(majestic music) I'm Dr. Onyeka Nubia, and I'm an historian.

And I'm walking through Britain to reveal a fascinating period in our history.

The Victorians shaped modern Britain.

I'm searching for the innovation, the technology, and the industry that the Victorians gave us.

(woman) It's the oldest working engine in the world, so it's really a jewel in our collection.

(Dr. Nubia) For good and for bad.

(Colin) If you get your finger caught in the belt, you get the fingers off.

(Dr. Nubia) I'm going explore this era that is as complicated as it is fascinating.

(soft, grim music) (energetic music) This time I'm in Northern England, exploring a Victorian industry from two different regions, both so dominant that they shape towns and cities to this day.

This region was the center of a textile industry with cotton on one side of the Pennines...

It's like a football pitch of machines.

And on the other side, wool.

(Maria) By 6:00 a.m., he had 3,500 people working in the mill.

(Dr. Nubia) This is a walk through the creation of northern powerhouses who left the most extraordinary legacies.

♪ My journey starts on the west side of the Pennines, 20 miles north of Manchester.

By the dawn of the Victorian age, the town of Burnley had established itself as a major producer of cotton cloth.

And with Burnley and its mill town neighbors, Lancashire had become the cotton-weaving center of the world.

The Victorian economy depended on it.

♪ Cotton made Britain's Industrial Revolution happen.

But what is cotton?

Well, it's quite uninspiring, as you can see.

And cotton isn't grown around here.

Nowhere in Britain can you find cotton growing.

It is grown in other countries outside of Europe, mostly the Americas or the Caribbean, South America, or Asia.

So how did this product come to dominate Britain's Industrial Revolution so strongly?

(energetic music) With Liverpool as its hub, raw cotton and finished products could flow in and out of Lancashire's network of mill towns.

On this walk, I'll explore how the industry worked here in Burnley, before I venture across the Pennines and into the wool industry of West Yorkshire.

I'll see the world's largest carpet factory in Halifax before stopping at the wool capital of Bradford and taking in the largest silk mill in the Victorian world, before finishing at the model village of Saltaire.

But here on the outskirts of Burnley, the turning of raw cotton into useful cloth was all-important.

Queen Street Mill is the world's last surviving steam-powered weaving mill.

It's where I'm going to meet one of its weavers, Colin Stevens.

-Good morning, Colin.

-Good morning.

-Welcome to Queen Street Mill.

-Fantastic.

It's like a football pitch of machines, just from end to end.

It's like stepping back in time, but then you see this every day.

(Colin) Yeah, I see it every day.

(Dr. Nubia) Colin, I'd really love you to give me a walk around this place.

What's that you're wearing?

-Are those clogs?

-Clogs, yeah.

These are clogs.

Everybody'd wear these at Victorian times.

And even when I were young, we used to wear these clogs.

(Dr. Nubia) Wow.

Throughout the 18th century, textile manufacturing was a mechanized process powered primarily by water.

But by Victoria's reign, another source of power became king: steam.

How do these looms work?

(Colin) These looms would be running off of steam.

So they'd run on that shaft there, -that big shaft along there.

-Okay.

How many machines are there?

(Colin) In here now, there's just over 300.

(Dr. Nubia) 300 machines.

(Colin) When it were running at the beginning, -they'd be running a thousand.

-A thousand!

(Colin) A thousand looms.

(Dr. Nubia) So is there a steam engine?

(Colin) Yeah, there's a steam engine to run this.

(Dr. Nubia) That gives the power to make these-- (Colin) To make these turn.

(Dr. Nubia) And then that rotation causes... -These belts to run on these.

-Right.

And the leather-- is it leather straps?

(Colin) Leather straps, yeah, they're all running on leather straps.

(Dr. Nubia) The leather straps power-- (Colin) Power these looms, yeah.

(Dr. Nubia) Ah, so they all work in unison, do they?

-Yeah.

-Or they work independently?

(Colin) All unison, every one of them.

