Upcoming meetings and events

4 September 2025 - Sir James Roberts' farewell to Saltaire and Two pioneers of women's education

Ian Watson told us about how Sir James Roberts gradually said goodbye to Sataire between 1918-1922.

Roberts had been Salts Mill’s boss for 25 years when he sold the business and retired to Strathallan Castle in Perthshire.

But, for the next 4 years, Saltaire was never far away. He took on more responsibility for the Sir Titus Salt Trust, gave Saltaire Park to the people of Bradford, and much more.

A selection of letters, loaned to the Saltaire Collection from his family, allows an insight into these activities.

Pauline Ford  introduced us to two leaders of women's education in Saltaire and the country - Catherine Salt and Medina Griffiths. 

Both were at the cutting edge of women accessing education.

Catherine was a lifelong supporter and worker to this end with both the Bradford Girls' Grammar School and Salt Girls' High School.

Medina, as the first headteacher of the Salt Girls' High School, had very few, if any, role models for running such a school, but delivered good results.

5 June 2025 - 69 George Street

People's lives are so much more interesting than soap operas and our speaker Sue Steel proved it!

69 George Street has seen court cases, an illegal marriage (or was it?), suicide, non-British inhabitants (or were they?), lodgers, and changes of employment.

6 March 2025 - Jonathan Glyde

Bradford’s first two mayors had much in common. Robert Milligan and Titus Salt were successful millowners, Liberals, and Congregationalists. They even attended the same chapel on Little Horton Lane (left above). This was no coincidence. The minister was Jonathan Glyde whose religion included campaigning for exploited woolcombers and for public parks.
 
Janet Senior told us his story. And she also introduced us to his younger brother, William Evans Glyde, a partner in Titus Salt, Sons and Co until 1865, and a resident of houses close by the village, in Victoria Park and on Moorhead.

5 December 2024 - The Fall and Rise of Bradford Beck

Our guide was campaigner extraordinAire, BARNEY LERNER

Barney is Chair of the Friends of Bradford’s Becks, a group that has been raising awareness of and improving the becks in and around Bradford since 2012. In his working life, he was Professor of Environmental Engineering at Sheffield. In 2023, he was awarded an MBE for services to the environment in Bradford.

5 September 2024 - Sport in and around Saltaire

In September we welcomed John Dewhirst as our speaker. John is a prolific researcher/author on sports history in Bradford/Airedale.

There is a feast of Dewhirst articles to browse at https://johndewhirst.blog/features-about-bradford-sports-history/,

Also see VINCIT – an online journal focussed on Bradford’s sport history at https://bradfordsporthistory.com/

6 June 2024 - Leeds and Liverpool canal

In 2024 it’s 250 years since the Five Rise locks at Bingley opened. So what better subject for our next, face-to-face quarterly meeting than our local canals?

Our guest speaker will be Colin Thunhurst, a fully paid-up expert on the Leeds Liverpool Canal and its little sister, the Bradford Canal. His topic:
 

Fireside chats - online research talks from January to April 2024

Colin Coate's talk on 25 January (see below) was the first of four monthly online 'fireside chats' where local historians tell us something about their research into Saltaire and share some tips about how to go about doing research and accessing a wide range of sources of information.

Each meeting was online using Zoom.

Here's what was covered:

• 25 January - Saltaire Mills in the 1921 census
• 13 February: Altiplano to Airedale (tracing alpaca wool from Peru to Saltaire)
• 20 March: Land acquisitions of Titus Salt
• 18 April: Saltaire’s hospital and almshouses

18 April 2024 - Saltaire's Hopsital and Almshouses

Our third fireside chat focused on SALTAIRE’S HOSPITAL AND ALMSHOUSES in the company of researcher Caroline Perry.
 
Saltaire is not the only model village in Britain – but you have to look long and hard to find another that boasts a hospital and houses for the elderly. Certainly among the pioneering models, Saltaire’s provision for the sick and infirm stands out, and it continued well into the NHS era!
 
You can read Caroline’s paper on her research so far using the link below.
 

