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Bradford

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For other uses, see Bradford (disambiguation).
The larger City of Bradford Metropolitan District includes other settlements in the surrounding area.

Template:Infobox England place with map Bradford is the major settlement in the City of Bradford Metropolitan District, in the county of West Yorkshire in the north of England. It became a 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 [1]. 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 (below the site of Bradford Cathedral) around which a settlement had begun to appear before the time of the Norman Conquest. The ford crossed the stream called Bradford Beck [2].

Bradford has been long 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, eg 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 (although no longer used for textile production) is Lister's Mill (or Manningham Mills). It is believed that the chimney of Lister's mill can be seen from just about anywhere in Bradford.

File:Bradford-panorama-01.jpg
A panoramic view of Bradford. The giant chimney is that of Lister's Mill

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 Brontë 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".

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 (campaigners for Free Trade which Bradford at one time saw as key to its commercial success) and W.E. Forster (perhaps Bradford's most famous MP). 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.

Geography

Bradford is located at 53°45′00″N 01°50′00″W / 53.75000°N 1.83333°W / 53.75000; -1.83333 (53.7500, -1.8333)1.

The Bradford Metropolitan District has an estimated population (2003) 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 [3] 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 [4], 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 (2006).

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 (or Bradforddale) is a name given by geographers to the valley of Bradford Beck (see for example Firth 1997 [5]). 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.

Institutions, galleries, parks and museums

Central Bradford looking down Church Bank from Barkerend Road.

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 medical sciences, optometry, nursing studies, and modern languages. Its peace studies department, founded with Quaker support in the 1970s, was for long the only such institution in the UK. There is also a highly-ranked business school.

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's former importance as a centre of international trade led to the creation of the Bradford Circle for Foreign Languages [6], which still survives today and is possibly unique among similar clubs in that it owns its own premises.

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.

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 the Bolling Hall, a pele tower with later additions which has been preserved as a museum. Bradford boasts some fine Victorian buildings: apart from the mills mentioned above, there is the City Hall (with statues of the Kings and Queens of England), the Wool Exchange (now used as a bookshop), and a large Victorian cemetery at Undercliffe. "Little Germany" is a Victorian 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 become somewhat run-down, particularly since Eastbrook Hall (a former Methodist church) was gutted by fire in the early 1990s. Much of the building stock was originally warehousing and needs a new use. 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.


Within the city there are numerous parks and gardens, including Lister Park with its boating lake and the Mughal Water Gardens, Peel Park (the venue for the annual Mela — a celebration of eastern culture) and the local beauty spot of Chellow Dene with its two Victorian reservoirs set in pleasant woodland.

There are four theatres in Bradford: The Alhambra was built for the Moss Empire group and refurbished in the 1990's; 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.

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.

Ritual Sites

Churches


Mosques Hindu Temples Sikh Temples Synagogue

Sport

Bradford is the home of the Rugby League side Bradford Bulls and the football clubs Bradford City and Bradford (Park Avenue) A.F.C. On May 11 1985, 56 people were killed at a fire at Valley Parade. Centenary Square now contains a monument to the Bradford City disaster.

Notable Bradfordians

The people in this list were either born or brought up in Bradford (not necessarily both), or had a significant connection with the city later in life. Those marked with an asterisk ('*') are listed in Lister, 2004 [7].

Wm Morrison Supermarkets originated in Bradford. Bradford is the birthplace of rock bands Smokie, Southern Death Cult / The Cult;Terrorvision, The Mission, Asian hip hop group Fun-Da-Mental 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.

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 quarries of North Yorkshire, the industrial towns on both sides of the Pennines and the ports on each coast. It opened in 1774, closed in 1866, reopened in 1871, and finally closed in 1922. There are plans to rebuild it (see the main article).

Railways

The Leeds and Bradford Railway opened Bradford's first railway station at the bottom of Kirkgate on 1 July, 1846. It offered a service via Shipley to Leeds and through Leeds to other centres, including London. The line was soon absorbed by the Midland Railway, and the station was rebuilt in the early 1850's and again, much larger, in 1890. Today it is a small utilitarian station dating from 1990, called Forster Square station, though it is somewhat distant from the site of its predecessors, and from Forster Square itself. It connects directly to Leeds, Ilkley and Skipton, and there is a limited direct service to London King's Cross.

The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway opened its station at Drake Street on 9 May 1850, on its line between Manchester and Leeds. The Great Northern Railway opened a third terminus at Adolphus Street in 1854, serving Leeds and other places on its network, but the station was too far from the centre, and the two companies eventually agreed to build a joint station to replace the L&Y's station at Drake Street. This was Bradford Exchange station, opened in 1867: Adolphus Street remained as a goods terminal. The Exchange Station was completely rebuilt in 1880, with ten platforms; but by 1973 it was too large and again was rebuilt on a different site. In 1983 that station was renamed Bradford Interchange when a bus station was built alongside. Bradford Interchange railway station connects directly to Leeds, to Manchester Victoria and to Blackpool. See this site

Both stations are under the control of the West Yorkshire Metro as part of the Leeds-Bradford Line routes.

From the 1870's the Great Northern built several suburban railway lines around Bradford:

These all closed at various times between the 1930's and the 1960's.

There have been many schemes to build a link between Bradford's main rail termini, but none has ever come near fruition. The main practical difficulty is the great difference in elevation: the Exchange/Interchange station is already at the bottom of a long slope, steep by railway standards, but it is several metres higher than Forster Square Station

Air

See also

  • bmedi@ (Bradford's new media industry)
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bradford.

References

  • ^ Allen, C (2003). Fair justice: the Bradford disturbances, the sentencing and the impact. London: Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism.
  • ^ Lister, Derek A J (2004). Bradford's Own. Sutton. ISBN 0-7509-3826-9.
  • ^ Ordnance Survey 1:10,560 County Series Map: Yorkshire Sheet 216. Heritage Cartography. ISBN 1-903004-34-9.. This was surveyed 1847-1850, and published in 1852, though it was reprinted at various dates with certain (unidentified) details updated. The modern edition from Heritage Cartography is 'redrawn' from the original, and titled Bradford 1849, but the railways shown indicate that it is from a printing of at least 1854.

Bibliography

  • ^ Firth, Gary (1997). A History of Bradford. Phillimore. ISBN 1-86077-057-6.
  • Wilmott, Elvira (1987). The Ryburn Map of Victorian Bradford. Ryburn. ISBN 1-85331-004-2. The map itself is a reproduction of the Plan of the Town of Bradford ... revised and corrected to the present time by Dixon & Hindle, 1871.
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