A potent symbol of empire that has been hidden for decades at one of London’s landmarks will be open to the public from February.
The restored Salt Stair at Somerset House will be home to an exhibition exploring the pivotal role played by the Salt Office, which collected colonial taxes on the commodity.
“It is a good way to show the entangled history of the building and of the nation,” said Cliff Lauson, exhibitions director at Somerset House. “So we have invited artists to come in and explore the impact the salt tax once had on India, where the colonial occupation controlled resources and even movement.”
Famously, Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent march in 1930 in protest at the salt tax in India sparked the biggest act of civil disobedience against British rule, a milestone on the road to independence and later an inspiration to America’s civil rights movement in the 1960s.
The renovation of the Salt Stair, once the five-storey spine of the Salt Office, means it takes its place as an attraction alongside two other historic stairwells at Somerset House.
It joins the neighbouring Stamp Stair, once central to the Stamp Office, which became the Inland Revenue, and the more famous, grandly sweeping Nelson Stair, in the building formerly occupied by the Navy Office.
Opening up this part of the building, which has loomed over Waterloo Bridge from the north bank of the Thames since the late 1700s, comes four months after fire ravaged the roof of one wing. Plumes of smoke were visible across London last August, but the damage was limited. “Luckily, the staff were very fast to raise the alarm, but the shock of the fire actually gave people a chance to voice a tremendous outpouring of affection for the building,” said Lauson.
Visitors will be invited into the newly restored area to celebrate 25 years since the site was handed over to more than 3,000 artists, entrepreneurs and cultural organisations.
A battle for ownership had been waged for two centuries between the fiscal demands of empire and the rival claims of the arts and sciences. While Somerset House previously housed both the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal College of Art and is now the home of the Courtauld Gallery, the building also notoriously once hauled money into the exchequer from around the world, as the headquarters of the Inland Revenue and of Customs and Excise.
That history can now be confronted head on as the Salt Stair, an emblem of divisive colonial taxation in India, becomes the focus of thenew exhibition, Salt Cosmologies, by artists Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, known as Hylozoic/Desires.
“This duo of artists have researched the complex history of salt, and the stairwell will become a pop-up gallery for the show, with sound installations,” said Lauson.
Another major artwork will go up in Somerset House’s courtyard, the site of a popular ice rink each Christmas, to represent the troubled legacy of the Great Salt Hedge, a monumental 2,500-mile long barrier built by the British East India Company to prevent salt smuggling.
The Salt Office managed the production, movement and taxation of British salt from Somerset House in the late 1700s, operating from offices on all floors. It oversaw the main source of production in Cheshire’s salt mines, as well as in north-east England and around the coast.
Overseas, the office controlled and extracted large amounts of salt and wealth through taxation from the colonies, notably the Indian subcontinent and around the Caribbean.
A valuable commodity, salt was mainly used as a preservative but also had medicinal, gastronomic, agricultural and chemical worth. Salt was used by the navy too. The Salt Office closed in 1798 when it was taken back into the Excise Board, and the salt tax was finally abolished in Britain in 1825. Divisions and departments of HMRC remained until March 2013, when Somerset House’s 224-year association with tax came to an end.
“It hasn’t been a straight line in terms of our development as a space for artists and innovators, but it’s been tremendous bringing it back into public life over the last 25 years,” said Jonathan Reekie, director of Somerset House.
“As offices for the civil service, it was obviously not purpose-built for this, but we’ve enhanced what is special about the architecture. London often boasts to the world that it’s a creative capital, but that is a bit hollow unless you have something innovative going on at its heart.”
The three stairwells have faced bigger threats than the recent fire. The Blitz almost destroyed a run of offices, including the Nelson Room and the handsome rotunda that houses the Nelson Stair in the South Wing. The stairwell was rebuilt by the architect Sir Albert Richardson in 1952 at a cost of £84,000.
