It includes weaving looms, 5000 wool-dyeing recipe cards, 8000 fabric designs, hundreds of ledgers detailing the minutiae of the mills’ day to day administration as well as photographs and memorabilia.
Last September, Caroline Brown of Rose & Brown Vintage, a fair organiser in the nearby village of Saltaire as well as in the North Yorkshire coastal town of Whitby, started a vintage furniture and homewares fair in what was the finishing room at the mills.
“We launched it last September when we thought it was our only chance to use this space before it was demolished,” says Brown.
The “wonderfully atmospheric vast finishing room, with lots of peeling paint, long rows of skylights and traces of its industrial past”, is earmarked for demolition in May this year, Brown adds, to enable “some essential improvements” to the mills complex.
“The fair focused totally on furniture and homewares and was such a success that we knew we had to return if we could,” she says. “So we are holding another on Saturday and Sunday, April 28-29 with customers and stallholders keen to make the most of this amazing space before it disappears.”
Now in a family-run regeneration which commenced in 2010 and with 30% completed to date spread over the 10 buildings, the semi-derelict mills are reinventing themselves as a business centre and community hub. They are now home to 70 firms including London-based School of Sew which offers workshops on, well, sewing, so where better to do this than in a former textiles mill?
Contact Brown via the website below.