(Dr. Nubia) The Queen Street Mill operated for 88 years before ceasing its production of textiles in 1982.

Today, in one corner of the mill, there's one loom that's still up and running.

(Colin) Before I start the loom, I'm gonna have to oil the spindle with a feather.

(Dr. Nubia) Why is it a feather?

(Colin) So it won't cost the manufacturer any money.

If you were using paint brushes or brushes, it costs you money, whereas that costs you nothing, and that's all you need it for.

Just to oil what we call a spindle.

(machine rattling) It's all said and done for.

(machine whirring) (soft music) ♪ (Dr. Nubia) Just one machine working.

(Colin) Yeah, this is just one.

The sound of this machine, you can multiply that by 999 and you get the-- -you can imagine the sound.

-Yeah.

All of the looms used in this mill were manufactured locally.

(Colin) These are Pemberton looms made in Burnley.

And then you've got Harling and Todd, which is these looms.

These are Harling and Todd looms.

These were built in Burnley.

(Dr. Nubia) And just like the looms, the weavers who worked here were also local.

Me grandmother, she were a weaver, and she wove on these particular-- these type of looms, Lancashire looms.

(Dr. Nubia) Lancashire looms.

So that goes back, what, a hundred years?

That'd be going back, yeah, a hundred years, yeah.

(Dr. Nubia) As I tour this factory, I'm beginning to see how this region gained its reputation for producing the country's best quality cotton.

(Colin) So this is the warehouse.

This is where their old cloth was stored.

(Dr. Nubia) And I looked at the sign, it said the "cloth-looker."

-Yeah.

-So who's that?

(Colin) So that'd be a cloth-looker who'd work on this machine, who'd look at the cloth, make sure there were no faults in the cloth.

(Dr. Nubia) And if there were faults?

(Colin) They'd bring the weaver in.

They would get told off, or in Victorian times they'd get fined it for it.

(Dr. Nubia laughs) -It sounds hard.

-It were.

(Dr. Nubia) Although the looms were capable of running for up to 14 hours a day, their design wasn't perfect, and occasionally they became blocked.

(Colin) So there'd be a big build-up of what-- Lancashire's term for this is down, -which is cotton.

-Cotton, yes.

The responsibility of clearing up the cotton often fell to the children.

So the children having to sweep that away would have to negotiate the danger of the machine.

(Colin) Yeah, they would.

So, you can see danger in-- when the belts are running 'round.

So what kind of injuries do you think people would get in the Victorian period?

(Colin) Probably if you get your finger caught in the belt, especially little children, they get their fingers off, or trapped, trapped in the machine.

(soft, somber music) ♪ (Dr. Nubia) Unfortunately, freeing a child caught up in the mechanics of a loom was no easy task.

'Cause when these machines start, they don't stop, do they?

-It's hard to stop them.

-It's hard to stop 'em, yeah.

You'd be looking at about two minutes, probably, before you could send a message up to the engineer.

Yeah, there's a human cost to progress.

-Yeah.

-Yeah, a social cost.

♪ Tragically, the 19th century saw thousands of children killed or mutilated as they worked around the machines of heavy industry.

So the Victorians learnt to industrialize cotton, and these sorts of mills were fundamental to that development.

There was progress involved, but also there was suffering, and both go hand-in-hand in the Victorian period.

(energetic music) I'm on a walk from Lancashire to West Yorkshire, discovering how the Victorian textile industry came to dominate this region.

During the 19th century, finished cotton became Britain's greatest export, and Lancashire was at the center of that industry.

But cotton doesn't grow in Lancashire.

♪ And that left the county and its economy in a precarious place.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, the supply of cotton from across the Atlantic ground to a halt.

In the Victorian period, Britain's Industrial Revolution in towns and cities such as Burnley was dependent on cotton.

They needed cotton to grow.

But in 1862, there was a cotton famine.

This meant that cotton wasn't being imported.

The result was that there was poverty.

Many of the people of Burnley suffered and ended up in workhouses.

