Saltaire
— — a model village still doing what it was built for.
Not only on a wall.
“A Victorian mill village on the River Aire, built by Titus Salt in the 1850s to move his workers out of Bradford's smoke. The mill is still here, now full of David Hockney paintings and a bookshop. The grid of stone terraces still houses people. The canal runs past the mill. UNESCO listed the whole village in 2001 and nothing much has changed since. from the studio
Saltaire, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Saltaire is a Victorian model village on the River Aire and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, in the Shipley district of Bradford in West Yorkshire. The industrialist Titus Salt founded it in 1851 to move his alpaca-wool workers out of the smoke of central Bradford. Salts Mill opened in 1853, and the surrounding terraces of honey-coloured Yorkshire stone were laid out in a strict Italianate grid. UNESCO inscribed the village as a World Heritage Site in 2001, citing it as a complete and well-preserved example of a 19th-century industrial settlement.
The whole village is built from local sandstone, much of it quarried at nearby Idle, with slate roofs from Wales. Salts Mill itself is one of the longest industrial buildings in Yorkshire, 167 metres along its main façade, with an Italianate tower modelled on the campanile of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. The streets are named for Salt's family — Caroline, George, Edward, Titus — and the workers' houses include indoor water and a back yard, both rare in 1850s Bradford. The Congregational church on Victoria Road is a small classical rotunda completed in 1859.
Saltaire station sits on the Airedale line, a fifteen-minute train ride from Leeds or Bradford. The village is small enough to walk in an afternoon. Salts Mill reopened as a mixed-use building in 1987 and is free to enter; the 1853 Gallery on the first floor holds the largest permanent display of David Hockney's work in Britain, the artist having grown up in Bradford. Roberts Park sits across the river. The annual Saltaire Festival fills the streets each September with music and a Sunday market.