Saltaire is still, for lots of reasons, a desirable place to live. It's a thriving and creative community, and the houses, built in the mid-1800s as homes for the mill workers at Salts Mill, remain comfortable. Many are quite small but they are sought after by young people starting out on the housing ladder and by a few older people choosing to downsize.
Wandering through the streets, I often wonder what it must have felt like to those early residents, moving from the disease-ridden slums of the city out to what was then truly a 'greenfield site'. The village was well planned and relatively spacious; its homes comfortable, with plenty of light and their own private backyards.
From the bottom of the streets, you still see the green of Hope Hill rising up, across the other side of the river. I wonder if it felt like 'a land of hope and glory' to those hard-working folk who first lived here?
Moving to Saltaire must have made a big difference to their lives, probably a kind of "before" and "after" when they thought back about what it had been like.
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