A man with a seesaw southern English accent asks: "Shall we sing a song?". A chorus of high-pitched voices agrees we should. I am most certainly not singing anything. It's 9.30 a.m. on a Saturday. I'm in bed. Who the hell are these people anyway?
It is hard to maintain any anger at the sight beneath my bedroom window. A small group of young children is gathered on the cobbled street. They are on a tour of Saltaire, the famous model village built by Sir Titus Salt outside Bradford, West Yorkshire, in England's industrial north. They are one of a handful of tours (not all singing) that will pass by my house during the course of that day.
Saltaire is at its most captivating on a summer's day. The yellow sandstone brightens like a sunflower in the sunshine and creates a village of gold, reflecting the wealth it has generated (and lost) in its history. People play cricket on the baize grass of Roberts Park. A barge offers bus rides along the canal while an omnipresent ice-cream van toots the theme tune to Match of the Day.
I can't help thinking that I have set up home in a museum - one presided over by the paternal ghosts of its invention, and preserved with great affection and pride in their honour. Strangely, however, the sense of the original inhabitants has somehow been eradicated. Their ghosts chose not to linger about in what seems to be someone else's doll's house.
Since 1985 the village has been listed for preservation but more recently it has been forwarded by the Government to UNESCO as a possible World Heritage candidate. This would put it in the same league as the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids.
Built on the river Aire, Saltaire centres on two mills. The Old Mill was built in 1853 and the New Mill was built in 1868. Salt catered for his workers by providing houses, a church, shops, and schools, a hospital and almshouses that are among the architectural gems of the village. Victoria Road, the tree-lined main thoroughfare, leads you from the top of the town, past these amenities and the railway station to the mills.
The Old Mill is internationally known as home to the David Hockney galleries. It comprises three galleries, each representing a different facet of Hockney's vision. His new exhibition of designs for opera-stage sets opened this month. On June 8th, Hockney received an honourary degree from the University of Leeds. June also saw him awarded Freedom of the City of Bradford, his home town. The New Mill is situated on the other side of the canal and has been turned into trendy riverside apartments.
Salt was a successful and wealthy 19th-century mill owner with five factories in Bradford. Although that city was booming in the 1840s, living conditions were appalling. There were no sewers and it was considered one of the filthiest towns in the world. With the outbreak of cholera in 1849, Salt, who had been elected as Bradford's second mayor the previous year, took action. By building an industrial settlement or model village outside the town, he believed that living and working conditions would be less hazardous. More conveniently for everyone, his workers could live close to the mill with such agreeable conditions as clean water and fresh air.
The Saltaire mill was opened in 1853. Built of fireproof bricks, stone flags and cast iron, it is 800,000 square feet, six storey s high and Italianate in style. Looking at it now in its elegant restored form it is hard to imagine the ceaseless drudgery that took place within it. Salt's workers were provided with a house, water supply, privy and gas. However, the nature of his paternalism was tempered with the autocracy and vanity that refused his workers the right to hang their laundry in their yards to dry (he thought it looked untidy) and named the streets in the village after his own family.
Salt died 23 years after the completion of the mill. Over a period of about 10 years, the business passed out of the hands of the Salt family to a consortium. In 1892 James Roberts became the new owner.
In the years that followed, changes in fashion and increased tax duties put the wool industry in Bradford under great strain. Overseas companies created stiff competition. Smaller mills, which could not afford the re-equipping necessary to create the fabrics that fashion dictated, shut down. Only very large companies pulled through.
Saltaire's Old Mill was eventually taken over by Illingworth Morris, which also ran a mill in Tullamore, Co Offaly. But by the early 1980s not even these tougher companies could sustain the strain. Bradford's textile industry, the woollen and worsted centre of the world, which had created huge economic and individual wealth, collapsed. The New Mill was already derelict and the owners of the Old Mill closed it and put it on the market.
The housing, in desperate need of maintenance, had already been sold via the Bradford Property Trust to sitting tenants, marking the beginning of private ownership in the village. When it looked like things couldn't get worse for the area a bid was put in by the Department of Transport, Bradford Metropolitan District Council and the West Yorkshire County Council to build a highway through Roberts Park.
But things turned around. In 1984 the Saltaire Village Society was formed and within a year had convinced English Heritage to list the village. 1984 also saw the reopening of the railway station. This meant that the housing was a short journey from both Bradford and Leeds, and the possibility of living in the country and being easily able to access work in the city attracted professionals, as it still does.
In 1987, self-made millionaire Jonathan Silver bought the Old Mill. Appropriately, he had made his fortune through a chain of clothing shops. And so "Salts" has been transformed. Besides housing the Hockney galleries, the mill is also home to electronic manufacturing companies like Pace Micro Technology plc and Filtronic Comtek plc, bringing it to the forefront of both modern art and modern technology.
Sometimes, in my little sandstone house, I get the feeling that I am also part of the exhibition. I understand that having been looking about this extraordinary place (which, unlike many historical sites, is still in everyday use) people may lose their sense of when to back off. Their curiosity is gentle and comparatively unimposing, like that of a child. More peculiarly, for an Irish woman, it instills in me too a sense of pride in, and appreciation of, where I live.
The school tour moves off to be replaced later by a group of adult tourists with an official guide. One can't help wondering what might become of the place with the onslaught of tourists that would arrive should Saltaire achieve World Heritage status. It already entertains 750,000 visitors per year.
Yet in its present busy state, the village still maintains an air of calm. It is an oasis on the edge of Bradford, watched over by its forebears whose names grace the streets, and by the four great stone lions situated outside the Saltaire Club and Institute. Originally intended to sentinel Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, and representing War, Peace, Vigilance and Determination, they now keep a peaceful watch over a model town.