Salts Mill

Salts Mill brought David Hockney's art into a building that already belonged to the history of Bradford. Opened as a textile mill in 1853, it acquired a new purpose after the entrepreneur Jonathan Silver bought it in 1987. Paintings, drawings and prints became part of a setting shared with books, art materials, shops and working businesses. The connection depended on a friendship, but its consequences reached beyond the two friends: Hockney's work helped give a redundant industrial building a public cultural life. ^{[1] [2]}

The relationship also ran in the other direction. Salts Mill became a place where Hockney could send new work, test ways of reaching an audience and sustain a connection with Yorkshire while living elsewhere. Its story includes the collective assembly of a fax picture, exhibitions of changing landscapes and a long digital frieze made in France. Following those episodes reveals how a place of production became a place of looking without losing its association with work.

The mill before the gallery

Titus Salt built Salts Mill to bring textile manufacture together on a site beside the Leeds–Liverpool Canal and the railway. These connections allowed raw materials and finished cloth to move efficiently. Lockwood and Mawson designed the Italianate exterior; the engineer William Fairbairn was largely responsible for the interior. The mill opened on 20 September 1853, Salt's fiftieth birthday. Its integrated operation could take raw fibre through washing, combing, drawing, spinning, weaving and finishing. The spacious building later available to Silver was the physical result of this ambition to organise manufacture under one roof. ^[3]

The architecture combined display with practical construction. Local sandstone gave the exterior a substantial presence, while brick and cast iron formed the internal framework. The nomination dossier for Saltaire's World Heritage inscription describes machinery and drive shafts placed below the floor as part of the attempt to reduce industrial injury. Its account of the long, regularly windowed elevations helps explain the building's later possibilities: the mill offered extensive rooms and light, but turning those rooms into galleries required decisions about how pictures would occupy them. ^[2]

Around the mill, Salt developed Saltaire as a planned community of houses, shops and public institutions. The housing supplied drainage, water and private lavatories, while communal buildings supported education, worship and recreation. The Saltaire Collection records that the early Dining Hall also accommodated a school, religious services, a library, lectures and concerts. Production and social provision were interwoven from the beginning. ^[3]

That history carries the paternalism of a community shaped by its employer. UNESCO's recognition of Saltaire in 2001 concerned the unusually complete industrial settlement: mills, workers' housing, public buildings and their surviving plan. Hockney's gallery belongs within this larger setting. Looking at the mill only as a container for celebrated pictures would miss the relationship between the building and the streets around it, and the workers whose lives gave its scale a purpose. ^[4]

Jonathan Silver's opportunity in 1987

The mill passed through several owners after the Salt family. Illingworth Morris acquired the business in 1958; its later reorganisation moved remaining productive processes to other sites. Cloth production at Salts Mill ended in 1986, following a period of industrial decline and deteriorating buildings. The Saltaire Village Society had formed in 1984 to help regenerate the area. Silver bought the mill in June 1987 and began making space for galleries, retail, restaurants and businesses. ^{[5] [2]}

The 1853 Gallery opened in November 1987, taking its name from the mill's original opening year. Local historian Roger Clarke's account describes Silver helping to remove flooring to expose the stone flags beneath, and records Maggie Silver's recollection that she was the first gallery assistant. The practical work and family participation give the project a human scale alongside the enormous building. A gallery could begin within the mill while the wider enterprise continued to develop. ^[6]

Hockney and Silver had known one another long before this purchase. In his tribute to Silver, written in 1997, Hockney recalled their first meeting in a Bradford Wimpy bar in the early 1960s. Silver, then a schoolboy, had asked him for a picture for an alternative school magazine. They stayed in touch through Silver's subsequent business career and Hockney's life in Los Angeles. When Silver telephoned in 1987 to announce the purchase, both men already knew Saltaire from growing up nearby. Hockney remembered family outings that passed the working mill on the way towards Shipley Glen. ^[7]

A different setting for looking

Hockney's recollection of his first gallery visit centred on a display problem: Silver had hung pictures in an extremely long room with windows where conventional gallery walls might have been. He watched the spaces develop on subsequent visits and lent early work from his Bradford School of Art years. He also remembered theatre, poetry readings, shops and restaurants becoming part of the undertaking. His admiration concerned the atmosphere Silver created and shared, as well as the entrepreneurial skills needed to sustain it. ^[7]

