Could Bradford be the Shoreditch of Yorkshire – or is it the next Detroit?

Could Bradford be the Shoreditch of Yorkshire – or is it the next Detroit?

I first fell in love with a long lost Bradford. The city I worked in briefly in my youth still had mills towering over its hillsides and tycoon mansions lining Manningham Lane. The centre was a tight group of Victorian palaces and wool warehouses. It could just echo TS Eliot’s assurance, sitting “like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire”. There were fashionable shops in Darley Street, once the Bond Street of the north, which was jammed with Rolls-Royces.



Today this Bradford is unrecognisable. A third of adults are out of work; 40% of the city’s wards are in the poorest 20% in Britain. It has the country’s youngest population and the highest level of child poverty. Few would believe that Bradford is bigger than Bristol or Newcastle, yet it must endure regular citation as “most struggling city” and “Britain’s Detroit”.

Bradford council’s chief executive, Kersten England, is a woman on a mission. She burns with a determination to pull the city around, and aims “to make Bradford the Shoreditch of Yorkshire”. She declines to join the northern chorus for more grants, subsidies and attention from London. She has given up on competing with her neighbouring rival, booming Leeds. She wants “not to do things, but to help others to do them” – to facilitate the revival of an “alternative Bradford”.

England has a job on her hands. The once-noble Darley Street is appalling. The place is dead, its facades boarded up or squatted by charities, and upper floors lie empty. Adjacent Ivegate, Hustlergate and Westgate are occupied by pound shops or To Let signs. In central Bradford 90% of property is reported to be vacant. This is comparable to Detroit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Britain’s Detroit’ … City Park in Bradford. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Undaunted, England led me through a maze of deserted alleys to her micro-Shoreditch, a subterranean warren of old storage tunnels and caves. Here a local developer, Graham Hall, has bravely invested £2m in craft beer pubs, gin bars, artisanal food outlets and music venues, cluttered with railway junk and industrial antiques. Sunbridgewells is a hipster cliche, but England sees it as ground zero of Bradford’s “creative hub”. She was so proud of it that last year she persuaded Princess Anne – hardly a hipster – to declare it open.



The Shoreditch model requires others to flock to Sunbridgewells, but this has yet to happen. Waterstones has converted the old Wool Exchange into what must be its most exotic shop. A few pubs, such as the famous Sparrow, cling to life nearby. The Little Shop of Soaps briefly showed its artisanal face next to Sunbridgewells but is closing “for lack of footfall”, says its owner Tracey Lavelle.

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Up the road from Rawson Square is David Craig’s Assembly warehouse, host to a group of freelance designers and publishers. Craig reckons the space costs roughly half what it would in suburban Saltaire, and a fifth what it would in Leeds. But he is a pioneer. He admits he was drawn to Bradford by its underdog status and “gritty, do-it-yourself nature”. He and his colleagues “have a passion for the city”, even though only a few live there. As yet they are less a hub than an oasis.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Once largest silk factory in the world, Lister’s Mill has now been redeveloped into housing. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Another champion of the new Bradford, Amir Hussain, is an architect with an expanding practice in the city’s Goitside district. He wants to persuade second- and third-generation Asians to come out of their suburban enclaves into the “centre of the donut”, bringing with them some of the ethnic vitality of the high streets and bazaars visible in the city’s encircling “villages”.

Bradford has long been victim of half a century of crisis in British town planning. Already in the 1970s the local council was committing suicide. As if to eradicate its past as capital of the wool trade, it began the demolition of its Victorian core and drove a road through the wreckage. Sites were cleared for blocks of what the Pevsner guide calls “mind-numbing banality”.

In the 1980s the city toyed with Thatcherism under the leadership of Eric Pickles. A third of people on the council payroll were sacked, some 9,000 jobs, with no compensating upturn in private employment. Tory Whitehall gave the city a meagre reward in the form of a photography museum and a tax office. One failed – its photographs were carted off to London’s V&A – and the other is closing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Micro-Shoreditch … Sunbridgewells, an underground warren of shops, artisanal food outlets and music venues built in some old storage tunnels. Photograph: Alamy

In 2003 the post-modern architect Will Alsop attempted a rescue. He boldly proposed to demolish the centre’s new buildings, but instead of restoring the intimacy of the old street pattern, he wanted the opposite – a “dispersed centre” and a giant lake “to let Bradford breathe”.