Workhouses in Burnley are believed to date back as far as the 1730s, but they grew in number with the arrival of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, a piece of legislation intended to centralize the way that poverty was managed.

By 1847, the workhouses of Burnley and its neighboring town of Padiham housed over 300 residents, who at the time were called inmates.

Now, what were workhouses?

They were the places where you ended up when you were poor or destitute or you had nowhere else to live.

In the Victorian period, being poor and being idle was a crime.

And so you had the rise of workhouses that sort of offered to "care" in very inverted commas for those most destitute.

And these were punitive places.

The idea was to punish you, was to be so horrible, the workhouse to be such a nasty environment, that you would never want to go there and that you would, you know, buckle up your bootstraps and get on working.

(Dr. Nubia) It's clear the history of Burnley is more than just industrial mills.

The cotton industry created an entire community.

Alongside the workhouses, there was the question of education, so I'm walking three miles south to the Weavers' Triangle Visitor Centre to meet the chairman, Brian Hall, in a recreated Victorian schoolroom.

(Brian) Good afternoon.

(Dr. Nubia) What makes this a Victorian school?

(Brian) Well, I would say mainly the furniture and the equipment.

It's very small for a Victorian schoolroom, most of which were extremely large and had large numbers of children in them, often a hundred or more.

Is it that the children were required to attend schooling, or would school have been thought of as an additional thing that they do?

To start off with, nobody had to go to school.

It was purely voluntary.

By the time they had got to the nines, tens, they would almost certainly be to work.

Children were just little adults, and people treated them in that sort of way.

(Dr. Nubia) Before the 1800s, education in Britain was not free.

Poor children often relied on Sunday school.

In the 1880s, that came to an end with the introduction of the Education Act.

This made school compulsory for all children under the age of 10.

However, the decision wasn't well-received by some of the country's factory owners, and poor families often relied on the children's income too.

Three years later, a new act had to be passed to compel children to attend school.

(Brian) A system was introduced known as half-time, when the children would-- half the week would go to school and the other half of the week would go to work.

In Burnley, of course, it would almost certainly have been in a mill.

So, during half-time, would you divide up your time between school and working?

(Brian) Usually it was half a day doing education, and the other half of the day going to the mill.

(Dr. Nubia) So the school would have been attached to the factory?

In Burnley, we do know there were one or two schools that were actually attached to a mill.

There were mentions of a schoolroom at Victoria Mill, and another factory on the edge of the town, the Dugdales' Factory, that had a schoolroom attached to it.

What do you call this?

-Uh, well, it's a slate.

-A slate, yeah.

(Brian) They were made out of slate.

Of course, the advantage was the child did its writing or its sums on, then when it was done they could be rubbed off.

And they were written on using another piece of slate.

And it's not very clear.

And, of course, they could make quite a noise, and sometimes they made a horrible squeak.

Quite often I think they were expected to bring to school a small piece of rag or a sponge to wipe it with.

If not, they had to use-- use the sleeve.

(Dr. Nubia) And the inkwell?

(Brian) Uh, the inkwells, of course, once a child had become a bit more proficient at using the slate, they would go on to an inkwell.

And the pens that were used were these dip pens, which were not the easiest things to use.

(Dr. Nubia) Interestingly, as much as the school materials may have changed, some things remain almost identical.

What kinds of things, apart from the three Rs, would they learn?

So, one day, arithmetic dictation, reading, arithmetic dictation.

-Geography.

-Right.

But when it came to physical education, the Victorians did it differently.

I think occasionally on Friday afternoon, two of the classes did drill.

(Dr. Nubia) Drill.

What would be required-- Is this military-style drill?

Yeah, I think so.

I think on the whole it was quite very much military style, sort of one, two, three type thing.

It wasn't the sort of PE that we would expect today.

(Dr. Nubia) And the purpose of that was for discipline?

Well, partly, but I suppose it was partly sort of to develop better, stronger bodies, stronger people.

