History

Sir Titus Salt made his fortune identifying a fibre that Victorian England’s textile industry had overlooked: the fleece of the South American alpaca and llama, whose long, lustrous fibres produced a distinctive cloth — lighter and shinier than wool — that became fashionable for ladies’ dress fabric. By 1850 Salt was one of the wealthiest manufacturers in Bradford, operating five separate mills in the city. Bradford itself, however, was one of the most squalid industrial cities in England: polluted, overcrowded, its workers housed in back-to-back slums without sanitation.

Salt decided to leave Bradford entirely. In 1851 he purchased a greenfield site on the River Aire, three miles upstream from Bradford’s centre, at a location served by both the Midland Railway and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. He commissioned the architects Lockwood and Mawson to design a complete community: first the mill (Salts Mill, opened 1853), then the housing, then the institutions.

The result, built over 25 years, was remarkable: 850 workers’ houses built in stone (not the cheap brick of Bradford’s slums), each with an indoor toilet — a sanitary provision virtually unknown in Victorian working-class housing. The village had a church seating 800, a school, a hospital, a park on the river with a bandstand, public baths and washhouses for those without bathing facilities at home, almshouses for retired workers, and a Mechanics’ Institute with a library and lecture hall where workers could improve their education.

What Saltaire deliberately did not have was also telling: Salt was a committed teetotaller, so there was no pub. He believed poverty was partly caused by debt, so there was no pawnbroker. He believed in education not punishment, so there was no prison.

After Salt’s death in 1876, the mill passed through several owners and by the 1980s had become derelict. Businessman Jonathan Silver purchased it in 1987, renovated it, and opened it as a cultural and commercial centre. In 1993 Silver persuaded his friend David Hockney — born in Bradford in 1937 — to exhibit a permanent collection at the mill. Hockney agreed, and the Bradford 1853 Gallery now holds over 300 of his works, including large-format paintings and the iPad drawings for which he became famous late in his career.