Saltaire Bradford
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.