Celebrating A Year In Salts Mill

Saturday 9th August will mark 1 year of The Peace Museum being open in their new home in Salts Mill.

To mark this milestone they are having a Peace Picnic in Roberts Park, Saltaire as well as having celebrations in the museum.

Bring some lunch, dress for the weather and join them in Robert’s Park and the museum space for peace and protest themed family-friendly activities!

About the move

In 2019, The Peace Museum carried out an assessment of its premises and determined that it was no longer suitable. The museum was inaccessible to visitors with it being located on the top floor of the building, up 60 steps with no lift. They did not have storage space to continue to build the collection, and structural issues with the building meant that the collection could no longer be stored safely at this site. This meant they urgently needed to move premises to ensure that The Peace Museum could continue to be a resource for future generations.

In 2020, they launched a CrowdFunder campaign to support plans to move to a bigger and more suitable premises. This was a huge success, and in May 2021 they announced they had found a suitable location for the new museum at Salts Mill in Saltaire. In 2023, The Peace Museum received a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant of £245,651 towards the move. The move included transporting the museum’s 16,000 object collection to new collection stores.

The Peace Museum reopened in August 2024, with a newly developed permanent exhibition, education facilities and a shop in their new museum space.

Its Impact

The move has had an incredibly positive impact onto The Peace Museum’s work and engagement. Opening in these new premises created many more opportunities for visitors, researchers, and community groups to explore the diverse range of stories told by the collection.

The Peace Museum is on course to hit 40,000 visitors on its anniversary weekend.

This is a massive increase in comparison to its previous site in Piece Hall Yard, where the busiest year on record was 3,000 visitors.

This increase in visitors means that more people than ever before are engaging with this important collection and the histories of peace campaigns.

This has also led to an increase in people seeking to donate their objects to the museum’s collection. The museum has recently welcomed 12 new collection volunteers to help accession the backlog of new donations.

People who have been involved in peace campaigning and protesting are bringing their families and friends to the museum, using the space and objects on display to teach them about actions they were involved in.

They are also increasing our knowledge of items we already have. Visitors are able to offer us new insights into how objects were used, when they were created and how they were used.