Bradford had grown rich on wool and cruel in the doing. Salt commissioned Salts Mill and the surrounding village of Saltaire as a deliberate rebuke to that cruelty. He hired the respected Bradford building firm J and W Beanland, picked stone that would carry six storeys without flinching, and surrounded the works with stone cottages, a hospital, schools, a church, almshouses and washhouses. Workers had ventilation and daylight; their children had teachers. The Italianate campanile of the mill chimney was meant to be admired, not endured. Whether Salt's paternalism was generous or controlling depended on whose side of the loom you stood, but conditions at Saltaire were undeniably better than the alternative. UNESCO inscribed the village as a World Heritage site for exactly that reason: a complete surviving example of a Victorian model industrial settlement.

Spinning continued for a century and a third. Then in 1986, the last shift walked out and the great floors went dark. Saltaire's reason for existing had vanished. Within a year the empty mill was bought by Jonathan Silver, a Bradford-born entrepreneur in his late thirties who had already sold a clothing chain and travelled the world. Silver saw something else in the cavernous space. He cleaned the soot from the walls, opened the 1853 Gallery, and persuaded a local artist named David Hockney to lend works. Hockney had grown up in Bradford. The two men became close friends, and Hockney kept on lending. Today the mill houses one of the largest public collections of his paintings, drawings and stage designs anywhere in the world.

The pictures hang where weavers once stood. A wall of swimming-pool blues from Los Angeles, a wall of Yorkshire moors painted in colours that no photograph can carry, prints made on iPads in the last decade beside lithographs from the 1960s. Hockney's relationship with the mill outlasted Silver, who died in 1997. The artist continued sending work, including the great landscape series he made after returning to Yorkshire in the 2000s. In August 2024 Bradford's Peace Museum moved into the mill's third floor, funded by the city's stint as 2025 UK City of Culture and the National Lottery. A textile mill that once helped clothe an empire now holds paintings, books, restaurants and a small museum dedicated to peace. Titus Salt, who hated waste, would probably approve.

Saltaire repays slow looking. The stone cottages on the gridded streets still house residents, though property prices have crept upward. The United Reformed Church Salt built in 1859 holds his tomb. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal runs alongside the mill, towpath busy with cyclists and walkers heading toward Bingley's famous Five-Rise Locks a few miles upstream. The village is one stop from central Bradford on the Airedale line. Visitors come for Hockney and stay for an afternoon of Victorian streetscape that never had a chance to grow ugly because Salt would not let it.