Step back into Yorkshire in the 1870s, and enter a world shaped by labour, resilience and hope.
Shanty Life invites you to discover the human story behind the Ribblehead Viaduct. Through this interactive online experience, you are taken inside the temporary shanty towns that sprang up on the moorland – home to the navvies and families who built one of the most extraordinary engineering feats in the Yorkshire Dales.
Explore the spaces of everyday life: step into the navvies’ homes, visit their church and local pub, and glimpse what it meant to live, work and survive in this rugged landscape 150 years ago. From a settlement created almost overnight, a strong and complex community emerged – one that went on to build something monumental, often in the face of extreme hardship.
More than 2,300 men and their families lived and worked here while the viaduct took shape. Their stories are rarely told, yet they are written into every stone arch that still dominates the Dales skyline. Shanty Life offers a chance to listen more closely, and to understand how this iconic structure came to be through the lives of the people who made it possible.
Play Shanty Life:
Shanty Life was commissioned for the Yorkshire Festival of Story, created by John Hamlett and William Hamlett, and made possible with the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
