How far do the site evidence from Saltaire and the supporting documentary evidence available help you to understand why Saltaire was developed?

      However, the documentary evidence is also quite unhelpful in some contexts. Even though there are plenty of written accounts, there seems to be no written accounts from the people actually living in Saltaire. There is evidence about how nice the town is, but not what the villagers thought of it. We cannot discover there opinions on their living and working conditions, and on Salt himself, therefore we cannot see if the workers liked the new village, and whether they felt they were being controlled. Also, we have no recorded health information, to see if health conditions had improved compared to Bradford, and whether of the villagers suffered from diseases. We do not know if the improved conditions meant improved health, so whether Salt was actually keeping his workers healthy. Also, there are motives given by Salt himself, which might be slightly biased, because he obviously wouldn’t say any motives he had if they made him look bad, so he would never admit that he wanted control over his workers, even if this was the truth.

We can leard a lot from the site evidence. Looking at designs and buildings, we could come up with many different motives, and there is actual visual proof. For example, there are many monuments linked to him, his friends, and his family, which show he wanted to leave his mark. We can see the evidence, there are statues, family crests, and streets were named after his closest companions. We can see how he constructed it, and whether he made it for a nicer place for workers to live (by looking at the housing), ar whether his motives were different. We could also see many things which were significant to his motives, such as the size and quality of the houses, the entertainment and leisure activities, the church and school he provided, and the construction and design. I noticed a watchtower too, which backs up the theory of control. The only reason for the site evidence not to be useful would be that we could only see Saltaire as it is today, not how it was all those years ago. Back then it will have been very different to the people, and we cannot see how they saw it. To conclude, I would say that we can gain a lot more from the site evidence, and there is a lot of key information missing from the documentary evidence. We can get a clearer picture from actually seeing Saltaire as to the motives for development.