From Salt to Silver publication photographs by Ian Beesley poems by Ian McMillan

Abstract

From Salt to Silver

I suppose it must have been sometime in the 1960s but I can remember waiting in Victoria Road for my aunty to come out of Salts mill, scanning the swarm of bustling faces, until I saw her strolling out the gates arm in arm laughing and joking with her friends. She worked here as a burler and mender a highly skilled job mending defects in woven cloth.

Twenty years later I walked through those gates to photograph the last days of production at Salts.
I had been commissioned by the newly opened and then called National Museum of Photography to document the demise of the textile trade and so in February of 1985 I made my first visit to Salts Mill.
The weaving shed was in full production and spinning was running shifts, I was given complete access to come and go as I pleased. I was a regular visitor for the next 18 months during which production ceased, the mill was stripped and eventually sold. Just a few of these images have been exhibited, the rest stored in my darkroom cupboards. In 2016 Maggie & Zoe Silver asked me to see what photographs I had. I was surprised to find that I have over 1000 negatives of Salts.

So thirty years later (with some new additions and poems by Ian McMillan) here they are, a small tribute to those who worked here when it was a textile mill, but more importantly it is a celebration of the development of Salts mill by the Silver family into a world famous hub of modern industry, creativity and enterprise.