Encyclopedia
Bradford is a city in the
northern English county of
Yorkshire, and the major settlement in the
City of Bradford Metropolitan District of
West Yorkshire.
Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a
city in 1897. The city status was transferred to the metropolitan district when it was formed in 1974 . It has a population of 293,717 with the district as a whole having 481,100 inhabitants. By urban sub-area, it is the 11th largest settlement in England.
History
The name Bradford is derived from the "broad ford" at Church Bank around which a settlement had begun to appear before the time of the
Norman Conquest. The ford crossed the stream called
Bradford Beck .
Bradford has long been a centre of the
West Riding wool industry. Bradford was one of the many English towns which became prosperous during the
Industrial Revolution. Bradford's textile industry dates back as far as the thirteenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth century that it became world-famous. Wool was imported in vast quantities for the worsted cloth in which Bradford specialised. Other fibres were also processed, e.g.,
alpaca. Yorkshire boasted plentiful supplies of
iron ore,
coal and soft water which were used in cleaning raw wool, and a coal seam which stretched as far as
Nottingham provided the power that the industry needed. Sandstone, Bradford's local stone, provided an excellent resource for the building of the mills, and the large population of West Yorkshire meant there was a readily available workforce.
To support the textile mills, a large manufacturing base grew up in the city, providing textile machinery, and this led to diversification with different industries thriving side-by-side. The textile industry has been in decline since the 1920s, and Bradford has been cited as an example of deindustrialization. However, Bradford remains one of the north's important cities, with modern engineering, chemicals and financial services replacing the "dark satanic mills" of the industrial revolution.
The grandest of the mills is
Lister's Mill . The chimney of Lister's mill can be seen from most places in Bradford.
Another large mill is
Salts Mill, part of the
world heritage site of
Saltaire. Saltaire is three miles from Bradford centre but it is within the
Metropolitan District.
The Bradford district also contains the villages of Thornton and
Haworth that were the birthplace and home of the
Brontė sisters.
Clayton was home to
Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last hangman.
There have been waves of immigration into the city ever since the industrial revolution, and this is reflected, for example, in the different types of places of worship which have been built over the years. Nonconformist chapels were frequently built in the nineteenth century, and mosques started appearing in the twentieth century. Figures for ethnic origin of inhabitants are given in the entry for the
Metropolitan District; the inner-city areas such as
Manningham tend to have a higher proportion of inhabitants of Asian origin than the suburban areas. Bradford has been praised for its cultural diversity. However, this leads to conflict on occasion. In January 1989, copies of
Salman Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses were publicly burnt in Bradford, and the city's
Muslim community took the lead in the campaign against the book in the United Kingdom. In July 2001 ethnic tensions led to serious rioting for which there is a separate entry "
Bradford Riot". Long before the riots the disparaging epithet of "Bradistan" in disapproving amusement at the residence of a significant Asian population. The name can be seen graffitied onto road signs in the city.
Bradford was one of the contenders for 2008 European Capital Of Culture, eventually losing to the city of
Liverpool. In 2004, the Bradford Urban Regeneration Company commissioned architect
Will Alsop to create a vision for the City's future and indeed the role of a "City Centre" in the 21st century. Alsop's controversial plans envisioned four regenerated quarters within the heart of the city — The Bowl, The Channel, The Market & The Valley — each creating new public spaces for commerce, education, leisure and showcasing Bradford's setting within the Pennine mountains.
Political history
During the
English Civil War the town was Parliamentarian in sympathy, but changed hands several times as it was difficult to defend.
A life-size statue of
Oliver Cromwell decorates the facade of the nineteenth-century Town Hall, suggesting a continuing commitment to parliamentary values. However, Bradford did not gain its own MPs until the Reform Act 1832 gave it two.
Other prominent statues of political figures include
Robert Peel and
Richard Cobden and
W.E. Forster .
Bradford's politicians tended to identify with industrialists in the nineteenth century, but the city played an important part in the early history of the Labour Party. A mural visible from Leeds Road commemorates the centenary of the founding of the
Independent Labour Party in 1893.
As regards local government, Bradford became a Municipal borough in 1847 and a
County borough in the Local Government Act 1888. The County borough was granted
city status by Royal Charter in 1897. The County borough was merged with borough of
Keighley, the urban districts of
Baildon,
Bingley, Denholme,
Cullingworth, Ilkley, Shipley and Silsden, along with part of Queensbury and Shelf urban district and part of
Skipton Rural District by the
Local Government Act 1972. One result of the boundaries of Bradford being widened in this way is that the district is marginal in terms of party political loyalty - at present no group is in overall control of the Council.
