Rural remnants? Historical geographies of landscape significance at Saltaire (1853-c.1900) and the assembling of a peri-urban heritage site

Quinn, Ruth Louise

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between landscape, peri-urbanism and heritage significance at Saltaire (Bradford, UK), one of the largest and most complete model factory towns constructed in mid-Victorian England. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, parks, gardens and ‘the countryside’ at Saltaire have been framed by heritage and planning professionals as integral parts of the site’s authenticity as a historic industrial town. However, there has been very little critical scholarship examining the relationships between landscapes, both in and around Saltaire, and the site’s historical geography on a local scale.
Landscape forms a significant part of the materiality of the nineteenth-century industrial model village as an improved environment. However, interpreting nineteenth-century medico-moral understandings of the environment as a basis for heritage conservation obscures more critical understandings of the relationships between health, landscape, ‘the countryside’ and urbanisation. This thesis combines an empirical historical approach with an analysis of contemporary heritage narratives, drawing on the recent use of archival fragments to ‘read against the grain’ of grand narratives of industrial improvement. The historical analysis in this thesis examines the social and material formation of landscape at Saltaire between 1853 and 1900. During this period, the landscape of Saltaire was enmeshed in broader processes of industrialisation, farming, property development, alongside the rich local associations embedded in leisure practices in the Aire Valley. Crucially, my empirical analysis demonstrates that the ‘significance’ of landscape at Saltaire can be better understood through emergent processes of social relations and peri-urbanisation, which continue to shape Saltaire today.
The main body of this thesis focuses on three empirical case studies. In turn, these examine the moral geographies of landscape and health, rurality and the formation of the peri-urban fringe, and gardens and designed landscapes at Saltaire. These case studies demonstrate the tensions inherent in the creation of an ideal peri-urban assemblage which was at once both compact, green and ‘healthy’, yet also industrial, densely populated and expansive. The findings of this thesis contribute to scholarship concerned with the development of industrial model villages and the relationships between landscape, health, leisure and property relations within the mid to late nineteenth-century. More broadly, this thesis demonstrates the importance of critically understanding the complex relationship between the historiography of planned model settlements and dominant ideas about landscape, locality, heritage and the ‘character’ of a place.

Citation

Quinn, R. L. Rural remnants? Historical geographies of landscape significance at Saltaire (1853-c.1900) and the assembling of a peri-urban heritage site. (Thesis). University of Hull. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4790656

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Aug 22, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 22, 2024
• Keywords: Human geography
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4790656
• Additional Information: Department of Geography and Environment; University of Hull
• Award Date: Oct 1, 2021