(Dr. Nubia) It's almost time for me to leave Burnley, but before I do, there's one unlikely location I have to visit.

Half a mile east, the home of a Premier League football team.

Turf Moor has been the home of Burnley Football Club since 1883.

At this time, the national game underwent a radical transformation.

Football began as a gentleman's sport before it became a national pastime.

The rules of football were created in the public school of Eton in 1849.

But in the 19th century, during the Victorian period, working class mill towns like this began to dominate the football league.

Driving this change were wealthy men who came from outside of the sport.

In 1883, local mill workers got together with industrialists here in Burnley to form Burnley Football Club.

Almost immediately it was in competition with other towns, other cities, and their football clubs.

Football became a medium by which the industrialists could compete with each other.

Today, the industrial north boasts a plethora of Britain's most successful football teams.

Now it's time for me to take the leap to the other side of the Pennines to Halifax in West Yorkshire.

We're here in Halifax outside this magnificent building.

In the Victorian period, towns like this became very influential and very powerful.

But in this town, the industry wasn't cotton.

(soft, bright music) ♪ This massive structure was created on the back of another industry, the wool industry.

Unlike cotton, wool is England's ancient industry, and was the backbone of its economy.

♪ I believe in the Victorian period that the woolen industry here helped to support the development of the cotton industry, and the skills and the abilities that the working class learnt in the production of wool enabled them to cross over into the production of cotton.

But the same was true in reverse.

The technology driving cotton production helped lift the wool industry to a whole new level.

This is Dean Clough Mills, once home to John Crossley and Sons.

By the end of the 19th century, this was the largest carpet factory in the world.

It's where I'm meeting the Chairman and Managing Director Jeremy Hall.

-Hello, Jeremy.

-Onyeka, good morning.

-How are you?

-Very well.

(Dr. Nubia) So this place seems steeped in history.

Can you tell me a little bit about it?

(Jeremy) Absolutely.

I think the wonderful thing about these mills is they're so much a part of the place.

They're called Dean Clough Mills.

Dean and Clough are both Old English words which, in essence, mean valley and ravine.

And they quarried the stone from this valley to create these mills.

In 1822, John Crossley and Sons, they first of all occupied a building on the lease and then subsequently they purchased it, subsequently demolished it, and then built through the rest of this enormous site.

(Dr. Nubia) Constructed between the years of 1840 and 1870, the purpose of the entire 22-acre site was carpet manufacturing.

When you think of the Industrial Revolution, you think of cotton.

You know, cotton is king, you know, cotton is the master of the British Empire.

But we're not talking about cotton, are we?

No, we're not.

The Pennines are synonymous with wool, and you have the two combinations of the wonderful Pennines, the hills, and the sheep farming, and then the water, which is obviously very prevalent in all the valleys.

(Dr. Nubia) Carpets from this factory were shipped across the globe from China to South America, Egypt, and the Caribbean.

The quality was so high, they were even enjoyed by Queen Victoria on the floor of Buckingham Palace.

(soft music) (Jeremy) One of the products that they created was called the Sultana carpet, which was sort of ultimate quality.

And I know of people who said, well, their mother had one and it was in their front room for 50 years.

(Dr. Nubia) In order to sustain their global business, John Crossley and Sons ensured they were in control of every step of the manufacturing process.

(Jeremy) One of the interesting things about the Crossley business when it was here, that they dealt with everything from the raw wool right the way through.

So they did every part of the process, from bringing the raw wool through to the finished carpets.

How did they manage to bring the wool in and the finished wool and goods out?

(Jeremy) It came in at the far end of the site, and it would have come in on carts, you know, into the buildings there.

There was a transport system that helped to make this industry work.

The railways were part of that.

(Jeremy) Yes, the Crossleys, as a part of the evolution of the site, there was a viaduct built in order to connect up with the mainline railways, and there's still areas within the site where you can see where the lines are and the trucks were and everything else, yeah, so very much part of it.

(Dr. Nubia) So that was a kind of revolutionary thing in the sense of using what was modern transportation at the time to make this industry work.