Twin towns
Bradford's current twin towns and cities are listed at http://www.bradford.gov.uk/life_in_the_community/twin_towns_and_villages:
It is sometimes claimed that Hamm, in Nordrhein-Westfalen,
Germany is a twin of Bradford, an impression strengthened by the street name
Hammstrasse in Bradford; but in fact Hamm is twinned with Shipley, a town about three miles from Bradford. As the small plaque at the bottom of the road indicates the street name was changed to express thanks to the people of Hamm for their support after the Bradford City disaster.
Bradford was formerly twinned with Tisma,
Nicaragua, up until at least 2001. .
Geography
Bradford is located at
1.
The Bradford Metropolitan District has an estimated population of 477,775. About 300,000 of these live within the main city area itself, the rest living in the surrounding towns, villages and countryside.
Bradford Beck
Unusually for a major city, Bradford is not built on any substantial body of water. The ford from which it takes its name was a crossing of the stream called
Bradford Beck. The Beck rises in the hills to the west of the city, and is swelled by tributaries such as Horton Beck, the Westbrook, Bowling Beck and the Eastbrook. At the site of the original ford, just below the present
Bradford Cathedral, it turns north, and flows more or less straight towards the
River Aire at Shipley.
Bradford Beck's course through the city centre is entirely underground, and was mostly so by the middle of the nineteenth century. On the 1852 Ordnance Survey map of Bradford it is visible as far as Sun Bridge, at the end of Tyrrell Street, and then again from beside the
Railway Station at the bottom of Kirkgate. On the 1906 Ordnance Survey , it disappears at Tumbling Hill Street, off Thornton Road, and first appears again north of Cape Street, off Valley Road, though there are further culverts as far as Queens Road. This is substantially the position today .
The Bradford Canal, built in 1774, took its water from Bradford Beck and its tributaries. This supply was often inadequate to feed the locks, and the polluted state of the Canal led to its temporary closure in 1866: the Canal was closed in the early twentieth century as uneconomic.
Bradfordale
Bradfordale is a name given by geographers to the valley of Bradford Beck . It can reasonably be regarded as one of the
Yorkshire Dales, though as the site of a big city, it is often not recognised as such.
Culture and recreation
Educational institutions
The
University of Bradford has around 10,000 students. It received its Royal Charter in 1966, but traces its history back to the 1860s. It has always been a technical and technological institution, and has no true arts faculties; but it still covers a wide range of subjects including optometry, pharmacy, medical sciences, nursing studies, archaeology, and modern languages. Its peace studies department, founded with
Quaker support in 1973, was for long the only such institution in the UK. There is also a highly-ranked
business school.
Bradford is home to one of the UK's largest ever birth cohort studies, known as
Born in Bradford. Partly supported by European funding, it is the result of close collaboration between
Bradford University, the
NHS and other institutions in West Yorkshire. It will track the lives of all the babies born in the city from 2006 to 2008 and aim to find solutions to some of Bradford's public health problems, such as
obesity and a higher than average
infant mortality rate.
Bradford College developed like nearby Bradford University from the nineteenth-century technical college whose buildings it has inherited. It now offers a wide range of Further and Higher Education courses, and is an Associate College of
Leeds Metropolitan University. It has absorbed the Art School whose most famous alumnus is
David Hockney.
Bradford Grammar School, in Frizinghall, dates back to 1548: it has been co-educational since 1999. The Girls' Grammar School, Bradford is a quite separate establishment dating from 1875: it continues to take only girls except for its infants' department.
Museums and art galleries
The city is well known for the
National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, which has an
Imax cinema. There is also an industrial museum, and a colour museum, and Cartwright Hall in Lister Park is an Edwardian art gallery.
Architecture
Bradford's oldest building is the
Cathedral, which for most of its life was a parish church. Few other
Medieval buildings have survived apart from Bolling Hall, which has been preserved as a museum.
Bradford boasts some fine
Victorian buildings: apart from the mills mentioned elsewhere in this article, there is the City Hall , the Wool Exchange , and a large Victorian cemetery at Undercliffe.
Little Germany is a Victorian commercial district just east of the city centre which takes its name from nineteenth-century immigrants who ran businesses from some of the many
listed buildings. In recent decades it has decayed somewhat, especially since Eastbrook Hall was gutted by fire in the early 1990s.
Attempts to revitalise the area were not very successful in the 1990s, but more recently there have been successful conversions to residential use. In mid-2005 renovation began on Eastbrook Hall.
Like many cities, Bradford lost a number of notable buildings to developers in the 1960s and 1970s: particularly mourned at the time were the Swan Arcade and the old
Kirkgate Market. In recent years some buildings from that era have themselves been demolished and replaced: Provincial House, next to Centenary Square, was demolished by controlled explosion in 2002 , and Forster House was pulled down in 2005 as part of the Broadway development, which is at July 2006 has not progressed beyond the demolition stage.
