Saltaire: the model of a nineteenth-century city

Were he alive today, Titus Salt would likely be addicted to Sims games. Prior to computer-generated realities, very few people could claim to have designed a town, but Titus did so with style. Saltaire is named for the River Aire and for the man who inscribed “T” for Titus and “S” for Salt on almost every building in town. Titus Salt was the wealthy owner of Salts Mill, a nineteenth-century wool factory he had designed in the style of an Italian palace. When you’re rich, you can do those sorts of things. You can also build the church, the town hall, the school, and every other major structure in the shape of a “T” (with all the door handles “T” shaped for good measure), and you can have a bust of your face in as many places around town as you want.

When told I’d be moving to a mill town in northern England, I immediately thought of the smoky factories that ground human lives to dust during the Industrial Revolution. Manufacturing brought wealth and poverty in startling extremes to places like Manchester and Bradford. With rapid urbanization and poor sanitation, life expectancy in factory towns was around 20 years old, and cholera epidemics killed by the thousands. Then Mr. Salt hit the scene.

He was a successful manufacturer in Bradford, but the city was crowded and cholera was rampant. He wanted a clean start, so he bought three miles of land by the River Aire and the Leeds to Liverpool Canal. Get this—the houses for his workers were built on a grid. A grid! Most streets in England meander mindlessly, but Titus had a plan. There would be bathhouses, a washhouse, a hospital, almshouses, churches, a school, and a hall. He also had a retirement home for his aged employees, which was a completely new thing in the 1850s. There was no pollution in his town—all his chimneys consumed their own smoke. Each house had its own plumbing system (as opposed to everybody peeing in the river in Bradford). The workers had to follow a strict set of rules, and, Titus being a good Christian, insisted there be no drinking or pubs in town. (Today there is a pub in city limits called “Don’t tell Titus….”) Titus was not perfect. He employed children under the age of nine, which was illegal as of 1833, but since Titus was the constable and magistrate, he could pretty much do as he pleased. The kids went to school half the day, though, because he wanted to raise an educated workforce.

The mill:

Saltaire was, in fact, a very nice place to live. It remains so. It even smells nice, since every house has a garden and flowering trees abound. I’ve taken a number of local tours and learned about the nineteenth-century toboggan rides and rollercoasters that used to sit on top of the Shipley glen. Saltaire was famous for leisure as well. Titus built a beautiful park (with a huge statue of himself) for people to enjoy, and the town’s shops started to draw folks from all over the area. The mill is today an art gallery, café, antique store, and museum. Titus lives forever, of course, since how could you forget a man whose name is stamped everywhere? Saltaire was named an UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001. According to UNESCO: “Saltaire, West Yorkshire, is a complete and well-preserved industrial village of the second half of the 19th century. Its textile mills, public buildings and workers’ housing are built in a harmonious style of high architectural standards and the urban plan survives intact, giving a vivid impression of Victorian philanthropic paternalism.” And it’s my home for a few months more.

Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus was actually Shakespeare’s biggest hit. The Elizabethan Age favored brutality on stage and off. To get to the Globe Theatre, people had to cross London Bridge, passing underneath the severed heads of convicted traitors on spikes. The Globe was competing for an audience with other violent entertainment industries, such as the bloody pastime of bear baiting, so a play like Titus Andronicus—with its unrelenting negativity and cruelty—was actually just the thing to get the audience through the door. History did not treat the play well. In 1687, Edward Ravenscroft called it “a heap of rubbish.” T.S. Eliot in 1932 did not mince words, saying it was “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” Samuel Johnson summed it up: “The barbarity of the spectacles, the general massacre which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience.”

I’ve been reading the play all week, wondering just how the Globe’s production would make such themes as rape, mutilation, and cannibalism palatable on the stage. There is nothing at all redeeming in the plot. It starts with ritual human sacrifice and ends with mass murder, passing through every level of horror in the meantime. I’m surprised Quentin Tarantino hasn’t adapted it. So, I kept wondering—did I make a huge mistake getting tickets? Should I have just seen Much Ado About Nothing and called it a weekend?

I’m glad I didn’t. It was a bloody good time. As an audience member standing in the yard (a “groundling”), you did more than just watch characters moving around on stage—you were forced into the action. Hordes of Goths pushed past you to rebel against Tamora, and proud soldiers bore Titus through the crowd as he entered victorious into Rome. Every surface of the theatre was performance space. If you didn’t move out of the way for the moving platforms, you really would get crushed by them. At one point, a net was stretched from the front of the stage, and the audience standing on either side became the pit it was supposed to represent. The energy of the crowd was unreal. Our attention never wandered—we were captivated for three hours in this world of Rome and revenge.

Yes, there was blood. And fainting—lots of fainting. At the Q&A session, actor Brian Martin joked that “it’s like acting in a hospital ward.” Paramedics really were standing by. The fact that people were dropping like flies added to the comradery of the experience. After the show, people asked “did it affect you?” as much as they asked “did you enjoy it?” But we did enjoy it, and I’ll tell you why—because it was superbly done. All the characters were three dimensional and strongly motivated—this was not violence for violence sake. The crowd was fascinated by the deep psychological intelligence conveyed by the actors. I’ve seen dozens of great Shakespeare casts, but this one outstripped them all. In Titus Andronicus, the actors at the Globe had truly achieved something remarkable.

Reading the play and seeing the play are two vastly different experiences. Reading it is uncomfortable and uninspiring—you wish it had never been written. But when you see it, theater does what theater does best—it takes you to an extreme. Whether it be extreme love or extreme sorrow (or extreme vengeance in this case), theater pushes you to beyond the limits of reality. From this heightened perspective, you can see the human condition in ways your ordinary life does not allow. So what did Titus Andronicus teach me about the human condition? That humanity is capable of going to a deep dark place, and that we should run as fast as we possibly can in the opposite direction.

Here’s me with the actors who play the rapists — Brian Martin (left) and Samuel Edward-Cook (right). They did the Q&A session. Aren’t they adorable villains?