A tiny town in England has big attractions

Author: By Claire Hopley, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, May 17, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

Today, the institute, flanked by giant stone lions, stands as massively as the mill and church, dominating the town, just as Salt intended. But while Saltaire looks much as it did when Salt died in 1876, life there has changed. The institute houses Britain's only museum of harmoniums -- small reed organs -- and its large halls make it a popular venue for weddings among the local Indian community. The boathouse, where workers used to rent rowing boats, has been converted into a pub, and on the canal ducks eager for tidbits from the customers on the terrace bar have replaced barges loaded with bales of cloth. Similarly, millhands no longer scurry down Saltaire's streets. Instead, residents chat with neighbors watering their window baskets or vegetable gardens, or shop for Yorkshire treats such as curd tarts and gingerbread in Beetie's Bakery. And where once the little shops provided simple necessities, now you'll find an antiques market and a second-hand bookstore, and restaurants that appeal to townspeople and visitors alike.

Two unique attractions attract visitors. The first is the town itself. It's a masterwork of 19th-century ideology and planning that fascinates lovers of Victoriana. The second is the world's largest collection of David Hockney paintings. He's a local boy and he regularly showcases new work in Saltaire before exhibiting it in better-known art venues. It's typical that the Hockney landscapes showing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through July 31 arrived in Boston from Saltaire, not from Hockney's studios in California.

In Saltaire, Hockney's picture hangs in Salt's Mill, whose sheer size is startling. As long as London's St Paul's Cathedral, the mill dominates the view, not only as you drive down the steep main street -- called Victoria Road after the queen -- but also when you come out of the chapel or scan the town from the park on the opposite bank of the River Aire. No wonder that it seated 3,500 employees and dignitaries for a meal when it opened in 1853. Nor that in its heyday it housed 1,200 looms weaving 17 miles of cloth a day.

Today a bookshop occupies a part of the mill, and that's startling, too: Hockney pictures hang everywhere. Reproductions, I assumed. ``Not so,'' said local historian Clive Woods, ``They're the real thing.'' Upstairs through a showroom of highly desirable sofas, there's another Hockney gallery. He has painted its brick walls in swimming-pool aqua, and hung them with his latest portraits. A third gallery on the floor above houses yet more work, including a large black-and-white mural. One of Hockney's most popular shows, a series of drawings of his two dachsunds, opened here a few years ago. In memory of this, the ``rope'' that prevents visitors getting too close to the pictures is made from dog leashes strung togther. Residents now take all these Hockneys for granted. Woods had more than a touch of civic pride in his voice when he said, ``He comes here a lot, changing the paintings. Doing new exhibitions, you know. He sends us a lot of faxes too, he just loves the fax machine.''

Hockney was born and educated in nearby Bradford, where he went to school with playwright Alan Bennett. If two great imaginative talents occurring in a seemingly unlikely spot seems unlikely, it's worth thinking back to the mid-19th century, when the Brontes were producing their work in the neaby village of Haworth, and Titus Salt, mayor of Bradford, was building mills and imagining an ideal worker's town.

Salt had multiple talents and often applied them unconventionally. Born in 1803 to a family of prosperous woolen merchants, his innovations took the family fortunes to stratospheric heights. His first big step was the purchase of a cheap load of Russian wool, rejected by other merchants as being too tangled. Salt devised a way to deal with the tangles, and made a lot of money. Then in a similar feat he bought up bales of llama wool lying unwanted because the fibers were too long and fine to be worked by current machinery. Eighteen months later, Salt had developed a way to spin and weave that wool into warm but lightweight alpaca, a cloth that was to become the Victorian favorite for dresses and cloaks.

By the 1840s, he was an economic powerhouse owning six Bradford mills, and in 1848 he was chosen as mayor. That was the year that cholera struck. ``Even before the cholera, life expectancy in Bradford was only 20 years and 3 months,'' Clive Woods said. ``Conditions were terrible; the canal was so polluted that it regularly exploded.'' Woods is an expert on Salt, and believes that though he had abandoned an early ambition to become a doctor, he read medical literature and knew that foul water caused cholera. ``You can think of Saltaire as his personal solution to 19th-century mill town problems,'' Wood claims.

Salt wedded philanthropy to business. He regarded his mill as a Temple of Industry, and when he had finished building it, he set to work on a temple of a religious kind, a Congregationalist chapel, but one with scant resemblance to the plain chapels typical of the north of England. Its Italianate tower soars into the sky; it dominated the workers' view as they trudged to work and confronted them again the instant they stepped out of the mill at night.

