Desk Notes No.6

Domestic goddesses, Salts Mill and Hockney's changing seasons

Sep 25, 2022

Dear friends,

The seasons are turning and the pavements are already scattered with crispy leaves. The intensity of summer has given way to something more relaxed. These are my favourite days, when clear skies and low sun make the nip in the air just bearable. So much about this time of year gives me that warm fuzzy feeling - the smell of radiators heating up for the first time, switching from iced to hot coffee in the mornings, the nights drawing in. The possibility of an Indian summer remains, but I can already feel myself reaching for Nigella’s first cookbooks filled with hot puddings, pies, stews and fancy feasts. I love the unashamed indulgence of her sweet-wine custard phase, the gratins overflowing with double cream, the pumpkin lasagne stuffed with goats cheese, ricotta and nutmeg. I turn to these recipes every year, giving autumn its own eagerly awaited flavour. Eating them with the curtains closed, lamps on, time slows down.

Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Goddess was the first cookbook I was ever given, a twenty-first birthday present from my parents. I can’t remember what attracted me to it. Was it the homey, unpretentious cupcake on the cover? Something I might actually be able to make (Nigella’s recipes have always been more about taste than presentation). Was it her vivacious TV persona? Or did the title ignite my desire to nurture and nest? Later that year, when my husband’s father died suddenly, baking became one of the few ways I felt I could help.

The book, “is not about being a goddess, but about feeling like one,” write the publishers. “Here is the book that feeds our fantasies, understands our anxieties and puts cakes, pies, pastries, preserves, puddings, bread and biscuits back into our own kitchens.”

I have mixed feelings about indulging the fantasy of womanhood Nigella courts and creates, albeit with her tongue in her cheek. But she strikes on something very truthful: the simple pleasures of food as comfort, food as care, food as nurture; and how rewarding these simple feelings of domestic success can be. Even when the only person we’re feeding is ourselves. When the book first arrived on the cultural landscape, I was figuring out how to be a grown-up, how to be a woman, having friends over for dinner at ‘my place’ for the very first time. Domestic Goddess was aspirational, the key to a middle-class world which had so far made me awkward and uncomfortable.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve thought about how this book shaped me. How it fitted into a complex cultural dialogue about how a woman should be. How having it all became confused with doing it all. How it presented a world in which women might indulge the aesthetic of 1950s housewives, becoming hostesses whose flirty personalities are as irresistible as their food. But none of this makes me love it any less. Because Nigella has given me the freedom to say something I’ve spent years trying to deny and conceal: that I enjoy domestic pursuits and that’s ok. Feminists bake too. To me, Domestic Goddess feels like an attempt to reclaim the kitchen for pleasure. As Nigella herself once said:

“Women of my generation were keen — rightly — not to be tied to the stove, but the ramifications of this were that they felt a sense of dread in the kitchen… I also feel that to denigrate any activity because it has traditionally been associated with the female sphere is in itself anti-feminist.”

Indulging this nesting side of personality, one of my favourite things to do at this time of year is visit Emma Bridgewater’s pottery in Stoke-on-Trent. Her autumn designs are always my favourite - game birds, apples, pears, root vegetables. There’s a nice little cafe where you can eat quiches, soups and homemade cakes, all served on her mix-and-match earthenware. I like the company’s ethos - keeping Stoke’s potteries alive and rescuing an old Victorian factory from disuse.

Crockery aside, the Pottery is home to a little walled garden that feels like stepping back in time. Right now there are pears ripening and dahlias in full flower - the giant cactus varieties and petite little globes. A few years ago there were chickens here. The whole place has an allotment feel to it. A cottage garden tucked between the smoke-stained bricks. The grow-your-own aesthetic has become increasingly fashionable, even twee, but it never feels that way to me. Instead it reminds me of my grandfather’s modest garden where growing provided an escape from the dark confines of the coal pit. Where the seasonal harvests helped wages go further, filling Grandma’s pans, stores and pies. This cosy feeling of love and family is tied to the food we eat and the land it comes from. It’s never more potent than during harvest time. It’s why I enjoy autumn so much.

