More on Bowling Lodge and a cost comparison with building a block of Ripley Ville dwellings
More information on who built Bowling Lodge in 1836, how much they were paid, other conditions and how long it took is compared with Cordingley and Peel’s contract for building a block of Ripley Ville Working Men’s Dwellings for H W Ripley in 1867.
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2016. All rights reserved.
Building Bowling Lodge in 1836 and a block of Working Mens Dwellings in Ripley Ville in 1867
This post expands on information in three previous posts:-
Planning Application Numbers : All the buildings of Ripley Ville
The plans for Victorian Ripley Ville 1866 – 1881
1836 : H W Ripley as SWCI, the Moulsons, their mark and a [Master] Carpenter and Joiner.
In its first part the post adds:-
- the names of the plumber, glazier and slater to the masons and the carpenter & joiner contracting to build Bowling Lodge for H W Ripley in 1836,
- the amount agreed for their payment
- some conditions to the contracts
- some stages in the work, completion dates and forfeits
The payments agreed give a probable total for the building costs of the Dwelling House, Coach-house and Stables that was being built, to drawings by the architect Walker Rawsthorne, for H W Ripley’s parents, Edward and Hannah Ripley (nee Murgatroyd). (1)
In the second part of the post, this information is compared with what we know about a single contract for building a block of Working Mens Dwellings in the industrial model village of Ripley Ville some thirty years later.
The third part speculates on the price H W Ripley was paying for a working man’s dwelling to be built in the industrial model village of Ripley Ville.
Bowling Lodge
Contractors and Price for Work
The earlier post revealed that Moulsons, a firm based in West Bowling or little Bowling as it had been called, were contracted to do the Masons work for Bowling Lodge and that John Hargrave, was the contracting Carpenter & Joiner. Hargrave would have made the massive water cistern associated with the water-closet installed in Bowling Lodge, which features in the previous post on Bowling Lodge. The Moulsons work as masons included the laying of the drains. The full list of contractors and the price agreed for their part in the contract are shown in the table below. The space for the signature of the contractor for the plastering is empty in the section of the eighteen-page Specification concerning their work – so we don’t know their name – but the price is given.
Planning Application Numbers : All the buildings of Ripley Ville
Application numbers for all the buildings of Victorian Ripley Ville (1866-1881) revealed on ‘rediscovering Ripleyville’ for the first time. This post lists the planning application numbers for all of the buildings of the Victorian industrial model village of Ripley Ville and their archive location.
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2016. All rights reserved.
Planning Applications Numbers : All the buildings of Ripley Ville
The plans submitted to the Borough of Bradford’s council for all the buildings erected between 1866 and 1881 on the northern and southern site of the industrial model village of Ripley Ville are held on micro-fiche at the Bradford Branch of West Yorkshire Archives.
The plans are those submitted to support the planning applications for each building or set of buildings. They were considered for approval by the Building & Improvement Committee of the council. The archive contains the deposited plans for 5 builds:-
- the Working-Mens Dwellings
- the Schools building and Schoolmaster’s house
- the church of St Bartholomew
- St Bartholomew’s Vicarage
- the Alms houses
The plans for Victorian Ripley Ville 1866 – 1881
The architects’ plans for the buildings of Victorian Ripley Ville were submitted to Bradford Borough Council between 1866 and 1881. This post uses one of the plans for the schools and a key passage in ‘When was Ripleyville built?’ to look at the sequence in which the village’s ‘Working-Mens Dwellings’ may have been built and by whom. It comments on the significance for rediscovering Ripleyville in having had access to all the architects’ plans 8 years ago, in having full copies now and on the ‘missing’ plans for St Bartholomew’s vicarage.
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2016. All rights reserved.
The Plans for Victorian Ripley Ville 1866-1881
My previous post was about half-an-hour at the end of a day at the local archives. It focussed on the water-closet and cistern of Bowling Lodge. Earlier in the same day, I had been getting together 21 x A4 pages of information and drawings. These were copied and printed from microfiches. They were of all, yes ALL, of the original planning applications for the buildings built in Victorian Ripley Ville between 1866 and 1881, including the one for St Bartholomew’s Vicarage – of which more at the end of the post.
I had re-found and re-viewed all the plans before I did the 150th Anniversary post on Ripley Ville on November 15th last year (2015). I made quite extensive notes about each from the microfiches at that time but had found these weren’t comprehensive enough. This time I had scanned and printed them – much easier to double-check what you think you are seeing, notice more of the detail, make calculations, measurements, etc – and you do not need to rely on memory.
Wikipedia on Victorian Ripley Ville : wrong! wrong! wrong!
The account on Wikipedia is wrong on a number of crucial points about the worker’s housing built between 1866 and 1868 in the Victorian industrial model village of Ripley Ville, These relate to whether water-closets were installed in each of the 196 Working -mens Dwellings”, on the village’s northern site in Bowling, south Bradford. The errors are identified in this post and a better version of events laid out. The post starts with a RVr news update. It ends by emphasising how regrettable the demolition of the village’s northern site is, in heritage terms.
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2015 and/or rediscovering Ripleyville. All rights reserved. (see sidebar right)
News Update
Work on the new ‘Ripley Ville rediscovered’ (RVr) web-sites on the Victorian industrial model village of Ripley Ville is behind schedule.
