Mill's empty floor prepares to open as museum

A floor of a Victorian textile mill is about to open as a museum after the space was repurposed.

The Bradford Peace Museum has moved from the city centre to a new base at Salts Mill in Saltaire, where it hopes to welcome more visitors.

It will open to the public on 10 August with exhibitions and collections dedicated to the history of the peace movement and peacemakers.

A National Lottery heritage grant of just over £245,000 and an additional £150,000 from Bradford 2025 City of Culture helped fund the move to the Grade II-listed mill.

Museum director Joe Brook has been working with his team to put many of the thousands of items owned by the museum back on display.

He said: "We've got really poignant and really moving objects like roof tiles from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"You can see where the surface has been vitrified and turned into glass in the nuclear blast (the Japanese cities were bombed by the Allies at the end of World War Two, the only instances in history of nuclear weapons being deployed).

Mr Brook added: "We've got education spaces for school groups and adult learning. We've got spaces for doing research with our collection, which is the only kind of its type in the world."

The museum opened in 1998 in Piece Hall Yard in Bradford, although items for its collection were being gathered from 1994.

It closed at the start of the pandemic as the original site was no longer viable and had issues with level access.

The museum's 16,000 artefacts were moved into a specialist basement storage space in Salts Mill

An empty, third-floor area which was once a working part of the woollen mill has been converted into an exhibition space with reception and toilets.

Zoe Silver from Salts Mill is renting out the space to the museum.

She said: "It's been empty for a really long time. The museum's unique collection will bring something new to what Salts Mill already offers.

"We are really looking forward to sharing it with our visitors when it opens next month."

The mill also has a David Hockney gallery - the artist is a friend of the Silver family - and a number of shops and cafes.