£1500 for a small lathe in 1870!! An ornamental lathe, and no doubt it was worth every penny.
I had a pleasant visit to Titus Salt’s Saltaire Mill, near Bradford, Yorkshire, last summer. It’s now a mixture of electronics manufacture, shops, galleries, cafés.
Salt was, for those times, a very caring employer, who made his fortune from the difficult business of spinning alpaca wool. West Yorkshire was famous for spinning and weaving wool, while Lancashire, on the other side of the Pennine Hills, did the same with cotton. Bradford was regarded as an even worse pit of poisoned misery than Manchester, so Salt built his new mill in the countryside outside Bradford, and established a well-planned village for his employees. He separated the houses from the mill by allotment gardens, so the workers could grow their own stuff. The allotment area can be seen in a photo below.
The village has eleven streets, each named after one of his children. I’m surprised he had time for his lathe.
One of the street names will appeal to us poms more than the N American members:-
Tourist information: if you’re in the area, you must also visit the nearby Bradford and Armley Mills (Leeds) Industrial Museums.
Titus Salt info:-
Salts Mill
The "Old" one !
saltairedailyphoto.blogspot.com
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