In this edition you will find:

Places - Salts Mill and Saltaire village

Pictures - The Arrival of Spring and A Year in Normandie both David Hockney at Salts Mill

Places

Gibson Mill and Hardcastle Crags, West Yorkshire, National Trust

Salts Mill and Saltaire village, UESCO World Heritage Site, West Yorkshire

I’ve spent a lot of time this year researching everyday life in nineteenth century cotton mills. Earlier this month, I took a short break in Yorkshire to see some of these places first hand. Nestled in a rocky valley half a mile from the nearest road, Gibson Mill reveals how isolated many of these factories were. They marked a turning point in the production of textiles. Formerly a cottage industry whose various processes were undertaken by different people in their own homes, the invention of water-powered (and later steam-powered) machinery was a game changer for Yorkshire, and mills began springing up all along its rivers. As a first generation cotton mill (one of the very first to be built and powered by a waterwheel), Gibson Mill ceased production in the 1890s. It was soon repurposed as an entertainment venue. Edwardians spent their spare time boating on the mill pond and scrambling up the nearby crags. They installed a dance hall, a roller skating rink and an ice cream kiosk.

Today, the tranquility of Gibson Mill belies its industrial past. In the 1830s, before health and safety legislation, the Mill’s 21 employees worked an average of 72 hours a week. Throughout the country, factories enabled a huge increase in production, but this came at a cost to employees and tragic accidents were frequent. By 1853, Yorkshire was home to the largest factory in the world, Salts Mill. The Illustrated London News reported that its 1,200 looms were, “capable of producing 300,000 yards, or nearly eighteen miles, of alpaca cloth per day, and an aggregate length of 5,688 miles of cloth annually.”

The Mill’s owner, Titus Salt, was an innovator. Not only was he the amongst the first to ‘discover’ the potential of alpaca wool for making high quality fabrics, but he also fervently believed in improving the lives and working conditions of his employees. In February of 1853, as Salt’s immense factory - 550 feet long and six stories high - was being erected, journalist George Dodd wrote that:

“A great power for good and for evil will rest in the hands of the owner of this gigantic establishment; and one feels inclined to encourage a hope that the second half of the nineteenth century may show itself to be something more than a mere steam-engine era.”

Salt had already proven himself a caring employer. In 1849 he took the workers of his six factories (in the heavily polluted town of Bradford) on a day trip to the beautiful Gordale Scar and Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales. When the time came to build his own Mill, Salt purchased six acres of land and built an entire town which he named Saltaire (after the man himself and the river Aire on which it sat). The town’s 805 houses were carefully situated on 22 widely spaced streets. There was clean water, a bath house, almshouses, a hospital, churches, schools, allotments, a club and institute, a dining hall, and a park. Salt was as concerned for his employee’s mental health as he was their physical health, believing in the importance of access to education and culture. The institute alone cost around £20,000 (£1.25 million in today’s money) and contained a school of art, a library, reading rooms and a lecture hall capable of seating 800 people. Meanwhile, in nearby Bradford, textile workers continued to live in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions. When journalist Angus Reach visited Bradford in 1849, he wrote that:

“With the exception of a few main thoroughfares, which are bustling, and characterised by good shops, and in many cases by handsome ranges of warehouses which I have alluded to, Bradford may be described as an accumulation of mean streets, steep lanes, and huge mills — intersected here and there by the odious patches of black, muddy, waste ground, rooted up by pigs, and strewn with oyster-shells, cabbage-stalks, and such garbage, which I have so often noticed as commonly existing in manufacturing towns…
The houses of the workpeople are very inferior. They are one and all constructed back to back, or rather built double, with a partition running down from the ridge of the roof. This is the case even in rows and streets at present building. ‘The plan,’ said my informant, ‘is adopted because of its cheapness, and because it saves ground rent.’ Cellars are very numerous in Bradford, and not one operative family in a hundred possesses more than two rooms — ‘a house and a chamber’.”

Today, Saltaire is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The architecture is beautiful and the public buildings appear extraordinarily grand. Four imposing lions adorn the corners of the institute and school. It’s hard to imagine the most successful capitalists being so dedicated to improving the lives of their employees today, or being so well loved by them. Last year, when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos announced a Housing Equity Fund of $2 billion US dollars to create 20,000 affordable homes, the reaction was initially positive. But analysis by the Washington Post soon poured cold water on the idea, concluding that:

“Amazon’s efforts will likely do little to move the needle for the region’s lowest-income residents, many of whom are already stretching their pay checks to make rent every month. Just 6 percent of the units secured so far under Amazon’s fund have been set aside for the poorest renters.”

Back in 1853, Salt opened his Mill with an enormous banquet, held in its 210 foot long ‘combing shed’. The room’s iron columns were wreathed in laurel and its walls, “decorated with pink and white draperies, flags, evergreens and flowers.” There were 3,500 guests, including 2,500 employees. Afterwards, Salt paid for special trains to take the guests to Bradford for a celebratory concert in St George’s Hall. The Illustrated London News devoted three gushing pages to the event: “Perhaps the largest dinner party that ever sat down under one roof at a time.” A great deal was made of the toast: “prosperity, health and happiness to the working-classes.”

