An award winning garden

On the canalside between Saltaire and Shipley there's a historic, Grade II listed, cluster of stone cottages called Jane Hills, built in stages between 1796 and the mid 1800s. One of them has a very tiny garden, but it is lovingly crammed with beautiful plants by its owner Kamal Hussain. Last year it was a finalist in the Garden of the Year awards and it won the BBC Gardeners World 'Gardens of the Year 2024 - People's Choice Award'. Despite the dry summer we've had, it is once again vibrant and interesting this year, with a huge variety of colourful plants. Kamal says he is inspired by David Hockney's use of colour. It also smells divine, with the fragrance of honeysuckle and jasmine wafting over the canal towpath as you pass by.  What a feast for the senses!

 

Summer garden

Just on the Shipley edge of Saltaire, on the canal side, there is a block of old cottages called Jane Hills, built in stages between 1796 and the mid 19th century. I took these two photos because I thought the garden was so pretty, with flowers spilling over the fence and a row of annuals brightening up the canalside. 

The picture below is one that I took about three years ago, though I don't think a lot has changed since then. I included it here to show the older cottages that sit at right angles to the ones in the pictures above. They say that at least one of them (the large house at the back in the bottom photo) was a lodging house for canal boatmen. The oldest building, adjacent to that house, is now a row of three cottages but (according to Historic England) used to be a cottage and a wool workshop, and you can see (photo above) the blocked up 'taking-in door' on the gable end where goods used to be loaded into the building from the canal. 

It must originally have been a fairly isolated and rural spot, until they built Salts Mill just along the canal in the early 1850s. Since then, mills and business premises have surrounded the cottages, though now, at the back, the HMRC building has been demolished and left as a rubble-strewn site. It may or may not one day become a residential area!