20 March 2024 - The land acquisitions of Titus Salt

Our March research 'fireside chat' was Ian Watson's work telling the tale of Saltaire’s location from the time Saltaire did not exist. It was moorland turned into productive farmland and Dixon Mill Lane led down to a weir on the Aire and to a fulling mill that used a waterwheel to harness that river’s power.

Ian’s The Land Acquisitions of Titus Salt is a gem of local history research. It’s the product of hard work in the West Yorkshire archives, revealing Salt’s purchases of more land than he needed, on both sides of the river.

Ian's research document is available from the Saltaire Collection website:

Download The land acquisitions of Titus Salt

7 March 2024 - 1872: When samurai came to Saltaire

May we introduce Ito Hirobumi who visited Saltaire as part of the Iwakura Embassy in October 1872? This picture, of Ito the samurai, was taken 9 years earlier.

After returning home, Ito became Japan’s Prime Minister, not once but four times!

The extraordinary story of the Embassy was told by Les Brook at the Club meeting on 7 March.
 
You can read all about the Iwakura Embassy by downloading Les's account 
Download 1872: When samurai came to Saltaire

 

13 February 2024 - Steve Day: Altiplano to Airedale

Alpaca made Titus Salt’s fortune – but until Steve Day committed to his research, we knew next to nothing about how it got to Airedale and the consequences for indigenous Peruvians. Steve joined us by the online fireside to talk about his discoveries and the very varied sources he used to pursue his research.

You can download Steve’s two papers entitled Altiplano to Airedale parts 1 and 2 from the Club website:

Download Altiplano to Airedale: Introduction (PDF)

Download Altiplano to Airedale: Life on the Altiplano (PDF)

25 January 2024 - Colin Coates: Saltaire Mills in the 1921 Census

A local history legend and former Club chair, Colin did not leave Saltaire research behind when he left Britain for Australia 5 years ago. The internet saw to that.

And the internet was our saviour again, at 7.30pm on Thursday 25 January 2024 when Colin joi9ned us for a Zoom meeting. We’d asked him to talk about his approach to research and how he researches.

To make this concrete, he focused on SALTAIRE MILLS in the 1921 CENSUS – and there was an opportunity to fire questions directly at the man himself.

Colin's talk will be available on the Club's Youtube channel sometime in February - we'll add a link here when it's available.

7 December 2023 - Saltaire's houses: Built for 19th century workers...still fit to live in?

Our December Club meeting will be tackling today’s Saltaire housing issues at the same time as exploring the past. We’ll consider the problems of yesterday that Titus Salt set out to solve by creating a planned workers' village.

But we’re also going to confront the challenges of living in that same Victorian village today. Can Saltaire’s houses be made to work for residents in the C21st ? We’d love you to contribute to the debate.
 
Venue: Saltaire Methodist Church lounge. The church fronts Saltaire Road BD18 3HJ. The lounge is at the rear.
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7 September 2023 - Frances Brody: Where does history stop and fiction start?

Frances Brody, author of 13 Kate Shackleton mysteries, talked about her latest novel 'A mansion for murder'. It's set in Saltaire and features dark deeds at Milner Field, the home on the outskirts of Bingley that was built for Titus Junior and Catherine Salt.

Frances will talked about the tricky problem of writing historically-set fiction and having to pass from fact into fiction to tell a gripping story.

7 June - The closure of Salts Mill

Ian Beesley, one of Bradford’s finest photographers and honorary fellow of The Royal Photographic Society, showed The Closure of Salts Mill.

The photograph shows a machine being dismantled in Salts Mill in the mid-1980s. Used with permission and copyright Ian Beesley.

2 March 2023 - The Mechanic's Institute Movement and the Bradford Institute

Our speaker was Tricia Restorick, President of the Bradford Mechanics Institute, the first woman to become President in its 181-year history.

Mechanic's Institutes were everywhere in Victorian Britain – so where’s Saltaire’s? Well, Victoria Hall of course, formerly known as The Institute.

"There’s no of course about it!", says the Saltaire historian. "It was never a Mechanic's Institute".

Now there’s a challenging debate – which we asked Tricia to address whilst she’ll also be telling us about the role the mechanics institutes played.

