The light, heavenly mills that 'rival the splendour of the great palaces of Venice', built beside a canal in West Yorkshire

Salt Mills near Bradford is the grandest of the ‘stupendous manufacturing piles’ of the Pennines, once the heartland of the world’s woollen industry. Local historian John James described it in 1866 as ‘rivalling in size and splendour the famed palaces of Venice’. In so doing, he failed to realise that it was, in fact, very much larger than anything in Venice, but Salts Mill does at least rise above a canal.

Even today, its scale takes the breath away. It comprises two huge Italianate piles — the Mill and the New Mill, situated on the valley floor of the fast-flowing River Aire and separated by the Leeds-Liverpool canal, built in 1774 (Fig 1). Both buildings use local Millstone grit, a good yellow sandstone.

The Mill stands between the canal and what is now the Leeds to Skipton railway (constructed in 1847), its show front extending between these two transport arteries. This façade is 21 bays wide and symmetrically planned with a central archway and bellcote, like a grand stable block (Fig 2). It addresses the Corinthian-fronted Reformed United Church, the most sumptuous non-conformist church in England (Fig 7).

Behind it extend two massive industrial structures: the spinning shed and warehouse. The former is 545ft wide and five storeys (72ft) high, again symmetrical and given presence by two projecting towers culminating in belvederes. No less impressive is the 320ft-long warehouse, which is equally tall, pedimented and flanked by the lower weaving and combing sheds. New Mill contained an additional spinning shed and dyeworks and is four storeys high.

Towering over the complex are two commensurate chimneys. The original mill chimney is 249ft tall and tapers like an obelisk (a character reinforced by the removal of its once prominent bracketed top in 1971). The New Mill chimney is more elaborate and is based on the campanile of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, complete with ‘belfry’ and octagonal crown. It was intended as an ornament when seen from the recreational park to the north-west.

This Venetian lineage is not unique in industrial Yorkshire and the chimney of Lister’s Manningham Mills on the other side of Bradford claims the campanile of St Mark’s itself as its model. This devotion to Venice in the West Riding is a tribute to Ruskin, who was a cultural guru to the wool masters, and a regular lecturer in the new art institutes, public libraries and town halls of their rapidly growing towns. His influential lecture ‘Traffic’ was delivered in Bradford in 1864 and published as chapter II of The Crown of Wild Olive (1866). In it, Ruskin sets out an ideal: ‘On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion… In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess, the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family… at the bottom of the bank is to be the mill… In this mill are to be in constant employment eight hundred toa thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday…’

Saltaire was the creation of Sir Titus Salt (1803–76) the biggest employer in Victorian Bradford, a titan of industry created a baronet in 1869 by Queen Victoria, granted arms by the College of Arms as displayed over the entrance to his factory and awarded the Légion d’Honneur by Napoleon III. His model industrial settlement on the edge of Bradford was the physical embodiment of Mowedale in Disraeli’s Sybil (1846), a model factory and beautiful village that answered the criticisms of the Chartist movement. Disraeli, then a Young England Tory — Salt was a Liberal in his politics — pointedly contrasts it to an unplanned slum in the shadow of a feudal castle nearby.

Salt was the son of Daniel Salt, a farmer who settled in Bradford as a wool stapler in the early 19th century. Salt Snr, who was religious, hard-working and enterprising, prospered. His son was educated at Batley Grammar School and carried his father’s middling prosperity to the heights, becoming the biggest manufacturer in the town, and developed the weaving of Fustian cloth, a lighter mix of wool and cotton suitable for women’s clothing. By pioneering the large-scale use of alpaca, a long-fibred, shiny, soft fleece imported from Peru, however, he became a tycoon (Fig 8).

The story goes that on a buying trip to Liverpool he discovered unwanted alpaca fleeces in a warehouse. He bought a quantity, took it home, washed and combed it and saw its potential. Neither his father nor the other Bradford manufacturers were convinced, so he developed the machinery himself and bought the whole stock from Liverpool. In fact, other Yorkshire manufacturers had already experimented with alpaca, including Benjamin Outram near Halifax in the 1830s. What singled out Salt’s venture was heroic scale and daring.

What is also undeniable is that his innovative investment, helped by the cotton famine caused by the American Civil War, made him one of the richest men in England. It also inspired his greatest venture, the building of a new industrial town, Saltaire. As his business expanded, he acquired five different mills across Bradford. In 1850, he decided to amalgamate them all. As well as a mill, he planned a town to house all his employees, complete with every facility, including a church, school, hospital, shops, cultural institute, almshouses, gas works, wash house and Turkish baths, park and games fields.

He chose a site three miles from the town centre in the Aire valley. It was not only served by the new railway and the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, but noted for the ‘beauty of situation and the salubrity of its air’. This remains true, with wooded hills still visible around the valley despite the spreading suburbia of the past 100 years (Fig 1). The local firm of (Henry) Lockwood and (William) Mawson, which enjoyed a near monopoly in Bradford at the time, was appointed as architect.