Theatre
There are four theatres in Bradford: The Alhambra was built for the Moss Empire group and refurbished in the 1990s; the Studio is a smaller studio theatre in the same complex. Both of these are operated by Bradford Council. The Theatre in the Mill is a small studio theatre in the
University of Bradford which presents both student and community shows and small-scale touring professional work. The Priestley is a privately-run venue with a medium-sized proscenium theatre and a small studio.
Among the professional theatre companies based in Bradford, are
- Kala Sangam
- the satirical madcap comedy troop, Komedy Kollective.
- Lost Dog
- Mind the Gap, one of the longest established, who have always worked with a mixture of disabled and able-bodied performers.
Groups and organisations teaching theatre include
- The Asian Theatre School
- Bradford Stage and Theatre School
- Stage 84
Amateur theatre groups include:
- Actors Community Theatre
- Bingley Little Theatre
- The Bradford Players
- Bradford University Society for Operettas and Musicals
- Bradford University Theatre Group ,
- Bradford Youth Players
- Buttershaw Church Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society
- Drama Unlimited
- Great Horton Amateur Operatic Society
Music and dance
St George's Hall is a grand concert hall, designed by Lockwood and Mawson, dated 1853. The Hallé Orchestra have been regular visitors over the years, as have a wide range of popular entertainers including
Ken Dodd. It is sometimes used for theatrical productions.
Though the
University does not have an academic music department, it has a
Fellow in Music who organises a range of playing and performing groups, and regular concerts around the university, in venues such as the Tasmin Little Music Centre, and the
Yorkshire Craft Centre at Bradford College; there are also occasional concerts further afield, in venues such as
Bradford Cathedral.
Although Bradford was home to composer Frederick Delius, there are no prominent professional music ensembles based in Bradford at present. There are some prominent amateur groups, such as the
Bradford Festival Chorus, and some amatuer soloists, such as
The has been in existence since 1956, though it has changed the pub it meets in every few years. It currently meets in the
Cock and Bottle on Barkerend Road, on Thursday nights.
Jazz at the Priestley is a long-running series of jazz evenings in the cellar bar of The Priestley on Friday nights.
Boars Head Morris Men have been established in Bradford since the early 1970's, but are not currently performing.
Persephone Ladies Morris are still active, as are
Rainbow Morris in Shipley, and
Clogaire.
mono is published out of Bradford monthly, covering the local alternative/independent rock music scene.
Cinema
Like many cities, Bradford has gradually lost its traditional
cinemas , and seen them replaced by new entertainment complexes with multi-screen cinemas: currently there is one at the
Leisure Exchange next to the
Interchange, and another at Thornbury, between Bradford and
Leeds.
However Bradford also has the
National Museum of Photography, Film and Television which contains an
Imax cinema and the
Cubby Broccoli cinema, and also has the
Pictureville cinema next door.
Nightlife
Since around 2000, several clubs and theme
pubs have opened in the
West End of Bradford, round the Alhambra Theatre, turning what was previously a fairly quiet area into one that is often crowded and vibrant at night. This has also caused some pubs and clubs from the
University area to close with the increase compertition.
Parks
Within the city there are numerous parks and gardens, including Lister Park with its boating lake and the Mughal Water Gardens, Peel Park and the local beauty spot of Chellow Dene with its two Victorian reservoirs set in pleasant woodland.
Sport
Bradford is the home of the
rugby league side
Bradford Bulls who are the
World Club Champions and the
football clubs and .
The Richard Dunn Sports Centre is just across the road from
Odsal Stadium, home of the Bulls. The sports facilities at the
University are also open to the public at certain times.
On May 11 1985, 56 people were killed at a fire at
Valley Parade, home of . Centenary Square now contains a monument to the Bradford City disaster.
Local groups and societies
Bradford's former importance as a centre of international trade led to the creation of the Bradford Circle for Foreign Languages , which still survives today and is possibly unique among similar clubs in that it owns its own premises.
Newspapers
The Telegraph and Argus is Bradford's daily evening
newspaper, published six days each week from Monday to Saturday. It is known locally as the "T&A".
Religion
The
City of Bradford and surrounding
districts are home to a wealth of places of worship that contribute to the region's cultural heritage. These include
Sikh and
Hindu temples,
mosques,
synagogues and many Christian churches. The district has a tradition of nonconformity which is reflected in the number of chapels erected by Baptists, Methodists etc. The city was a major centre of the House Church movement in the
1980's, and the Christian charity Christians Against Poverty was founded in the city.
