Sir Titus Salt built Saltaire solely to gain greater control over his workforce.How far does your study of the site and the supporting evidence support this point of view?

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Saltaire Coursework

Sir Titus Salt built Saltaire solely to gain greater control over his workforce.

How far does your study of the site and the supporting evidence support this point of view?

This statement is saying that to gain control of his workforce was the only reason Salt built Saltaire. I disagree with this statement. I do think that that was one of the reasons, and possibly the main reason, but there were many more than this alone. Using both the site and documentary evidence, we can see many of Salts’ ideas and plans for Saltaire, were often not essential to the well being of his workers, and not essential for him to gain greater control of his workers. I think that if we just looked at the documentary evidence, you would probably think that it supports this opinion. Firstly, if we read some of the descriptions written about Saltaire, we can see that Salt did not allow the building of any pubs in Saltaire. This could show that he wants to control their lives, and stop them drinking and socialising and possibly working against him. Or it could show that he just wanted his workers to be fit and healthy, and by having no pubs, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to get drunk.

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Another useful piece of evidence are the rules for living in Saltaire. These go someway to support the theory of control. One of the rules is that no animals are allowed in the village, another consists of instructions when and how often to wash, and another states that gatherings in the street of more than eight people are forbidden. These rules are very strict, and mean that Salt has very strict control over the workers, and they were forbidden to do many things. The idea of not allowing gatherings of more than eight people was probably to stop any of ...

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