Nice collection of images..
Here is a shot of the original baths..
I think Converse first visited this spot back in 2007ish.
Lot of history here for sure..
Wapping Road School, built in 1877, was a ‘Board School’ under Bradford's very own W.E. Forster's Education Act of 1870.
The school’s distinguished 123-year history saw it play a leading role in the development of state education. More than a century ago, the school created national and international headlines with the help of education campaigners Margaret and Rachel McMillan and their push to improve the lot of children in the state system. Their influence helped bring the country’s first school swimming pool to Wapping Road school and nearby Green Lane School in 1899.
Bradford was a grim place for the poor in the 19th Century, with a lot of extreme poverty. Children suffered in spite of the sacrifice by their parents. Also at this time, children were brought up from London workhouses to work in the mills. This is how the area of Wapping in Bradford got it’s name. Dirt and disease was a problem.
Right up to the early part of this century some children were ‘sewn up’ for the winter – wrapped in flannel which was then sewn into place and not removed until the warm weather came. Some parents thought that this was necessary because there was not enough food to keep a child warm otherwise.
Margaret McMillan
"The condition of the poorer children was worse than anything that was described or painted. It was a thing that this generation is glad to forget. The neglect of infants, the utter neglect almost of toddlers and older children, the blight of early labour, all combined to make of a once vigorous people a race of undergrown and spoiled adolescents; and just as people looked on at the torture two hundred years ago and less, without any great indignation, so in the 1890s people saw the misery of poor children without perturbation."
http://silverstealth.fotopic.net/c1555597.html
More on my site here.