Two carved stones, probably parts of a Saxon preaching cross, were found on the site of Bradford cathedral. They indicate that Christians may have worshipped here since
Paulinus of York came to the north of England in the year 627 on a mission to convert Northumbria. He preached in
Dewsbury and it was from there that Bradford was first evangelised. The vicars of Bradford later paid dues to that parish.
Religious buildings
Bradford Cathedral
The most prominent Christian church in Bradford, is
Bradford Cathedral, originally the
Parish Church of St. Peter. The parish of Bradford was in existence by 1283, and there was a stone church on the shelf above the Beck by 1327.
The Diocese of Bradford was created from part of the Diocese of Ripon in 1919, and the church became a cathedral at that time.
Other Christian Churches
There are many fine churches in the Bradford area, some of them
listed buildings, and also many buildings that were formerly churches but now in other uses. In 2006 the Roman Catholic diocese of Leeds proposed to close half the Roman Catholic churches in Bradford for demographic reasons .
The Abundant Life Centre, is the home of a charismatic, evangelical Christian sect. The building is modern, low and unassuming, but it is visible from most of central Bradford, as it is sited high up on the eastern side of Bradfordale.
Several immigrant communities from central and eastern Europe have their own churches, such as the Ukranian Bazilian Fathers and the Polish Catholic Church.
Since the 1960's Bradford has had a significant
Muslim population, and accordingly there are many
mosques throughout the city. Some were converted from churches or other buildings, but there are several purpose-built mosques as well.
There are two Hindu temples, the Hindu Cultural Society of Bradford on Leeds road and the Hindu Temple & Community Centre on Thornton Lane .
The Sikh community has several places of worship in the Leeds Road area of Bradford. Ramgharia Gurdwara is on Bolton Road, Bradford, and the Guru Nanak Gurdwara is on Wakefield Road at the corner of Usher Street.
The
Jewish community in Bradford was strong in the late 19th century, but small today. There is a 19th century
Reform synagogue in Bowland Street in the
Manningham area.
Notable Bradfordians
The people in this list were either born or brought up in Bradford , or had a significant connection with the city later in life.
Those marked with an asterisk are described in Lister, 2004 .
Born on 22 October 1955 in Bradford [i], West Yorkshire [i], Inspector Martin Richard ...
, race relations officer West Yorkshire Police .
- David Bairstow* — Yorkshire and England cricketer
- Rodney Bewes* — Actor
- John Braine* Writer
- The Brontė sisters, Anne
...
*,
Emily*, and
Charlotte* were born in Thornton on the outskirts of Bradford, but later lived in
Haworth.
...
— Guitarist
- Alice Jones — the child-actress who played Katie Rowan in ITV's Heartbeat born 4 March 1993
- Ken Kitson — Bradford born actor in Last of the Summer Wine
- Samuel Lister* — Industrialist & inventor, commemorated by a statue.
- Brian Noble — Great Britain Rugby League coach
- The Black Panther — career kidnapper and murderer
- Albert Pierrepoint — executioner from Clayton — put to death Ruth Ellis- the last woman executed in England, and many others.
- J. B. Priestley
...
* — Writer, commemorated by a statue.
...
Wm Morrison Supermarkets originated in Bradford.
Bradford is the birthplace of rock bands
New Model Army, Anti System, Smokie, Southern Death Cult/The Cult, The Scene, Terrorvision, Morbid Humour, Asian
hip hop group Fun-Da-Mental, Violation,and new Hip-Hop record label DMB Records, also known as Defying Musical Boundaries.
Transport
Bradford's location in Bradfordale tended to make communications difficult, except from the north. Nonetheless, Bradford has been well-served by transport systems.
Roads
Bradford was first connected to the developing turnpike network in 1734, when the first
Yorkshire turnpike was built between
Manchester and
Leeds via
Halifax and Bradford. In 1740, the Selby to
Halifax road was constructed through
Leeds and Bradford. Several more local and long-distance roads were built through the rest of the century.
Today Bradford lies on several
trunk roads:
The
M606 is a spur off the
M62 motorway serving Bradford, but it does not come right to the city centre.
Buses and trams
Bradford's
tram system was begun by Bradford Corporation in 1882: at first the vehicles were
horse-drawn, but they were replaced by
steam-driven trams in 1883, and by
electric ones in 1898.
On 20 June 1911, Britain's first
trolleybus service opened in Bradford, between Laisterdyke and Dudley Hill. It was often known as the
trackless, in contradistinction to trams. The last trolleybus service in Bradford - and indeed in Britain - ceased operation on 26 March 1972.
First Bus are now the main operator of most routes in Bradford, and are part of the First Group.
Canal
The Bradford Canal was a four-mile long spur off the
Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Shipley. It was planned and built as part of the original Leeds and Liverpool project, to connect Bradford with the
limestone 