Dispersal was the last thing central Bradford wanted. The council answered with a killer punch of its own. It cleared a 12-acre swathe of land behind the city hall for a giant, introverted shopping mall, Broadway. When it opened a few years ago, it killed all other retail activity in the city centre like a plague. I have never seen such commercial devastation caused by a single planning decision.

We must make central Bradford a place in which people want to live, not from which they are desperate to move Bhupinder Dev

It is hard not to warm to the determination of England and her team. Yorkshire cities are notoriously bad neighbours, and Bradford’s rivalry with Leeds, 10 miles away, is the stuff of history. But the city planner, Bhupinder Dev, knows his future lies in finding a relationship with Leeds.

The contrast is almost obscene. Leeds seems rich. It has drawn big government investments in universities and hospitals. Towers of luxury flats line the old canal. Smart shops define the Headrow. Council leader Judith Blake told me her chief challenge was “an acute shortage of skilled labour”. To her, Bradford’s value to Leeds was almost humiliating – its unemployment rate and its output of school leavers.

Dev and England want Bradford to be “alternative” and creative. “We simply must make central Bradford a place in which people want to live, not from which they are desperate to move,” says Dev. Successful Asians, he says, are drifting away to Pudsey on the Leeds road to avoid a Bradford postcode.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Broadway shopping centre stands amid period buildings in the middle of Bradford. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Bradford has tried this before. Across the centre of town is Little Germany, a neighbourhood of handsome sandstone warehouses next to the cathedral. It was given a conservation makeover 10 years ago, and is home to the Bradford Playhouse and a scatter of studios and galleries. A large portrait of the city’s favourite son David Hockney adorns a building exterior. But Little Germany lacks critical mass and residents are wary of the place.

The revival of Bradford as “creative” will take a Herculean effort. Even tidying up the city centre must fight cuts of 40% to the council budget over the past decade. The City Park cost more than £20m. The Art Deco Odeon cinema is being refashioned as a 4,000-seat venue. The city’s troubled museum of photography has undergone various mutations, now devoted to “science and media”. At least Bradford’s literary festival is a star of the north.

While music venues and arts festivals draw audiences, they do not draw residents. Somehow life must be breathed into dead Victorian streets and old mills. The spirit that once revived San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and the ever-cited Shoreditch must be found somewhere. These places recovered by sucking activity and enterprise from adjacent areas of wealth. Bradford must do that from Leeds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest City Hall during the Bradford literature festival in July 2017. Photograph: Alamy

The Shoreditch/Detroit model requires extreme measures. It requires unused buildings to be released by their owners into a “down and out” economy. They must gradually attract artists, designers and writers, people who appear to find inspiration in dereliction. They in turn hand over to digital entrepreneurs and other “creatives”. Bradford may not be as desperate as Detroit, but the longer it sits and hopes, the more its centre will depopulate and deteriorate.

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The Yorkshire economy has been tortoise to the hare of Manchester’s northern powerhouse. It has depended on the employment hotspots of Leeds and Sheffield, on prosperous farming and on tourism to York, Harrogate and the Dales. This has left “cold spots” in the old mining and mill towns, Barnsley, Rotherham, Wakefield and Huddersfield. The pits and the looms have disappeared and nothing has taken their place.

Bradford is the most challenging by far. It is lucky to have in England, her council leader, Susan Hinchliffe, and Leeds’s Judith Blake, leaders of stature and intelligence, who seem to get the point of Yorkshire’s future. They are well-placed to capitalise on a promised new dawn in Yorkshire politics, with Labour MP Dan Jarvis who will run for mayor of South Yorkshire. He is rumoured to have his eye on becoming mayor of all Yorkshire, of “God’s own county”. He might start by declaring Bradford “God’s own Shoreditch”.

This piece was corrected on 3 May 2018 remove an erroneous reference to South Yorkshire in Kersten England’s comments.

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