And in the end, this giant Halifax business ran for 180 years.

This site was in operation as recently as 1982, and the legacy that they carved out of this valley lives on.

(soft music) So the point is that this history is still alive.

(Jeremy) The history is very much alive, and it's very much a part of the community in which we all live and breathe.

(Dr. Nubia) Fantastic.

So there was a community here in the 19th century, and there's still a community here in the 21st century.

From one side of the Pennines to the other, I'm on a walk through the Victoria textile industry that created a northern powerhouse.

And here in West Yorkshire, I've reached a key point: the city of Bradford.

I'm here in what became the center of the Victorian textile industries.

The industrialists here were very smart.

They developed an infrastructure that made industrial development work.

At the start of the 19th century, Bradford was a market town with a population of 16,000.

By the end of the century, the Victorians had created 350 mills here.

Bradford was the biggest wool producer in Britain, and the center of its wool trade.

The city's key product was known as worsted, a high-quality, fine, smooth yarn.

And they began to develop these monumental statements to their economic power, and these statements are all over the city.

Look at them.

This says that Bradford has arrived.

So far, my walk has taken me to the world's last surviving steam-powered weaving mill, and on to a Victoria schoolroom, before stopping off at the 19th century's largest carpet factory.

But now I'm heading just outside the center of Bradford to an area with a very particular role in shaping the city's Victorian grandeur.

So here we are surrounded by these impressive Victorian buildings.

These buildings are clearly trying to make a statement about the Victorian period, commerce, business, and industry.

Who were the people that built them?

Why did they build them?

And what does it tell us about the Victorians?

(energetic music) In the 1850s, this area was a magnet for Bradford's affluent business community.

And I'm meeting Bradford University historian, Professor Munro Price.

So we're in Little Germany, but how is there a Little Germany in Bradford?

(Munro) Because by the time the Industrial Revolution really got going in Yorkshire, Bradford was the global wool capital.

And a lot of wool merchants from Germany, which was very specialized in the marketing of wool, spotted a really good commercial opportunity.

500 of them came with their families between the 1820s and the 1860s.

And they basically put Bradford on the global market.

(Dr. Nubia) Once here, they built 85 grand, Italian-influenced warehouses to store their worsted.

So the warehouses were actually here where we're standing.

-Yes.

-Oh, that's fantastic.

(Munro) They had a dual purpose.

The main purpose was to store the actual cloth produced from the wool that they would then export all over the world.

But they also doubled as offices and showrooms where potential buyers would come and inspect the wool over the counter.

(Dr. Nubia) They're extraordinarily grand.

Just to sell wool?

(Munro) Just to sell wool.

And also a bit of-- a bit--a bit of ego boosting as well.

These wool merchants were very, very wealthy men, they were millionaires, and they wanted to build monuments to themselves.

And these enormous warehouses are, I think to a degree, fantastic monuments.

When we think of the 19th century and we think of industrialists in the 19 century, we have an idea about who they are, and it isn't necessarily German wool merchants -in Bradford.

-Absolutely not.

But I think the key thing about that is that the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about Britain.

Britain is where it started.

Britain wouldn't have become the workshop of the world, also the warehouse of the world, if it hadn't had a global market.

(Dr. Nubia) In Victorian Bradford, trade boomed, and its German merchants handled 80% of all exported British worsted.

Do we know the names of any of these families?

Yes, indeed, there are some-- there are some very famous names of people who had local and indeed national importance.

Now, someone like Sir Jacob Behrens was passionate about music, so he and his son were absolutely instrumental in founding one of the great British orchestras that began in the north, which is the Hallé Orchestra.

The other thing that Jacob Behrens did is as a Bradford home for the Hallé Orchestra, but also for other orchestras and musical performances, he helped build St George's Hall in the center of Bradford.

(Dr. Nubia) Bradford's wool trade reached its peak late in the 19th century.

And as you can see today, the architectural and cultural legacy of that time is still with us.

