28 Facts About Ripley Ville

Ripley Ville or Ripleyville was an estate of model houses for the working classes in Broomfields in the West Bowling ward of the City of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England.

Ripley Ville contained 196 workmen's cottages, a school and teacher's house, a church, allotment gardens and, on a separate site about a half-mile distant, a vicarage and ten almshouses which are still standing although all the other buildings had been demolished by 1970.

Ripley Ville built up the business to be the biggest dye works in Yorkshire.

Ripley Ville was recognised as one of Bradford's "big four" industrialists alongside Titus Salt, Samuel Lister and Isaac Holden.

Ripley Ville was not convinced by the arguments of the speculative builders.

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The specification for the Ripley Ville houses was influenced by the proponents of model housing, such as J Hole and Godwin, editor of "The Builder" and the practices of contemporary model builders in the West Riding.

The design of the Ripley Ville houses incorporated these enhanced standards, and in several respects exceeded them.

The architecture and townscape of Ripley Ville was complete and remained substantially unchanged until demolition a century afterwards.

Ripley Ville occupied most of the Broom Hall Estate: Broom Hall was a working farmhouse into the 1860s.

The site chosen for Ripley Ville had the disadvantage being irregularly shaped with steep gradients.

Discussion about the superiority of the Ripley Ville houses compared to the average working-class houses of the time focused on the provision of WCs.

Ripley Ville said there were 26,000 houses in the town and 19,500 privies – of which 1,500 were WCs, 6,000 ash pits and 12,000 pail closets.

Type 1 and 2 Ripley Ville houses were comparable in size to the houses built at Saltaire for supervisors and managers and to contemporary lower-middle-class houses elsewhere.

Working-class houses comparable in space and number of rooms to the Ripley Ville houses started to be built in Bowling from about 1895 and were built in large numbers between 1900 and 1914.

Use of a transverse staircase as opposed to the longitudinal staircase in the Ripley Ville houses allowed access to a bathroom in addition to the rear bedroom.

School building was financed by Ripley Ville and run by the non-denominational British and Foreign School Society It was designed by Andrews Son and Pepper in a gothic revivalist style.

Ripley Ville agreed to provide a site at no cost after he and Hardy had inspected it in 1868.

In 1881 Ripley Ville paid for ten almshouses in New Cross Street a short distance from the vicarage.

Ripley Ville had intended the houses should be for outright purchase – but very few, mainly the end terrace houses adapted for retail use, were purchased outright.

In 1881 when it was announced that the parish of St Bartholomew's had a debt of £800, Ripley Ville led the fund raising campaign and it was paid off in months.

The tone of press reports show Ripley Ville greatly enjoying himself as leader of his new community.

Ripley Ville was a node on the expanding rail network.

Ripley Ville had achieved his aim of providing houses for the working classes but the census returns of 1881 and 91 show that the residents represented the upper stratum of working class occupations.

The Midland's cash offer of £6,000 for the purchase of Ripley Ville property was unacceptable to the Ripley Ville Trust who felt that there was a direct threat to the soft water supply to the dye works.

Ripley Ville's Trustees required tenants to contribute to the cost of connection so take up was slow.

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Ripley Ville provides a history of the dye works and in his references to Ripley Ville gives details of the rental purchase scheme and its abandonment.

Unpublished dissertation by Derek Pickles shows that the eastern and southern boundaries of Ripley Ville's landholding followed the lines of former coal tramways, and that Ripley Ville Road which bisected the dye works was a tramway route.

Cafin's remit from the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments was to record extant buildings so such an absence is understandable: Ripley Ville had been demolished twenty years before the time of her survey.