The chapel is open every afternoon, but on mornings when the organist practices, he leaves the door ajar for visitors. This is a splendid chance to hear the notes belling powerfully around the massive cupola. Italian marble pillars, their pediments emblazoned with Salt's monogram, carry the eye upward to the painted ceiling, the elaborate chandeliers and a gallery built at the insistence of Caroline Salt, who didn't want to worship in the same pews as her husband's employees. ``He didn't approve of that,'' notes Woods. ``So he had the chandeliers hung at just the right height to block the view from the gallery.''

This doesn't sound very Christian, and it's easy to see the chapel as a monument to Salt himself. His bust in white marble dominates the entrance. With bushy hair and beard, he seems almost at one with the animals that produced the luxury fleeces that made him rich: the llama and angora goat carved in intricate and beautiful detail on the pedestal.

There are more llamas plus two cherubs scribbling angelically away on the bell tower of the school. Salt provided education for his workers, as well as for their children. In the Victoria Institute, they could attend lectures, study in the library, take art classes, or join in public discussions.

But while his public buildings attract immediate attention, in their day Salt's domestic buildings were just as idiosyncratic. His 850 houses range from the company manger's handsome villa -- now a bank -- to houses with gardens for supervisors, and on down to terraces for lowlier workers. Uniquely for workers' houses of the period, even the smallest had its own lavatory. As Salt understood, hygiene was essential if industrial towns were to be free from epidemics. In another forward step, he built two-bedroom houses so parents could have one room and children the other. Later he realized that two bedrooms were not enough; newer houses had a minimum of three bedrooms so girls could sleep separately from boys.

For old people he built 45 Victorian Gothic almshouses around a lawn with flower beds. Still reserved for senior citizens, these are now perhaps the prettiest houses in town, their doorways mobbed with baskets of petunias and edged by beds of roses and snapdragons and fuchsias.

One resident has tucked tiny dolls and elves among her flowers, giving her cottage a fairy-tale air that is scarcely out of place in a town where llamas and lions ornament so many buildings.

This flowery spot draws lots of visitors, and since the English are a nation of garden lovers, so do the ``allotments'' visible from Victoria Road. These vegetable plots are as carefully tended by their current owners as they were by the workers of the past. But while Salt promoted vegetable growing, he forbade his workers to keep hens, rabbits, and pigs. Though they were a popular way to get cheap food, they were also a source of smells and disease. Less logically, hanging washing out to dry was also forbidden. The bathhouse had laundry facilities, and Salt decreed washing had to be dried there.

The bathhouse has gone, but local historians like Woods have collected information about it. He explains, ``One old man did us a drawing. It showed pillars everywhere. We thought he was losing his memory: getting the bathhouse mixed up with the chapel. But then we found an old photograph and, sure enough, it looked just like a Greek temple. Typical of Salt!''

Another old-timer solved the riddle of Daisy, Myrtle, and Fern streets. Salt called his streets after himself, his wife, and his 11 children. Two streets were named after Lockwood and Mawson, the Bradford architects who built the town, and two others after the queen and prince consort. ``There was no Fern, Myrtle, or Daisy in the family, so why were the streets named after them?'' asked Woods. ``Eventually one of the people born here told us they were the maids in Salt's house.''

As for the name of the town, Salt created that by combining his name with the nearby River Aire.

But while Salt took care of so many things, he left no fund to maintain Saltaire. Within 17 years of his death in 1876, his business was bankrupt. The mills were bought and produced textiles until 1986, but many of Salt's philanthropies went by the board.

This neglect may have helped preserve Saltaire in its Victorian form. Today conservation orders protect the neat little streets and the giant buildings alike, and new uses revitalize them. Businessman Jonathan Silver, who bought Salt's Mill in 1986, rents part to a telecommunications company and parts to shops. The Hockney galleries were his idea, and the visitors who come to see them have helped bring prosperity to the town.

As Woods said, ``Saltaire is as unique today as ever. It's one of the few towns where urban renewal is driven by the arts.'' He is not just thinking of Hockney. The Victoria Institute now hosts craft shows and performances of dance and music. Saltaire is on England's A650, which connects to the M606 and M62. Trains link it to Leeds and from there to London. Buses travel to Bradford, Leeds, and Haworth, the nearby moorland village where visitors can see the parsonage where the Bronte sisters lived. Indeed, Saltaire itself, like most of the little industrial towns of Yorkshire and neighboring Lancashire, is within sight of the moors. As Woods noted when he explained why the town had battled the local authority over a proposal to develop housing, ``Those moors are really part of Saltaire. Salt chose this spot so his workers could enjoy the countryside.''