A relatively rare lull in the traffic on Saltaire Road... This is the A657, a busy through-route linking Shipley with Bramley about eight miles away, on the outskirts of Leeds.
It used to be the Shipley to Bramley turnpike road, a toll road built in 1827, before Sir Titus Salt started to purchase the land on which he built Saltaire. His first purchase in 1850 was land to the north (the left of my photo), between the turnpike road and the River Aire, including Dixon's Mill, the corn and fulling mill that stood by the weir where the New Mill is today. Between the 1850s and 1870s he gradually added to his early land acquisitions and, as it was steadily constructed from the mill up the hillside, his township of Saltaire spread out on both sides of the turnpike road. Saltaire Road looks very different these days from how it would have looked in Victorian times. Originally it would have been farmland and some quarries. Then, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, it was gradually filled with terraced housing and commercial buildings. Of these, apart from the original Saltaire houses, the Shipley Board School and a few remaining Edwardian terraces, little remains. Large scale demolition took place in the 1960s and modern flats were built at Wycliffe Gardens, opposite the school.
I like that view.
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