Attraction in West Yorkshire

Saltaire is a Victorian model industrial village in the Aire Valley near Bradford in West Yorkshire, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built between 1851 and 1876 by the mill owner Titus Salt as a planned community for the workers of his enormous alpaca and wool textile mill on the River Aire. Salt's ambition was to create a working community with housing, education, recreation and cultural facilities of a standard far above the norm for Victorian industrial workers, and the resulting village of 820 terraced houses, schools, a Congregational church, almshouses, a hospital and the Institute for recreation and education provides one of the most complete surviving examples of Victorian philanthropic urban planning in the world. The mill itself, Salt's Mill, was the largest building in the world when completed in 1853, a six-storey Italianate palace of wool manufacturing on the banks of the Aire whose scale and architectural ambition expressed Salt's belief that industry could be conducted with dignity and beauty as well as efficiency. The mill ceased textile production in 1986 and has been transformed since then into a complex of galleries, restaurants and businesses of which the principal tenant is the 1853 Gallery, housing the largest single collection of works by the Bradford-born artist David Hockney outside Los Angeles. The combination of the Victorian mill architecture and Hockney's vivid contemporary paintings creates an unexpected but highly effective juxtaposition. The village streets, built on a grid pattern and named after Salt's family and the countries with which he traded, retain their original architecture in a remarkable state of completeness and provide an excellent example of how high-quality Victorian urban design creates an environment of lasting value.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the West Yorkshire countryside near Wakefield is one of the finest outdoor sculpture venues in the world, a 500-acre estate of eighteenth-century parkland and lakes in which permanent and changing displays of sculpture by major British and international artists are sited in a landscape of considerable natural beauty. The park was founded in 1977 and is consistently ranked among the leading visitor attractions in the north of England, its combination of outdoor sculpture, gallery spaces and the park landscape itself creating an experience quite unlike any conventional museum or gallery. The permanent collection includes major works by Henry Moore, the greatest British sculptor of the twentieth century, who was born in Castleford only a few miles from the park and whose large bronzes inhabit the Yorkshire landscape with a particular rightness that reflects the deep connection between the sculptor and his native region. The Barbara Hepworth works in the collection provide a complementary perspective on the same mid-century British sculptural tradition, and the works of Andy Goldsworthy sited in various locations across the estate demonstrate the capacity of site-specific sculpture to animate and transform the landscape in which it sits. The changing programme of temporary exhibitions brings major international artists to the park on a regular basis, and the gallery buildings at the centre of the park provide indoor exhibition space for work that requires a controlled environment. The Longside Gallery, the Chapel Gallery and the Underground Gallery each have their own character and provide different relationships between sculpture and indoor space. The park is free to enter and is open daily throughout the year, making it one of the most generously accessible major art venues in Britain. The café and restaurant facilities and the management of the parkland for walking and wildlife watching add dimensions beyond the sculpture programme itself.