The timing connected this new setting with Hockney's interest in circulation. In 1987 he bought a colour laser photocopier, expanding his experiments with reproducing paintings and rearranging drawings. That February, a colour design appeared in Bradford's Telegraph & Argus. His accompanying reflections, preserved by the Foundation, connected printing with the opportunity to reach a public. Showing work in Saltaire and distributing it through a local newspaper were different activities, but both brought pictures into contact with people beyond an established exhibition circuit. The wider history of his prints helps explain why reproduction technology mattered to him. ^[8]

Salts Mill developed its own institutional character. In its 2024 visitor guide, the 1853 Gallery described itself as a private enterprise devoted to Hockney's work, with free entry and no public-source funding. This arrangement placed access to art within an enterprise supported by other activities. Books and artists' materials could sit within the same encounter as displayed pictures. The resulting experience allowed looking, reading and the possibility of making something oneself to meet in one building. ^{[9] [1]}

Tennis: a picture arriving by fax

On 10 November 1989, Salts Mill became the receiving end of an unusually public experiment. Hockney sent Tennis from Los Angeles as 144 fax sheets. Four machines in the gallery received the pages, which were assembled into a grid according to instructions sent in advance. Jonathan Silver organised the evening, with Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries supplying a soundtrack. The audience could encounter a picture arriving in pieces and being given its full scale through work carried out at the destination. ^{[2] [10]}

The process made distance part of the event. Hockney's hand had made the image in California; a telephone connection transmitted it; people in Yorkshire handled and joined its paper components. A technology normally associated with office correspondence became a means of producing a large public picture. Silver's contribution involved staging the conditions in which that remote act could become a shared experience. ^[10]

The same year's São Paulo project showed the practical limits. When the connection failed to receive Hockney's faxes in Brazil, sheets were faxed between rooms in a Los Angeles hotel and carried to the exhibition. At Salts Mill, transmission and local assembly had worked together to make the picture. ^[10]

A place for new work

The early exhibitions also kept Saltaire connected with Hockney's current practice. Some Very New Paintings reached the 1853 Gallery in September 1993 after presentations in New York and Glasgow. The figureless studio paintings brought a different aspect of his work to the mill from familiar views of California or Bradford. Saltaire was participating in the circulation of a recent body of work between exhibition venues. ^[11]

In summer 1994, New Drawings: Some Drawings of Family, Friends and Best Friends presented large portrait drawings. The Foundation records that the catalogue reproduced video-camera stills of the drawings, connecting the direct marks on paper with Hockney's exploration of camera and printer technologies. In 1995 the gallery showed his dog paintings, with the Foundation listing the exhibition from 26 June to 1 October. These successive projects gave the mill's audience access to changing subjects and methods, from abstract space to familiar faces and the close observation of his dachshunds. Their range helps explain why Salts Mill mattered as a place to encounter an artist who continued experimenting. ^{[12] [13]}

Friendship and the Yorkshire return

The relationship acquired a different urgency in 1997, when Silver was seriously ill. Hockney returned from Los Angeles and spent an extended period in Yorkshire. His recollection describes driving from Bridlington to visit Silver in Wetherby every few days. Along the route he noticed fields changing through growth, harvest and ploughing. Familiar country began to offer a renewed subject, with broad views and roads leading across the Wolds. These journeys connected personal concern with an increasingly attentive experience of landscape. ^[14]

This was one important beginning within a much longer relationship with Yorkshire. It should retain the particular circumstances that made the journey necessary: Hockney was visiting a close friend with whom he had talked regularly about art and other matters. After Silver's death, the 1853 Gallery held a memorial exhibition from 14 December 1997 to 12 April 1998. The institution they had helped animate could also provide a public setting for remembrance. ^[14]

The landscape work continued across geographical distance. In 1998 Hockney painted Yorkshire from memory after returning to Los Angeles. The region could remain active in his pictures even when he was elsewhere. This movement between presence and recollection helps explain the mill's place in his career: it maintained a local point of encounter for work made within a life that continued to move between countries. ^[15]

