Shipley & District

Until 1853, Shipley was an unremarkable market and textile town in Airedale, its name - from the Saxon for Sheep Field - betraying its history.
But in that year a man called Titus Salt came along.

The Industrial Revolution had choked the West Riding's manufacturing towns in filth - soot was turning the buildings a uniform black, human waste was turning what had been trout streams into open sewers.

Verminous, hungry and exhausted, the working population had swapped farm labouring for factory drudgery with all its attendant evils - drink, vice and drained spirituality.

Salt, himself a mill-owner, saw the condition of his workforce and was filled with pity - and with a vision.

At the edge of Shipley, where moorland dipped to the waters of the River Aire, he decided to make his vision real.

He had seen the conflict between 'masters' and 'men' at first hand as a young man when, in 1826, a strike at a Bradford mill had led to mob violence, wounding and death.

Now, as a successful manufacturer a quarter of a century later, he saw a way of leading his workers into a new way of life, away from the stink and stews of Bradford to a new place, a village to be built among fields and woods, with good fresh air and as much sunlight as could be had from a sky which touched the Pennines.

He would build it on the edge of Shipley, where there was a railway and a canal to bring in raw materials and take away the finished cloth.

At the heart of the village would be a mill, a grand mill built in the grand style, influenced by Italian design, light, airy - a good place to work.

Also in the village would be a hospital, almshouses, schools, places of worship. a village institute where people could learn, be entertained, have a window on the world. There would be parks and sports fields.

What there would not be would be pubs. Salt was not a prude, nor a teetotaller, but had seen the damage that drink could do to families.

And there would be houses the like of which his workforce had not even dreamed, in the slums they had inhabited.

The idea of model workplaces was not new. The reformer Robert Owen had created New Lanark half a century earlier. But Owen was a Socialist, while Salt was unabashedly a capitalist who believed the human condition could be improved hand in hand with the national economy.

What to call the new village? Here was Titus Salt, there was the River Aire. Combined, they made Saltaire. And Saltaire made Salt's fortune even greater, from worsteds and from alpaca, a light, lustrous fibre from a South American cousin of the lama which, as a fibre, was attractive but regarded as impossible to weave commercially. Salt found a way to weave it.

Nowadays the village is a tourist magnet and a popular place for homebuyers. The terraced houses are a long way from the stereotype back-to-backs of the industrial West Riding and the village retains a relaxed atmosphere to this day.

But Saltaire, and Shipley with it, is on the up. It is not a museum. Saltaire's mills complex houses two companies at the leading edge of communications technology. A new Holiday Inn has just opened. The future is arriving.

A town reared on fish and chips is now delighting in food from around the world, from tapas bars to one of the most up-market Indian restaurants around.

Antique shops, book stores and music shops now cluster round Salt's Mill.

And the mill itself, its interior glowing with the patina of age, now houses furniture shops, a diner and Saltaire's flagship, the 1853 Gallery, home to the biggest collection of works by David Hockney in the world.

The Bradford-born artist, who has keenly embraced technological advances, has even used a satellite to send his latest work by fax to the gallery - past, present and future in a harmony that would have pleased Titus Salt, a lover of music and concord.