So when did this business go into decline?

Perhaps the decisive moment, a lot of historians are thinking today, was with the outbreak of World War I.

Like all Germans in Britain at the time, they were rounded up, the Bradford Germans, they were locked up.

They were taken to a barracks so that--so that they were under surveillance for a bit.

But in the longer term, these German wool merchants being taken out of their places of work meant that the trading routes between Britain and Germany on which so much of Bradford export trade depended, got disrupted, actually, forever, and never recovered.

(energetic music) (Dr. Nubia) It was the end of a quite extraordinary and very lucrative chapter in Bradford's history.

But behind the great facade, there was another side to the wool industry in Victorian Yorkshire.

Its hundreds of mill chimneys made Bradford a toxic place to live and work.

Like other cities in Victorian Britain, the air was polluted, and stunted the growth of those who were born and grew up there.

My walk has now taken me two miles northwest, out of Bradford, to a giant landmark that added more than its fair share to the area's pollution.

This is Lister's Mill.

Built in 1871, it covered 13 acres and employed over 11,000 people.

And topping it off, a giant 250-foot chimney.

And it's where I'm meeting Bradford Museum Collections Manager Lizzie Llabres.

(majestic music) -Hello, Lizzie.

-Hi, Onyeka.

-It's lovely to meet you.

-Hi.

Was this all a mill?

(Lizzie) All of this was part of the Lister's Mill complex.

Lister's Mill was a vertical mill, which meant it did the entire process from start to finish, dealing with raw wool to finished dyed product, and it was all done on this site.

(Dr. Nubia) This mill was owned by the inventor and industrialist Samuel Cunliffe Lister.

Some people think of Bradford as a wool city, but Bradford doesn't just produce wool.

No, it's not just manufacturing wool.

Lister's is producing silk.

It was believed to be the largest silk factory in the world when it was constructed in 1871.

He's also inventing machines to use silk waste.

So he's taking something that most people can't use that he's able to acquire quite cheaply, and he's able to produce really, really high-quality silk.

(Dr. Nubia) Lister was one of the giant figures of Victorian Bradford.

His innovations revolutionized the textile industry.

But at what cost?

(soft, somber music) What was it actually like living here?

Pretty horrible.

Bradford was known for being one of the dirtiest and filthiest places in the UK.

Visitors that came to Bradford described it as, "Purgatory for the working classes."

It was a pretty horrendous place to live.

(Dr. Nubia) Bradford's population had grown so rapidly, housing did not keep pace with demand.

The result was slum housing with poor sanitation.

♪ People were living in really poor conditions.

They have basically slum landlords who were not cleaning out their outhouses.

So some houses around here might have had 12 people living in one 15-foot room sharing one toilet.

Now if you'll imagine the state of the effluence coming out of that.

And then in bad weather, the toilets in the housing flooding.

So you've got sewage in the streets, effectively, flooding the houses where they live.

They're not getting good quality food, so people are malnourished.

And the air is very, very polluted as well.

So people are not healthy as it is, so it's really, really easy for them to contract cholera and typhoid.

(Dr. Nubia) A notable cholera outbreak took place in Bradford, and more than 420 people died and many more were infected.

It has a serious impact on public health.

Most children are not reaching the age of 15, so it's around 30% of children born to mill workers are reaching the age of 15, which is dire.

And the average life expectancy in Bradford is about 18 years old.

(Dr. Nubia) Bradford's slowness to tackle these problems was because profit mattered more than people's welfare.

In the final decade of the Victorian age, Lister himself acted in a typically hard-nosed fashion during a slump in the textile trade.

He decides to implement wages cuts for his female workers predominantly.

-When was this?

-1890.

-Wages cut.

-Wage cuts.

The mill workers go on strike, and his solution is, "Well, I've got enough money, so I'm gonna shut the factory for three months."

The mill workers are starving and they're forced to come back to work on the lower wages because he's able to shut the factory, he's able to afford to do that.

And that, I think, says a lot about his priorities, -doesn't it?