Landscapes, paper and changing displays

The mill's exhibition history lets us follow the changing forms of that encounter. Midsummer: East Yorkshire was shown at the 1853 Gallery from 3 June to 6 November 2005, before travelling to Somerset House in London. The series consisted of thirty-six watercolours made in 2004. Its subjects included roads, cornfields, gardens, buildings and agricultural equipment: a landscape experienced through repeated excursions and attention to ordinary features. The exhibition gave Yorkshire viewers access to this recent work within a Yorkshire institution, while its subsequent journey connected Saltaire with a wider audience. ^[16]

The Arrival of Spring opened at the 1853 Gallery on 18 February 2015. The mill's historical exhibition description identifies its works as drawings made on an iPad in 2011 and then printed at enlarged scale. This distinction matters. The handheld device was the place of drawing, while paper gave the work another size and a shared physical setting. The exhibition extended the mill's earlier interest in making technologically produced images available for public viewing. ^{[17] [18]}

The broader 2011 project began with Hockney drawing the East Yorkshire landscape outdoors in January and recognising that he could follow the transition from winter towards summer. He made more than a hundred iPad drawings. For the Royal Academy's 2012 exhibition, fifty-one were selected to accompany a separate oil painting on thirty-two canvases. The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate brought several kinds of picture together; Saltaire's enlarged paper works offered a further exhibition form for the digital drawings. ^{[19] [18]}

A year in France, seen in Saltaire

The relationship eventually carried a French landscape into the mill. A Year in Normandie, dated 2020–21, developed from Hockney's iPad observations of the seasons around his home in Normandy. A Salts Mill exhibition began on 30 April 2022, with a further showing from 4 May to 3 November 2024. ^{[20] [18]}

The installation used the mill's roof space, with the paper frieze attached to a specially built wall beneath the timber beams. The Saltaire Festival's 2024 account explains that the continuous work joined selected images from the 220 iPad works made during 2020. Walking alongside it offered a way to experience the passage of seasons through changes in the garden and surrounding landscape. The building's long dimensions acquired a new use: viewers could move through pictorial time as they moved through space. ^[21]

The Foundation connects the frieze with Hockney's interest in the Bayeux Tapestry and Chinese scroll painting. At Saltaire, that interest became an encounter at the scale of the visitor's body. A sequence initially worked on a screen could extend along a wall, invite a walk, and allow a return to details already passed. This was another transformation of image into exhibition, following the fax sheets and enlarged spring drawings through quite different means. ^{[20] [21]}

An industrial place with a cultural future

The later programme continued to explore the meeting of images and their making. The mill's 20 Flowers for 2025 and Some Bigger Pictures presentation combined iPad flower pictures with larger landscape and abstract works. A six-screen installation showed recorded brushstrokes from the creation of 10th–22nd June 2021, Water Lilies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers. Here the developing picture itself became something an audience could follow. The emphasis on process sits naturally within a building whose previous purpose was manufacture. ^[1]

Industrial history also has its own place in the mill through People + Process, whose exhibits include machinery, clothing and objects connected with the original opening. Keeping that history visible matters to the cultural reuse of the site. The rooms have acquired other functions, yet their earlier working life remains available to understand. The gallery and the history exhibition offer different reasons to enter the same building. ^[1]

Historic England's 2016 case study considered Saltaire's heritage as an active resource for artists, artisans, businesses and festivals. It described the mill's façade and industrial references appearing in the village's public identity, including the alpaca used by the Saltaire Festival. This broader activity shows how Hockney's presence formed part of a local cultural network. The mill could draw visitors while other people made, traded and organised around it. ^[22]

UNESCO likewise identifies continued life as a community as part of Saltaire's authenticity. The survival of stone buildings alone does not explain the place's significance; their use and relationship to one another also matter. Silver's undertaking gave the mill new functions, and Hockney's art supplied an enduring reason for people to look, return and talk about what they had seen. Within that history, friendship had public consequences. ^[4]

Salts Mill within Hockney's Bradford

Salts Mill belongs alongside other local institutions in the story of Hockney's life. Cartwright Hall was somewhere he visited as a child and later as a student practising drawing. Bradford Museums' collection includes the four literary print series associated with Hogarth, Cavafy, the Brothers Grimm and The Blue Guitar. These civic holdings and the privately developed 1853 Gallery have different histories. Together they show several ways in which the region supported the experience of art: early learning, collecting, exhibition and the renewal of a working place. ^{[23] [24]}