TL;DR - A truly unique venue combining art, food and shopping…read more
One of Sparky's colleagues tipped us off about this place, and I'm amazed we'd never heard of it before. In case you don't know (I didn't!), Saltaire was built by industrialist Titus Salt (amazing name!) alongside the river Aire to bring all aspects of his textiles business onto one enormous site. He also built a town for the workers, and the whole area is now a world heritage site.
The mill has now been converted into an amazing and huge venue spanning several floors. There's so much here it's hard to take in, but I'll try and summarise.
The ground floor is a mixture of books on art, stationery and arts supplies, postcards and the like but interspersed with huge art displays. At first I wasn't sure if I was in an art gallery or a shop, but the answer is both. As with the rest of the mill, David Hockney features strongly throughout.
There's a basement level which we didn't explore in detail, but it sells rugs and wallpapers and is just as big as the ground floor.
The first floor houses the most. One end is a gorgeous bookshop, where the focus seems to be on unusual titles rather than breadth - I saw many, many books in the recipe section which I'd never seen or heard of anywhere else. The other end of the building is devoted to homewares - kitchen supplies, furniture, clocks and more. A lot of it is very expensive, but it's a beautifully curated selection of objects for sale.
Between these two wings is Salt's Diner. It's a separate venue on Yelp but suffice it to say we had lunch here and it was great.Through the restaurant you can access a further wing of the building which is split into an outdoor clothing shop, a jewellers, an art exhibit, a treasure trove of an antique store and a small coffee shop.
Finally, the top floor is split into three: an exhibit on the history of the mill, a major exhibition of work by David Hockney, and a further cafe/restaurant.
On top of all these, parking is free on site and it's right next to the Saltaire train station, so there's really no excuse for not visiting.