Visiting Salt's Mill - a UNESCO world heritage site in Yorkshire

I was so happy this weekend to finally get to venture out to actually visit somewhere and especially happy because it is one of our absolute favourite places in the world to go…and what’s more it is right here in Yorkshire. Salt’s Mill remains, for us, a surprising gem in the textile heritage of the Yorkshire landscape.

Salts Mill and it’s adjoining model victorian village, Saltaire are situated just outside Bradford and are named after their owner and founder Sir Titus Salts (1803 - 1876). This absolutely enormous mill that at one time produced up to 30,000 yards of cloth every day has quite a story to tell and these days a wonderful destination to visit.

Titus Salts was a prosperous industrialist in the textile industry and in 1851 he consolidated 5 smaller businesses into one large Mill site and at the same time he built a worker’s village for the workers in which they could live better lives, away from the heart of Bradford which was renowned for it’s slums and pollution and unhealthy living conditions. The village is the very model of how society might have been - a school, a church, hospital, bath houses and rows of stone terraced houses that must have seemed the very height of luxury at the time. There is a park, a cricket pitch, and a canal walk alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal which also carried the woollen goods to market.

The Mill produced woollen cloth up until it finally closed in 1986 when local business man Jonathon Silver bought it and began turning it into a heritage destination along with his friend the Bradford born artist David Hockney. Today the Mill itself is a splendid place to visit, housing fabulous shops, galleries and eateries. Interesting things lie everywhere and if you love books about art, design, printing, photography and art history the ground floor is heaven on earth.

On the upper floors are a further more general and very large bookshop that you can easily spend an hour or two browsing in, along with a fabulous homeware store that showcases modern design from Scandinavia and beyond, as well as a large antiques centre where you can wander amongst every kind of vintage treasure from days gone by. Everywhere there are Hockney paintings adorning the stone walls providing vivid pops of colour amid industrial clues to the mill’s past.

We have visited Salts Mill many times and one thing that is really quite impressive is how they change up the exhibitions and artefacts so that there is always something interesting to see if you return. This time, I was very taken with this beautiful display of all the jobs that were undertaken in this vast hub of production.

The top floor is full of museum still exhibits and galleries but is currently closed and at the moment, due to Covid, the restaurants are still not open, but let’s hope soon, because the food is normally excellent and it makes a real day of the visit.

After browsing the Mill, you can wander into Saltaire and soak up the atmosphere of the village. It is steeped in social history, victorian philanthropy and textile heritage. This whole site is a great day out, even when the weather is grim and it often is in Yorkshire!

This heritage site is often used for filming period dramas and at present you can see it featured in ‘The English Game’ on netflix as the setting for the story of the beginnings of the english football league. (I should add that this series is excellent and much more about the english class system of the times than about football).

If you are interested to read more about this destination click here for further information on Salts Mill and here for more about the history of Saltaire.

Meanwhile, I’ll see you soon, Ruby x