HIDDEN SECRETS | Saltaire Victorian Village

Hello and welcome to a new adventure. So today we're down in the beautiful village of Saltaire, which is just outside Bradford in a little suburb called Shipley. Now Saltaire, if you don't already know it, is a World Heritage Site. But while we're here we're going to take you for a tour around the village, show you all the beautiful sights and also explain to you how this village came to be and the man who created this village. So the story begins with one man who was known as Sir Titus Salt. Now he was a politician and a mayor in the city of Bradford, but he was also an entrepreneur. What he did was he wanted to get into the wool business. So instead of creating a mill in the centre of Bradford, where it was known to be very smoggy, dirty and overcrowded with mills, he found a site just outside the city of Bradford in a place just by the canal down here. Now it was very convenient for him because there's also the main railway that runs through this site as well. And you've also got the canal, like I mentioned, which is the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and also there's the River Eyre just behind that. So not only did he have the means to transport his goods in the area, but he also had a means to power his mills from the river. So we're gonna go explore Saltaire, but while I'm here I just thought I'd introduce you to Martin Zero. You may have seen him on our last video. Is this a different video? This is a different video. He doesn't know it. It's not the same video, is it? No, different video. Same day, but we're doing a different place altogether. So if you haven't checked out Martin's channel, you need to head over to Martin Zero. Oh yeah, sorry, I was so taken with the place, I'm looking around and he's promoting my channel. He's like a kid, he's off, he won't keep still. Go on, you can go explore. So this whole village was built for all of his workers in the mills. So he looked after them very well, he was very well respected. This village included houses, a school, library, churches, almshouses, a boathouse and a beautiful, beautiful park as well. We're just gonna start our tour of Saltaire. We're just walking down the main street into Saltaire here, which goes all the way through the village and down towards the canal and the river, which is just down there. Now you can see how beautiful some of these buildings are. Now I know some of these buildings were institutes and schools and various libraries and things like that. For example, this one here used to be the Institute. You can also see on the four corners of these buildings here, we've four lions. Now you may recognize these lions, they're very similar to the ones in Trafalgar Square in London. Now they were built originally for Trafalgar Square, but for some reason they ended up here in Saltaire instead. Now these days Saltaire is full of nice coffee shops and bars and galleries and antique shops and things like that. It's a very quaint, quirky town now, but back in the day, even though this was industrial, it would have been still very beautiful as you see today. Now Saltaire gets its name from Sir Titus Salt and also the River Eyre, which is at the bottom, so you've got Salt Eyre. Now Sir Titus Salt had a couple of rules for his workers, one of them being that they must attend the church, the second being that they weren't allowed to consume alcohol. So as you can see from the name of this bar, it's a very nice take on the fact that he didn't allow alcohol in this village. It's called Don't Tell Titus. I love that name, it's brilliant. So we're heading down to the bottom end of the village now and we're getting near the mill complex. Now this mill complex is absolutely massive and it's on, right on the banks of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and also the River Eyre, which is not far behind it. Now you can see all the quaint terraced houses in the village, they go on from many streets down this way and just to my right we've got the Saltaire station. Now this originally had a nice beautiful station building, for some reason it disappeared many years ago. It would have been situated just over here. Now it's still used as a station today as you can see but the beautiful station building has now gone. Now right at the bottom end of the village we've got the beautiful mill complex which is now known as Salt's Mill. So this was where his empire began. It now houses various businesses, some of them technology companies as well and the National Health Service. But the biggest thing in there, which is very popular, is the David Hockney Art Gallery which is right inside the mill complex and it's very good for tourism. Martin's filling his memory card up with pictures. So we're now down here at the Saltaire Church. Now this was a congregational church that opened in 1859 and you can see how beautiful that building is. We're going to make our way down towards the canal and into the park, the beautiful Roberts Park as it's known today. It used to be called Salt's Park. We're going to catch up with