Bradford, a ‘House Divided’

Wool Exchange, Market Street Bradford, credit Wikipedia

                    Bradford, a ‘House Divided’, by Bill Hartley

At the ironically named Bradford Transport Interchange, the bus station has been closed since January of this year, because of ‘structural problems’. The railway station doesn’t then perform any interchange function, beyond a traveller finding another platform and there are only four to choose from. They tore down the large Victorian era station in 1976 and this was eventually replaced by the no longer working bus – rail interchange. In July of this year there were no toilet facilities at the station either. Back in 2021 a BBC report noted that Bradford has the worst rail connections of any major British city. To reach Manchester means going to Leeds, and travelling to London usually involves first heading to Sheffield. For anyone approaching the station on foot, access is via one of those grim 70s era underpasses. Emerging from this into a dirty and neglected culvert, pedestrians pass an abandoned shoe store whose window is full of shopping trolleys.

Motorists aren’t better off. Leaving the M62 heading towards the city means joining the M606, a motorway that goes nowhere. It abruptly ends on the outskirts of the city. This is the only section of the proposed Aire Valley Trunk Road which was actually completed.    Bradford is destined to become the UKs ‘City of Culture’ in 2025. A place, incidentally, of more than half a million inhabitants but described in a Guardian article as ‘Britain’s forgotten city’. Of course, Bradford is not unusual in suffering from disastrous town planning decisions. Here though they are juxtaposed with some superb examples of Victorian architecture, such as the Wool Exchange building and the city hall. They show what was accomplished in Bradford’s boom years during the nineteenth century. In the twenty first century the city seems to be going nowhere.

The broader Bradford Metropolitan District reaches out to encompass some attractive parts of West Yorkshire. ‘Bronte Country’, as Haworth has been labelled by the local tourism people, is nearly ten miles away and the World Heritage Centre of Saltaire more than four miles. Neither has any real connection to the city except they lie within the same local government boundary.

There is a sense of lassitude about the place and an overriding nostalgia among older inhabitants who remember what Bradford ‘used to be like’, with its fine department stores and bustling city centre. Bradford of course isn’t the only place with a declining retail sector. What they do have is the Broadway Centre, a shopping and leisure complex. Work on demolition and road diversions began in 2004 then ground to a halt for a decade. The site became known locally as ‘the hole in the ground’. It finally opened in 2015. Making the development fit harmoniously with the surrounding Victorian townscape was always going to be a challenge. The solution appears to have been to not try. As a result this glittering palace of retailing and leisure can be seen as a homage to 70s architecture and serves to emphasise the seediness of the surrounding area. This year unfortunately, both Marks and Spencer and Debenham’s have pulled out of the Broadway Centre.

Bradford has a vibrant neighbour. Only ten miles separates Leeds town hall from Bradford’s. In between lies a near continuous urban sprawl made up of other former textile towns. It may not be the most scientific test of economic activity but there are at present fifteen high angle cranes hovering over Leeds city centre, whilst Bradford has none. Local officials and politicians in Bradford can talk a good game but that seems all.

An interesting contrast would be Sunderland with its neighbour Newcastle only thirteen miles away.  Sunderland has refused to decline in Newcastle’s shadow and up there things are happening. A new city hall is open, as is a 450 seat performing arts centre. Legal and General are set to invest £100m, a four star hotel has opened and a thousand new homes are planned, all as part of the Riverside Sunderland project. In contrast, Bradford has come up with the concept of new homes in a ‘city village’ but so far this hasn’t got beyond the planning and consultation phase. In theory it is a sound idea but given the council’s track record and the fact that they haven’t even fixed the bus station, it would not do to be optimistic. Even City of Culture preparations are showing worrying signs that all is not well. Bradford Live is a building close to the railway station and is intended to be the heart of City of Culture events. The exterior of the former Alhambra cinema has been cleaned up but inside nothing seems to be happening. On September 14^th last, the Telegraph and Argus reported in an article dripping with sarcasm, its repeated failure to get answers from city officials about what is happening.

Why is Bradford a byword for inertia compared to Leeds? There is the question of demography. At the last census the city showed a continuing decline in the white population.  Bradford is a young city which has the second largest Asian-Pakistani population in Britain, said to renew itself by marriage partners from ancestral villages in the home country. As long ago as 2001 the late Lord Ousley, former chairman of the Council for Racial Equality, referred to what he delicately called a ‘unique entrenchment’. (Editorial note, on a no less less delicate note, see BBC news, 27 Feb 2019, ‘Bradford grooming: Nine jailed for abusing girls’) It has been described as a community within a community. The council estimates that there are 25,000 people with little or no knowledge of English. How then with a third of the cities’ population isolated culturally and to some extent linguistically, can it pick itself up and regenerate in the same way as neighbouring Leeds has done? Demography is evidently destiny.

Connoisseurs of Action Plans to do with racial equality will find plenty to interest them in Bradford. The council, police, university; every organisation it seems has a similar message. Then there is the Bradford for Everyone Strategy 2018-2023. One of its aims was to build stronger communities. Presumably no-one dares admit that they have at least one very strong and rather exclusive community already built. Arguably this prevents the city operating as a cohesive whole; not that any politician or public servant is likely to suggest as much.

As for Bradford Council, apart from its financial difficulties and the need for a government bail out to prevent it from going bankrupt, the city has been singularly unsuccessful in obtaining ‘levelling up’ money from central government. Four schemes were put forward by the council in 2023 and all were turned down by civil servants who claimed they were not adequate enough to be put before ministers. Predictably the council went into a sulk, became defensive and gave no indication it would learn from, or seek advice as to how best to submit bids in the future. A recent Times article was sceptical about the benefits that the City of Culture might bring. It felt that Bradford’s predictions were overly optimistic. The legacy of the scheme in both Hull and Coventry has not been that significant.

It would seem that a series of problems have combined to leave Bradford moribund. Poor transport facilities, badly led local government and to quote Lord Ousely once more, the unique ‘entrenchment’ of a substantial part of the population. On a more optimistic note, in October the BBC reported that the bus station ‘could’ reopen ‘as soon as’ January 5 2025. Don’t hold your breath.

                William Hartley is a Social Historian