The engineer of the project was Sir William Fairbairn, who devised all the practical side of the operation, including the steam engines ‘arranging fifty horse power each’ to turn three miles of shafting that powered the looms and spinning machines. They were capable of producing 5,688 miles of cloth per annum. The engines and boilers were supplied with water from the River Aire via a system of tunnels running under the canal and buildings. A 70,000 gallon iron tank on top of the warehouse was filled by steam pumps and an even larger tank of 500,000 gallons under the weaving sheds was fed by rainwater collected from the roofs.

The windows, too, were innovative, comprising pivoting glass panes in iron frames that provided ventilation, as well as light. Lockwood & Mawson exhibited them at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. This vast mill with all its machinery was constructed in less than three years; the lavish opening ceremony on September 20, 1853, included a banquet for his employees to celebrate Salt’s 50th birthday. The surrounding grid-plan town took longer and continued to be added to and developed up to Salt’s death in 1876. It comprised 850 well-built houses of three grades — for lower and upper workers and directors — accommodating more than 4,000 people, with gas-lighting and heating, running water and individual outside privies. (Country Life, March 9, 1972).

After Salt’s death and the early death of his eldest son, the business changed hands and suffered various vicissitudes, with lows and highs before and after the Second World War. There were also phases of near bankruptcy. It ceased production in the 1980s. The past 40 years, however, have witnessed an astonishing renaissance. As with Jonathan Ruffer’s work at Bishop Auckland, Co Durham, or the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth-focused revival of north Derbyshire, this is an example of how a private individual can invest and tackle some of the economic and social challenges of a locality. The results are inspiring.

Salts Mill was acquired in 1987 by Jonathan Silver as a semi-derelict ‘white elephant’. Of Eastern European Jewish descent, he was a young entrepreneur who had built up a local clothing chain and then been in partnership with Sir Ernest Hall in Dean Clough Mill at Halifax, a trial run for Salts. He began the restoration and conversion to new uses aiming to transform the building for ‘culture and commerce’. The spinning mill was developed as a cultural destination for a ‘day out’ with art galleries, shops, restaurant and cafés.

The ‘1853 Gallery’ occupying the vast spaces on the ground floor opened in 1987. The popular ‘Diner’ and other eating outlets opened in the 1990s. The place has never ceased evolving. An independent book shop, the largest in the region, was established in 1998, an antique market was set up here in 2004 and a Home Store, with top-end furniture and home accessories. A history exhibition called ‘People + Process’ was installed in 2015 and, more recently, in 2024, the Peace Museum, a tenant group, opened its doors.

The industrial character of the interior has been preserved (Fig 3) with the iron columns and fireproof ceiling all visible, a visual celebration of the industrial achievement of the north of England. These spaces were enlivened with brightly coloured fittings and a mixture of contemporary and Victorian furnishings, some of the latter Salt’s own. A key element has been the establishment at Salts of a permanent Yorkshire home for David Hockney’s art (Fig 4).

Like Hockney, Silver had been at Bradford Grammar School, although he was younger, and edited the class magazine. When Hockney graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, Silver wrote and asked him to contribute a cover for his form magazine. The artist obliged and they became friends (‘Are you ready to order?’). The 1853 Gallery at Salts Mill, a permanent display of his art, including early works such as the ‘Rake’s Progress’, and portraits, was the result.

There are also thematic annual displays of more recent work. In 2025, the changing exhibition is currently devoted to ‘20 Flowers’, recent floral paintings. Other gallery space is dedicated to a range of local artists. There was also ‘Life Goes On’, photographs of Bradford by Ian Beesley. Landscapes by Kitty North are a regular feature and there is also a mural by Philippa Threlfall. A ceramic mural by Grete Marks, recently restored by F. J. Hutchinson, who worked from a temporary workshop in Salts Mill, is now on public view in the main entrance.

Silver died in 1997, but Salts Mill continued to be developed by his widow, Maggie, and brother Robin. It is now run by his daughters Zoë and Davina, who both returned to Yorkshire after Cambridge and careers in London. They are present every day and, with the support of a dedicated local team, have further improved and enlivened the galleries and added to the offices. Among the 45 tenants there is even, in H. Dawson & Co, a continuing link with the Bradford woollen industry. It is this combination of culture and commerce that constitutes the foundation for the ongoing success of this endeavour.

There is something about Salts Mill that encourages the compilation of statistics. The place serves 100,000 covers a year in its restaurants and cafés, a figure that offers an insight into the visitor numbers overall. The site employs 100 people on the cultural-tourist side and the total workforce with the tenants in the offices amounts to 1,000 people. It is an outstanding story of urban regeneration (Fig 6). The cleaned sandstone elevations gleam in the now smokeless air and the bright industrial interiors have an almost post-modern character.

The success of Salts has encouraged the preservation and re-use of other former industrial buildings in the North, in Lancashire as well as Yorkshire. Silver himself was a mentor of Roger Tempest at Broughton Hall, North Yorkshire, the founder of Rural Solutions. The Silver family and Bradford are rightly proud of Salts Mill, its extraordinary history, its architectural grandeur and the way it is used and enjoyed today. It is a hugely — in every sense — worthwhile place.

Visit the Salts Mill website to find out more.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.