’.

Salt owned five mills in Bradford. As a keen businessman there was certainly an economic impetus to aggregating them into one new purpose-built factory situated on the transport links of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and the Leeds and Bradford Railway. But what is remarkable is that he took the opportunity to create a carefully planned town for his workers, one far more salubrious than the Bradford slums. He built neat terraced houses with outside toilets, he built baths and wash-houses, he built schools for the children, a hospital for the sick and almshouses for the destitute. He built a park for recreation. He built that most Victorian of edifices, an ‘Institute’, complete with library, lecture theatre and rooms for clubs, to enable his workers to ‘better themselves’. He built a chapel. He most certainly did not build any pubs, nor allow any to be built, for drunkenness is a vice. And all this took shape a mere six years after Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England.

And it is the town which provides the OUV for Saltaire. The bulk of Salt’s Mill draws the eye but, other than its size, it is pretty ho-hum. As others have commented, it is now an art gallery and selection of upmarket shops (though the book shop is rather lovely). Inside it is hard to understand how the mill operated. You simply have huge rooms with shallow brick arches stacked one atop the other. But if you can turn your eyes away from t’mill what you see is a Victorian model town with its neat rows of houses. The very Victorian virtues of cleanliness, godliness, education, betterment and exercise can be seen in the facilities provided for the workers and their families. That is the story of Saltaire.

There is a paradox common to World Heritage Sites dating from the last couple of centuries that what you see is not… well…  remarkable. They have become commonplace. There are hundreds of mill towns across northern England alone which are almost carbon copies of what can be seen in Saltaire. Terraced houses? Tick. Grand civic buildings? Tick. Chimney stacks piercing the clouds? Tick. Saltaire is maybe just one of the better examples of such communities and was chosen to represent them all through its Unesco listing.

As ever, I tried to find an interesting way to see the World Heritage Site, and so I took to the water. For £4 each the narrowboat Titus offers a 30-something minute there-and-back-again cruise along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and through the man-made valley formed by the two sections of Salt’s Mill. The wide double-doors leading out from the mill directly over the waterway highlights the importance of canal-borne transport in Saltaire’s heyday. Plus, it was a fun diversion for my son to sit atop the boat watching the goslings as we thrummed along. The open spaces of Roberts Park, which are also included within the boundaries of the World Heritage Site, provided him with room to run, a bandstand and statuary alpacas to climb over and a cricket match to watch (the pavilion backing on to the River Aire in the park’s south-west corner dates from Salt’s era). There is a good children’s play area just east of the park lodge (and hence within the buffer zone). And if you exit the park to the north and cross the road you find the Shipley Glen Tramway, a funicular dating from 1895 which rattles a pair of trams carriages up and down through a patch of bluebell-speckled fairy-tale woodland (likewise in the buffer zone). A ride each way takes a couple of minutes at most but it is a surprisingly joyous experience and one that my son wanted to go on again and again (single tickets are £1.50 for adults but a day pass is only £2.50).

 

World Heritage-iness: 2

My Experience: 2.5

(Visited May 2019)