Time has been given over instead to exploring several long trails in archival material about the village’s Victorian beginnings. The searches have focused on the water-closets that are understood to have been built in the basements (cellars) of the 196 Workmens Dwellings of the village.
The water-closet controversy : its importance
If water-closets were installed this would make the houses, in their sanitary status and arrangements, the most advanced then built for the working classes. When taken together with the number installed, this would significantly enhance the importance of Ripley Ville as an industrial model village and of ‘Messrs Ripleys scheme…’ for workers housing.
Ripley Ville : 150th Anniversary today
Bradford’s only industrial model village, Ripley Ville, has the 150th anniversary of its founding today, 15th November 2015. The village was unique : each and every one of its 196 workman’s dwellings, built between 1866 and 1867, had a water-closet in its basement.
150th Anniversary
Today is the 150th anniversary of the event in 1865 in south Bradford that promoted ‘Messrs Ripleys scheme for building a number of Working-Mens Dwellings’. The event was a public meeting that took place in Edward Ripley & Son’s Patent Melange Works on Spring Mill Street, west Bowling on the 15th November 1865. At it, a prospectus was made available to those attending and the planned scheme for up to 300 dwellings of three types was explained. From the 20th of November 1865 draft plans of the dwellings were available ‘between Six and Eight O clock’ until ‘Friday 1st December’. In this case ‘Tickets of admission [were] to be had of Messrs Ripley and at the Melange Works’.
Victorian Ripley Ville : Getting the Best & Doing it Right
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2015. All rights reserved. See side bar right →
A previous post on this blog stated that the research needed in rediscovering Ripley Ville was not ‘in any way complete [nor is] what is out there on the internet or in print … adequate to telling the story of Victorian Ripley Ville.’
The proposed new web-sites; Ripleyville.co.uk and Ripleyville.org.uk, will be aiming to improve what this project offers about the old Borough of Bradford’s only industrial model village. This post develops the points about
- research
- content now on offer on the internet
It deals in particular with content available about Ripleyville on Wikipedia in comparison with the blog posts and pages on this rediscovering Ripleyville (rRV) web-site. The post’s focus is on the content on the Wikipedia site about Ripleyville’s Working Mens houses and on this rRV site and the Wikipedia site about the village’s original Victorian Vicarage. Issues of transparency and best practice in arriving at the Ripleyville story are raised on both topics. The post’s overall message is that for Victorian Ripley Ville this web-site leads, while Wikipedia follows.
Getting the Best 1
Delving into History & rRV Membership
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2012-2015. All rights reserved. (See sidebar left)
The first part of this post picks up on Graham Wilkinson’s comment about ‘delving into history’ and outlines an idea for a Victorian history and heritage project for Bowling, south Bradford. The second explains the present and likely future position on Membership of the rRV project and for people who have signed up as ‘Friends’ of ‘rediscovering Ripleyville’. Looking towards the future, the post ends on a positive note.
Archive Fridays; Water supply & water use in west Bowling 1865-1871
Copyright R L Walker 2014. All rights reserved (see sidebar right→)
Baths, brewing, brick-making, building a Church, fire-hoses, piggeries, plastering, a public drinking fountain, smoke-houses, stables, water-closets, urinals, ‘1 horse, 2 cows and a duck pond’. This post is about water supply and use in Victorian south Bradford. It gives an update on some of the research I have been doing in Bradford Archives most Fridays over the last couple of months. The significance of Victorian Ripley Ville as an industrial model village and as an example of Working Men’s housing rests largely on the question of whether water-closets were installed. If they were this would be of national significance. In spite of a claim to the contrary, which has appeared on the internet, this question has not been resolved. The research I have been doing has the aim of finding archival evidence for or against the installation of water-closets – from the time when it was supposed to have happened.
The scope of the research has been fairly wide but targeted as to dates and location. It has been on water supply, water use and domestic and industrial sewerage management -and the lack of it – in Bradford between 1865 and 1871. Particular attention has been given to Bowling in south Bradford and the area around where Ripley Ville was built and in which it was built. The time period includes the year in which the Ripleys’ Scheme for building Workmens’ Dwellings in Bowling was announced (15th November 1865) through to the period after a start was made on building the Church of St Bartholomew in Ripley Ville. (1)
This post covers water supply and use during this period and provides a background and context for the installation/non-installation of the water-closets.
Plan of basement of one of Messrs Ripleys’ Workmens Dwellings showing W C. Detail from architects drawings 1865 as submitted for building consent. Source : West Yorkshire Archives.
A follow-up post will look at the industrial and domestic sewerage of Bradford in the two years up to 1867. It will include findings from the Reports of the Rivers Commission published in August 1867. This is when the bulk of the Workmen’s Dwellings of the industrial model village of Ripley Ville were likely to have been built for Messrs Ripley. H W Ripley gave evidence to the Commission on what was done at Bowling Dyeworks to prevent pollution of Bowling Beck. His testimony also has direct relevance to the Workmen’s Dwellings of Victorian Ripley Ville because in it he reaffirmed his intention,
rediscovering Ripley Ville 
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