Salts Mill closed in 1986. On the top floor, there is currently an exhibition of work by social documentary photographer, Ian Beesley, including many images of factory life during this period of industrial decline. It’s a moving and powerful ode to a bygone era. But, just as the the Edwardians reshaped Gibson Mill into a place for larks and laughter, Salts Mill has been rescued as a place of cultural and artistic retreat. Its galleries, shops and cafes throng with people, wandering the Mill’s corridors in awe of its scale and optimism.

Pictures

The Arrival of Spring, David Hockney at Salts Mill 3rd Floor Gallery

A Year in Normandie, David Hockney at Salts Mill, Wednesday - Sunday until 30th October 2022

Salts Mill is home to the world’s largest permanent collection of works by Bradford born artist, David Hockney. On the ground floor, the walls of an immense bookshop are lined with his abstract lithographs, his fairytale illustrations and his portraits. Prior to my visit, I was aware only of the pool paintings, but I soon learned Hockney’s work is much more diverse. I was particularly impressed by his innovative use of materials and apparent desire not to take his art too seriously. Many of the works on display are ‘computer drawn,’ using an iPad with the Brush app and printed out in large scale. A video screen displays works he simply emailed to friends.

In the third floor exhibition The Arrival of Spring, forty-nine works reveal the same patch of Yorkshire road on different days between 1st January and 31st May 2011. It’s a record of changing seasons, of weather, of growth, all painted on the iPad. Back in August, I wrote about Turner’s skies and the challenge of capturing rapidly changing light at the beginning and end of the day. I wondered about the speed at which Turner must have sketched, and the necessity of committing details to memory. In capturing the ephemeral light of late winter and early spring, Hockney seems to have found the solution in technology. In the introduction to the exhibition he comments on the iPad and the Brush app:

“Turner would have loved it. You can be very, very subtle with transparent layers. The light changes quickly here, so you have to choose how you want to depict it. I realised how fast I can capture it with the iPad, a lot faster than watercolour for example. Simply faster. You can choose a new brush more rapidly. You don’t have to wait for anything to dry.”

Looking closely at the paintings, it’s easy to imagine Hockney working at speed. But the rapidity of the dashed-off lines and unselfconscious squiggles is eclipsed by the sheer quantity of marks on the page, all working together to build texture and subtle gradations in colour. A mass of red, orange and brown lines give the effect both of a barren dogwood hedge and the quality of an autumn bonfire. In echoes of Pointillism, tiny dots suggest gravel, snow and little green buds about to open. Later, in higher density, they become a tree in full leaf. Smudges and fuzzy edges make the pictures opaque, implying low-lying mist yet to be burned off by the coming sun. Hockney’s colours are vibrant, unexpected but never jarring, used instead to convey story; to suggest time of day and invite us to feel the temperature of the scene. Smoky mauves give the impression of dusk, while aquamarines immerse us in cold - the temperature of ice melting. Sunlight bounces off new growth in the limey yellows of low, morning sun on a sharp day.

The simplicity of the tools reveal just how skilled Hockney is at creating shadows, perspective and reflections - his ability to suggest water that, in some variations of the same scene, becomes simply mud. What imbues all these pictures is stillness and calm. There are roads but no cars. In these pictures Hockney offers us a moment of pause. Together, they are an exercise in extreme noticing. On first glance, what strikes most is the suddenness of the vivid green; the almost unanticipated fullness of the foliage. Hockney writes:

“You have to show the winter first to appreciate how everything changes… What I began to call Action Week, when the cow parsley (Queen Anne’s lace) seems to grow a few feet in about a week, always comes around early May.”

By comparison, nature’s autumnal disrobing is a much more subtle affair, as shown in Hockney’s, A Year in Normandie. This work, almost 91 metres wide, is the product of 220 iPad works created during the pandemic in 2020. Sewn together they create a visual record of the seasons. Hockney explains his hopes that, “the viewer… will walk past it like the Bayeux tapestry, and I hope they will experience in one picture the year in Normandy.” Hockney’s materials might seem crude, but his palette shifts so gradually, so seamlessly, that on first glance it’s impossible to spot the moment summer divides from autumn. Returning to find it, it arrives with the swelling of fruit; the rich golds and russets of apples ripening on trees.

News

London Film Festival 2022, 5th - 16th October

Keep eyes on your inboxes this October for some special newsletter supplements with the best of this year’s London Film Festival.

Wishing you all a lovely October. If you have any thoughts about the things you’ve read in this month’s Desk Notes, please get in touch in the comments.

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