The image is of the now demolished Bradford Mechanics Institute on Bridge Street, Bradford.

8 December 2022 - Voices from Saltaire's past

What better way to learn about Saltaire’s history than to listen to the people who were there?

So we invited several of them along to our December meeting where Henry Stolworthy was the  host.

Arriving in Bradford from Norfolk in 1839 at the age of 4, Henry and his family lived in this house next to Salt’s Hollings Mill in Goitside. Around 1854, the Stolworthys moved into one of the first of Saltaire’s houses. Henry spent decades working in Salts Mill and was superintendent of its fire brigade.

Henry has asked John Unwin to come along. John’s a private man but kept a diary of everyday life, so who better to tell us the price of bacon in 1894, or how much he gave the wife each payday?

Since they lived in Saltaire at much the same time, John might well have known the Kendall family. Maybe we’ll find out, because Harold Kendall will be with us. Harold became an overlooker at the mill – and to do that he had to study for several years at Saltaire’s Technical School. We’re expecting him to tell us what it was like.

Henry tells us there will be others… a woman from Italy who came to Salts soon after World War Two. And a chap who’s still alive!! He’s been invited because he saw and photographed one of Saltaire’s biggest milestones, the closure of Salts Mill.

15 September 2022 - The Saltaire Collection: past, present and future

To many Club old-timers, the Saltaire Collection is still the 'Saltaire Archive' – and the Learning Resource Centre (where we met on the 15th) is ‘the Library’.

But Lesson #1 is that history does not stand still!

What was a brave little archive will soon be a registered museum. Collection Trustee and Saltaire historian Maggie Smith told us how it all started and where her team is taking us.

And we did that literally next door to the maps, documents and images – a selection of which was a major feature of the evening.

6 July 2022 - Saltaire's allotments: a core feature of the model village

A small group of Club researchers has been working on the history of the village’s allotments – and their significance as part of a Victorian model village.

Club secretary Les Brook presented their findings which include:

• The discovery of allotments now lost
• A long-disappeared but substantial collection of piggeries
• The theft of pigeons!
• A Saltaire house you’ve never heard of
• Fowls of the Sultan and Golden Spangled Hamburghs.

And history continues to be made – by Veg on the Edge and our Shipley Town Council which is now responsible for the allotments – so the audience heard about those developments too.

A paper on the history of the village allotments can be viewed and downloaded from our Research publications page.

3 March 2022 - maps, maps, maps and more maps

Amongst the most valuable sources of historical information are maps.
 
And at the Club’s March meeting in March we were knee deep in them.
 
Three of the very best experts on local maps were with us – to let us into their cartographic historical discoveries and to show off a selection of their favourites. And the Saltaire Collection  added theirs too.

 

11 and 12 September 2021 - Celebrating Saltaire World Heritage Site’s 20th anniversary with a tour of the Dining Hall

During the 2021 Heritage Open days, the Club organised tours of the Dining Hall building in conjunction with the Saltaire Collection.

Today, the Dining Hall has become Shipley College’s ‘Mill Building’ but it retains many original features and has a terrific story to tell.

For many years before Saltaire’s other public buildings were built, the Dining Hall was also used as a school, a meeting place, library, reading room, a venue for religious services and numerous social events and political debates.

After changes to the building at the end of the 19th century, the Dining Hall’s new upper floor continued to provide social space for everything from boxing tournaments to flannel dances, and a buffet for the adjoining railway.

Paul Jennings is the author of "The Local: A History Of The English Pub" and "Bradford Pubs" so who better to speak to us about The Pub in Titus Salt's Bradford?

Image credit: Bradford Local Studies

And just in case anyone thinks this a trivial topic, please note these facts – that in nineteenth century Bradford, pubs were frequently used by coroners to conduct inquests; that a Bradford directory of 1822 listed the “Inns houses [sic]" of the “Manufacturers attending the Piece Hall”; that Bradford’s beer houses were so notorious by mid-century that a man called Salt decided he’d do without one when he built a village for his workforce.

The President of the Halifax Antiquarians David Glover introduced us to the Crossleys and their close links to the Salts.