Titus Salt (1803-76) was a BRADFORD wool merchant's son, and by the 1840s owned four mills in the city. But he became sickened by the filth, overcrowding and pollution there, and by the conditions, endured by working people. On a beautiful, green-field site outside Bradford, he built not only an extraordinary new mill, but a whole village for its workers, incorporating the newest ideas in planning, engineering and hygiene. He paid good pensions 36 years before government ones were introduced, and built a school for 750 pupils, an exquisite church, almshouses - even a boathouse and dining room on the river, with boats for hire. The village, Saltaire, remains almost as he built it.
The paternalism of Salt and Arkwright, deeply religious men like many others of their time, sprang from a belief that the possession of wealth imposed a moral duty to improve the lot of the workers who had helped to create it. It was an attitude increasingly affordable (although by no means universal) as Britain rapidly became the wealthiest nation on earth, and though aggressively pursuing the expansion and consolidation of empire, British developed a genuinely held conviction that they were bringing order and civilization to the territories they had explored or conquered. At the pinnacle of imperial power, in the closing years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, this was truly, as the slogans of the time proclaimed, 'an empire on which the sun never sets'.
Huge areas of the world atlas were coloured pink, denoting a British possession; a quarter of the world's population owed allegiance to the British Crown. Britain saw herself as presiding over a brotherhood of nations, an attitude that found ultimate expression after the First World War, when the dominions secured equality in the comity of nations by their admission to the League of Nations.
The first seal crack in the edifice appeared only three years later - on Britain's own doorstep. For most of the 19th century and up to 1922, the United Kingdom embraced the territories of four historic peoples - the English. Scots, Welsh and Irish. Then, after centuries of bitter and -often bloody strife, 26 of IRELAND'S 32 countries broke away to form the Irish Free State. By 1931, the Statute of Westminster was acknowledging the self-governing status of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa as 'freely associated members' of the Commonwealth. However, Britain's territories still included India, and lands in east and West Africa, the Far East, Central America and the Mediterranean.
Locals hypothesize that the legacy of Italian blood and culture in Cologne, colonized by the Romans more than 1500 years ago, makes the people more jovial and lighthearted. Cologne is the largest city on the Rhine.
Kolsch is not only the dialect spoken here but, also the name of their own top-fermented beer. There are more than 4,000 pubs, restaurant's and brewery taverns in Cologne.
Unlike many of the world's large cities, Cologne, with a population of over a million, gets better every day, there are more things to do and see, more new and innovative buildings... more
Travel is an opportunity to learn, whether geography, languages, history or other subjects.
Cologne is situated on the beautiful Rhine River.