-That's quite shocking.

And I've heard a lot of shocking things.

(Lizzie) He's not well liked.

He's not a well-liked man, this Lister.

He has a bad reputation.

(Dr. Nubia) Unhappy with his reputation, Lister went to great lengths in the hope that people would remember him differently.

(Lizzie) He donates some land and money to build Cartwright Memorial Hall, because he wants the people to remember him as philanthropic.

He wasn't.

(laughs) (Dr. Nubia) But he wants them to remember him.

-Him, yes.

-Yeah.

So this, all this-- this place is a monument to him in many ways.

There's a tower.

Everything that's here.

(Lizzie) Yeah, absolutely.

This is his invention, really.

And all the pioneering work that he did, it was here.

(soft, somber music) (Dr. Nubia) The 19th century is full of industrial development in towns and cities such as Bradford.

And industrialists such as Lister believed that they were creating modern cities.

But their modern cities also had suffering in them, and they expanded their industry, but often at the expense of their workers.

(energetic music) I'm on the final leg of a walk that has crossed the Pennines from the cotton mills of Lancashire to Yorkshire's wool capital, Bradford.

I'm heading three miles north of the city to visit a village that's become well-known as one of Northern England's greatest Victorian experiments.

In the 1840s, a successful mill owner and local politician came looking for the perfect undeveloped site.

Here, he would build his great industrial and social legacy.

His name was Titus Salt.

Titus Salt was a 19th century industrialist, and he was concerned about the plight of the working people.

He saw the way that people lived in poor conditions and suffered with smog and the blight of industrialization, so he came to Bradford and built his own city with his own name in a way to get over all of these social conditions.

They call it Saltaire.

Salt knew that to make his revolutionary vision a reality, he needed a location that could provide his mill with water, and lots of it, and he found it on the banks of the River Aire, where I'm meeting tour guide Maria Glot.

(Maria) This was one of the main reasons why Titus Salt decided to build his perfect mill and model village here, because he needed good, clean running water.

(Dr. Nubia) And Salt chose this location because it ran alongside the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

(Maria) And, of course, the site also had the railway.

All the cloth comes into the docks at Liverpool, down the canal.

Site of the factory by the mill and the river.

Unload, production starts.

(Dr. Nubia) So, Titus so understood that he needed the river, the canal, and the railways.

(Maria) Transport.

Perfect site.

Integrated site.

Everything was here.

(Dr. Nubia) But this was just the beginning of Salt's master plan.

Soon after came houses.

824 of them.

A reservoir.

A 14-acre park.

Schools, religious buildings, and a hospital.

The work from these ambitious plans were completed in 1853.

Saltaire was officially opened on Salt's birthday.

(Maria) He actually requested that the mill be built in a T for Titus, because he knew wherever you stand on the Pennine Hills, you can look down and you don't doubt that this village belongs to him.

And then they said, "What are you gonna name your village, Mr.

Salt?"

He said, "I'm a modest man.

Salt after me and Aire after this lovely river."

You know, Saltaire sounds pretty good.

What was it like for the workers here?

They'd wake up at 5:00, and they'd knock you up, they'd bash on every door and window.

So by 6:00 a.m., he had 3,500 people working in the mill.

(Dr. Nubia) Salt realized that the success of his business relied on having a healthy workforce.

Remember, a lot of his workers were now starting to be very highly skilled at working machines.

They were doing patterns.

They were mechanics and engineers.

-Skilled workers.

-They were skilled.

-Yeah.

-A weaver or a wool sorter.

Oh my goodness, if you lost them, they were not easy to replace.

So therefore looking after them meant that they were more productive.

(Dr. Nubia) As Charles Dickens noted in 1857, "Salt not only cared for his workforce, he also controlled them."

(soft music) He wrote a lovely article, and he basically praised Titus, but he actually pointed out that Titus Salt had built a colony, a concertation camp, a way to control his workers.

He wanted complete control.

-It's his business.

-Right.