Martin a bit further down, he's wandered off that way taking pictures of everything. You can just see down here as well all the original cobbles. They were talking about tarmacking over this, the original cobbles, and they have done in certain sections like down here. But the locals put a stop to that and they managed to win and get them retained. As you can see here we've got the beautiful mill complex as it straddles the Leeds-Liverpool canal which runs is over there would have continued straight across here across the River Eyre. You can see the rivers down there. The road bridge would have originally come over here and joined where we are now to continue that way. The bridge was sadly not maintained during the war and it fell into disrepair and it ended up collapsing. So they just took it all down and they never replaced it. It's now just a footbridge or a pedestrian bridge just to the right of it. This original road bridge is now gone. So we're now in what is known as Roberts Park. So Titus Salt believed in his workers having leisure time. He believed that if they were happy they would enjoy what they did. He also built them a nice boathouse which is just there. It's used as a pub today. They used to have rowing boats moored up down on the dock at the front there. They also had steam cruisers going up and down the river. They could also bathe just down here by the River Eyre. It had all this widened just so they could go in and bathe down there. Now the mill complex is just over there that we're looking at and what we're going to do is head through this park here. I'm going to show you some of the buildings. Like I said we're down here today. We're taking Martin on a bit of an explore around Saltaire. He's never been here before have you? No it's quite nice. It's very nice. I thought he might like it with it being industrial, mills, things like that. What I like about it, I actually like the idea behind it. The fact that this Titus Salt, this industrialist, invested in the people and he's left this amazing legacy. The architecture, the park, that was the way it was done wasn't it? He's proper radical for the time I think. It was because a lot of mill owners were known as being sort of money pinchers. Yeah yeah there were other ones but yeah what an altruistic guy for doing all this for his workers. Yeah it's fantastic. I mean he was quite well renowned at the time and apparently when he died there was a large procession held for him in Bradford. He had a lot of fans, a lot of people that liked him and they reckon there was over 100,000 people turned out for his procession for his funeral. So that's how well liked he was. Now as far as I remember it's been restored quite recently this. So it should be in good nick now. But we're taking Martin on a whistle stop tour around the whole site. Here's the bandstand. The lovely cannon there. I don't know what the significance of that is. They have these lovely sitting shelters as well where people would sit and relax. There's one at the end down there and another one down the other side. But here we have the man himself. So one thing I never mentioned was the mill. It was mainly a woolen mill but it was a special type of wool. It wasn't normal wool, sheep's wool. It was actually alpaca wool that they used. Now that's why he's got such a large fortune from these mills because it was unique at the time. Alpaca wool was very expensive and when he made alpaca clothes in this mill he could sell them to the rich people who would pay a fortune for alpaca. So that's where he made most of his money and you can see a nice memorial down here. Two alpacas. Okay so the next port of call where I'm taking Martin. So we're still in Saltaire. We've headed across the road. We're heading towards what is known as the oldest operating tramway in the UK. Now it's a funicular tramway. It goes up a steep hill all the way to the top of what is known as Shipley Glen and it's an old Victorian one. It was built in 1895. So what do you think of Saltaire Martin? Beautiful isn't it? Yeah it's lovely. It's somewhere that I've never really looked at but I've heard of it but knew nothing of it. It's one of those places isn't it where I think you've kind of got it in your head but you don't really know what it is. Yeah I remember coming here as a kid and dad used to take me to Shipley Glen and on the tram down to the park. Yeah. And that bridge we walked across used to dangle the old jars off it, catch the fish, bit of rope, tie it up, catch the fish, bit of bread in it then pull it back up. That was as exciting as it got. That's how you made your fun though. Now it's a shame we can't go on the tram today but it's actually closed because of the situation that we're in now. But it's only open weekends anyway and the odd Wednesday through summer. It is run by volunteers. Like I said it's a charity these days. It used to have a permanent owner but when the owner died it passed into the council's hands and then a charity trust took it on and they get funded by donations now. It's well looked after and it still operates today.