A postcard from Bradford
From my seat behind the glazed front of ‘The In Plaice’ fish and chip restaurant, opposite Bradford Town Hall I have a good purview of the urban centre. The outlook is over Centenary Square, a relatively recently-engineered public space at the centre of the Yorkshire city. It creates a vast, key-hole-shaped plaza, from which a surprising amount of the important central landmarks are visible.
The principal beneficiary of this redevelopment, visually, at least, is the Victorian Italianate Town Hall (Lockwood and Mawson 1873). Released from the streetscape within which it was for a century and a half contained, it is now rightly the focus of many admiring glances. Beside it is the court building, a largely horizontal left-over from the enthusiastic remaking of the city that occurred in the sixties and seventies and beyond that a smoke-brown glazed office block where once was the main Police Station.
Looking in the other direction, the approach to the city’s main station, the Interchange is visible, as is the colonnaded corner of St George’s Hall. Britain’s oldest concert venue (and Europe’s third oldest) St Georges was financed by German-Jewish wool merchants who came to the city during the nineteenth century and is best known for staging choral works. For me though, it was where I saw The Clash on the tour that accompanied London Calling, a teenage night of incomparable magic.
Over my shoulder, Sunbridge Roads climbs the hill away from the civic buildings towards a pub in whose upstairs room my own band used to annoy the drinkers more than thirty years ago (Mysterons, 25 February 1982).
It is an impressive urban reworking and one that creates a determinate centre – something that many large industrial cities lack. Centenary Square is overlooked by the Central Library, the National Media Museum and the Alhambra – a theatre whose architectural exuberance almost does justice to its name.
No amount of smart architecture or imaginative space planning can mask the poverty that has bedevilled Bradford even during its nineteenth century heyday as the wool-manufacturing centre of world. My chip-shop panorama swarms with human movement – much of which has been visibly shaped by hard times. Picking almost at random, there is the disturbingly obese mum whose leopard-print leggings struggle to contain her wobbling bottom half, the hatted old man, whose bony frame shudders with every step beneath his Gannex mack, and a hoody on his mountain bike whose several-times-repeated, jerky circumnavigation of the square telegraphs some kind of desperation.
Most passers-by defy trite lines, but nearly all bear the stamp either of poverty, or life in its close proximity. Smart young office workers, yummy mummies and prosperous pensioners don’t seem to pass this way. Its little wonder, perhaps. Unemployment in parts of the city runs at over 30% and nearly a sixth of retail units in the city are empty.
The cafe in which I am sitting would once have seemed like typical a provider of staple fare for Bradfordians. Its fish and chips are as moist, crisp and as succulently fresh as you could hope for. Despite this, two sit-in meals, served with bread and butter and a cup of tea cost just £9.25. Today, however, The In Plaice, with its plastic tables and chairs, and friendly, mumsey waitresses, sits at the end of a row that includes Nandos, Starbucks, Weatherspoons and Dragon Thai – slick operations promising a uniform service across their national chains.
City leaders have been promising a renaissance for the one-time Woolopolis for decades. In the nineties, ‘Bradford Is Bouncing Back’ was the slogan. An unsuccessful campaign to make Bradford the 2008 European City of Culture was promoted with beermats that exclaimed ‘Oh ye of little faith’. Today, the local paper promises that ‘We Are Backing Bradford’.
To be sure, the infrastructure of the city has, if not been transformed, then substantially renewed. Urban Splash took over the skyline-dominating Listers’ Mill, where 11,000 people once toiled producing silk cloth. With the addition of some space-pod penthouses, the company reworked at least some of the power-loom palace as sexy urban housing. The proliferation of curry houses has long since metamorphosed from migrants’ belly fillers to glitzy cultural attractions. And, neighbourhoods like Little Germany are no longer forgotten commercial corners, but bustle with arty start ups. The iconic Wool Exchange now houses a branch of Waterstones. And, in 2009, Bradford was named UNESCO City of Film (although quite what this honour means, I am not sure).
Yorkshire folk from outside the city, when considering its plight are wont to observe that whatever investment has done for Bradford that ‘it’s not a Leeds’. It is a comparison that has bedevilled Bradford for years. The larger city to the east today seems glitzy and rich – a retail destination and regional capital to rival European counterparts. The gloom that J B Priestly detected about his home city in the 1930s, endures.
It is enough to make planners and economic strategists wring their hands. But beyond their metrics and powerpoint presentations, Bradfordians display a friendly familiarity and an impressive resilience. The former is easy to find in my chip restaurant, where the banter is every bit as good as the batter. I just hope that its proprietors have a good stock of the latter quality. They will need it to maintain a modest local beachhead among the multiples, and to ensure that those who rely on the £3 ‘fish butty’ for their essential nutrition don’t have to walk any further than is necessary.