A Victorian Village: Saltaire

We took the train to Saltaire, a UNESCO site not far from where we are staying. Saltaire is home of the Victorian era company town established by Sir Titus Salt back in the 1800s. Well, it was a company town back in the day after Salt moved his textile business from the busy borough of Bradford to the outskirts of the more sedate town of Shipley.

Textiles was the family business before Titus got grown. His father was a dealer in the wool business. He dealt primarily in Russian Donskoi wool, which was widely popular in the woolen trade but not in worsted cloth trade. Titus, along with his father, tried to get the worsted cloth spinners to use the Russian wool but they were unsuccessful. So they set up their own manufacturing business spinning the wool into worsted cloth. Spend any winter in England and you’ll soon understand why the demand for woolen cloths proved successful. Woolen clothing provides the insulation one needs in the damp cold .

One local recounted the story of a television show in which two beautiful women from sunny California wearing shorts and mini skirts and eating salads changed places with two women from Yorkshire who wore bulky coats and ate “stodgy” food. “After two days living in England, the women from California were wearing bulky coats and eating stodgy food,” he said, laughing.

But back to Saltaire, Titus Salt eventually left his father’s company and set out on his own. Seems that while in a warehouse in Liverpool, Titus happened upon a bag of Peruvian wool. He took some of the wool back to his shop and secretly began to experiment with it. Those experiments led to Titus Salt becoming one of the first mass manufacturers of what we now know as Alpaca cloth.

Titus expanded his textile business and built the Salt Mill along the Leeds to Liverpool canal, that same canal that Tim and I have been walking about all week. It was the inland freeway to the ports at Liverpool. He opened his new mill on his 50th birthday in 1853. The next year he began building the company town around the mill.

When I think of company towns, I think of Appalachia and the tent towns that Mother Jones marched into as she urged workers to take back their own power from the mine owners that were oppressing them. Towns like Matewan, West Virginia, where gunfights broke out, where people were shot dead, all in an effort to have a better life than the one the mill owners afforded them.

Saltaire isn’t a tent town. The stone buildings that Titus Salt had built still stand to this day and serve as charming homes, not unlike the Victorian-era homes found in San Francisco. The church Titus paid to have built is still in use. And while the hospital no longer serves as a hospital, it does provide housing for many. There’s quality to the buildings. Each street retains the name of one of Titus Salt’s eleven children. The mill, no longer in use as a textile manufacturing site, serves as office buildings. There’s a college right smack dab in the middle of the village.

Titus Salt invested what would be millions in today’s market in building the company town named for himself. According to one of his biographers, Salt’s reasons for building a company town remain questionable. Did he build it to help his workers or to maintain better control over them? Was he really interested in creating a community for his employees and giving them a better life? Or did he do it because workers would make less demands of a landlord than they might of a boss? Mother Jones believed that company towns were a bad thing, giving mine owners too much control over workers.

Salt said he was motivated to provide a better future for his children, to give them employment, a place to live. One of Salt’s biographer suggested, “Salt’s motives in building Saltaire remain obscure. They seem to have been a mixture of sound economics, Christian duty, and a desire to have effective control over his workforce. There were economic reasons for moving out of Bradford, and the village did provide him with an amenable, handpicked workforce. Yet Salt was deeply religious and sincerely believed that, by creating an environment where people could lead healthy, virtuous, godly lives, he was doing God’s work.”

Established as a 15-minute neighborhood – the time it took to get from home to work, or to the hospital, or the church, etc. – Titus Salt’s village was designed to get people outdoors walking the canal, or visiting the parks. He believed that exercise helped build a healthier workforce. Today, the canal is part of the National Cycle Network and while we were there saw many bikers and walkers taking full advantage of the scenic canal.

When Titus Salt died it is estimated that over a 100,000 people lined the streets for the funeral cortege. Reminded me of a recent moment when another humble man who built homes for people passed and the masses lined the streets for President Jimmy Carter.

Karen Spears Zacharias

Author/Journalist/Educator. Gold Star Daughter.

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