And it made him money, obscene amounts of money.

He had so much money.

But remember, no income tax.

Also, no health and safety.

No rules, no Monopolies Commission.

That man literally could get away with whatever he wanted.

(Dr. Nubia) So with the trade unions and the friendly societies and the other radical groups, what did they think of Saltaire?

(Maria) Oh, I don't think-- They weren't allowed in.

They weren't allowed in.

This was his.

You know, it's like me going into your house, I obey your rules.

Anyone came through his boundaries, they were immediately subjected to his rules.

(Dr. Nubia) So this meant that Saltaire was without public houses.

So when he built the village, he said, "I want everything for a complete and model village, but no pubs."

Why?

Because the unions met in pubs.

If you actually look around Bradford, you look at the pub names.

The Weavers, The Yarn Spinners, The Woolpack.

They were all union pubs.

The Joiners Arms, The Masons Arms, -The Blacksmiths.

-That's right, yeah.

And that's where the unions met.

They met in the back room of a pub.

Pubs were very, very important then.

And that's why he hated pubs.

Wasn't to do with alcohol, which is what he said, because he kept a beer and a wine cellar in the mill.

(soft, quirky music) (Dr. Nubia) In the Victorian times, Saltaire was built to be functional.

♪ It is now a highly desirable place to live.

And I notice there's shops.

(Maria) Yeah, he gave--he put 40 shops in the village.

-40?

-Yeah, on every corner, as we walk 'round, you'll see there's a corner shop.

So you earned the money and you paid him back.

You paid him back in rent, you bought goods from his shops.

Everything was him.

You paid for the hospital, you paid for the school, you paid for the library, you paid for everything.

So all of the money was recycled back to him.

(soft, somber music) (Dr. Nubia) As you walk around the residential streets of Saltaire, you can't help but notice the quality of the stone buildings.

♪ Who would live in these houses?

(Maria) Well, these are the workers' houses, but you had different types of workers.

And the streets reflect the type of worker.

Ordinary worker, improved worker, decorated workers, overlookers.

(Dr. Nubia) So, who were the overlookers?

(Maria) Well, can you see the three-story houses?

If you look 'round the village, on the ends is a tall house, in the middle a tall house.

Why?

He put lookout towers on the mill, and then there'd be lookout towers all the way around the village.

They kept little books and they'd write down misdemeanors, like if you swore you had to pay.

All kinds of things in those books.

You know, if a child stole something, the overlooker would get their whips out and they'd beat them.

(Dr. Nubia) So even the workers here couldn't escape the overlookers, 'cause the overlookers were living right next to them.

(Maria) They were your neighbors.

Absolutely.

(Dr. Nubia) In 1866, residents and workers, unhappy with their pay, went on strike.

(soft music) But this colony, as Dickens put it, achieved results.

And life in Saltaire guaranteed residents better living conditions with running water and improved sanitation.

(soft music) In 2001, Saltaire was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its international influence on town planning.

♪ Why are we saying that it didn't work?

(Maria) It didn't work because people hated the control here.

But on the other hand, it did work because of the way Titus showed people the way to live, with your water supply, with your clean housing, et cetera, your wide streets, that you would live longer.

If you lived here even for three months, you saw that this was the way to live.

And it's amazing how quickly, once people had lived and worked here, they went back to Bradford and they demanded and recreated these conditions.

"We want reservoirs.

We want clean water.

We want better housing."

So that's why Saltaire works really well.

It was the model for why you are living as you are today.

(soft music) (Dr. Nubia) Saltaire gives me a number of feelings, conflicting, contradictory feelings, about the Victorians, about the Victorian industrialists.

On one hand, Titus Salt seems to have an interest in making things better for his workers.

On the other hand, he seems to be a megalomaniac constantly trying to control everything.

What's undeniable is that Salt and his industrialist peers drove the world of textiles, both here and in Lancashire, an industry so dominant that it shaped the life, towns, and cities that we still find right across this region.

(majestic music) ♪ (bright music)