Bradford

I’ve been meaning to do this post for a while.  See, I’ve spent a lot of time denigrating the city of Bradford,¹ when actually I think it’s a fairly nice place.  (If you go to the right bits.  Bits of it are awful.  Oh, damn, I was supposed to be selling it, wasn’t I.  Oops.)  There’s actually quite a bit to do if you go there, and I’m probably one of the best people to tell you about it, as a travel blogger² who actually grew up there.  Indeed, Bradford was one of the candidate cities for European Capital of Culture 2008, losing out to Liverpool in the final decision.  So let’s go, and see what’s there.

Date of visit: n/a
Journey time (from Leeds): approx. 25 minutes (to either station)
Fare: £3.90 (Off-Peak, with 16–25 Railcard)

(This post doesn’t correspond to a specific visit.  As with previous West Yorkshire posts, I’ve given journey time and fare from Leeds, because it’s not really somewhere you can conveniently visit from Oxford.)

So the trick when visiting Bradford to stay in the nice bits is to stay at the bottom end of town.  Fortunately this is where both railway stations and the bus station are, so you’re good if you arrive.  But don’t venture up the hill.  What’s happened here is very similar to what’s happened to Oxford: a new shopping centre opened, and gutted the rest of the town when all the shops moved in.  Except Bradford already had a lot empty shops to start with, and there isn’t quite the same market for tourist shops.  (Not enough people read this blog.)  So it’s pretty desolate, to be honest.

And that’s quite enough negatives now.  The centrepiece of the bottom end of town is the City Park, which was opened in 2012.  I remember mocking the concept during its construction, and I still think the original proposal—for an actual honest-to-God lake lapping at the walls of the adjacent City Hall—would indeed have been silly.  But what’s there instead is a mirror pool, which is quite pleasant, and (unlike its predecessor pond) kept free of rubbish by the fact that it’s drained every night.  It has fountains, and can be filled to different levels so that it’s one big pool, or three separated by a path.  The only disappointing thing about it is that it’s not entirely clear why it’s a mirror pool, given that no mirrors are involved.  The surface is indeed reflective—but that’s just a pool…

Near to the mirror pool, across an inner ring road that they really need to close off, is the National Science and Media Museum, whose new name I hate.  The trouble with it is that it’s not really clear what it’s a museum of, except that it’s vaguely science-y.  Originally it was the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, and that’s somewhat clearer.  The “film” bit is perhaps the most impressive: it has what was the first IMAX in the country, which is still larger than many (the screen is the full height of the building, which is about five storeys).  There are two other screens: Cubby Broccoli, and Pictureville.  The latter is capable of screening basically any film format ever invented except IMAX, which includes three-strip Cinerama (where three separate film strips are projected onto a curved screen), for which there are only two other remaining venues in the world.

The rest of the museum is pretty cool to visit, though sadly some of the galleries I’d be most inclined to recommend have closed (they used to have a huge archive of TV programmes that you could watch on-demand in viewing rooms, and a gallery about the history of TV, and…).  This is, I suspect, mainly down to pressure from the Science Museum Group to make it more science-y, which follows the Group’s threat to close the museum a few years back.  Still worth visiting, though, especially as they often have a couple of cracking (and usually free) temporary exhibitions on.

A few other things to mention, and I’m going to go for the bullet point format, because I haven’t used those before on the blog and they’re always fun.

• Next to the Media Museum is the Alhambra Theatre, which isn’t really a thing visitors would go to but it’s a major receiving house for West End productions—I’ve seen Oliver! and Oklahoma! there, but unfortunately they’ll only show musicals with exclamation marks so hopes for a transfer of Hamilton! aren’t high.  Incidentally, if you pronounce the “h” in Alhambra, you’re saying it wrong.
• Next to that is the Bradford Odeon, which opened as the New Victoria cinema in 1930 and closed in 2000.  It was there, in the year it closed, that I first saw a film in a cinema.³  It’s been empty ever since; the story of what happened afterwards is long, but there were plans to demolish it, based partly on the false idea that nothing of value remained of the original interior; there was a vociferous local campaign against demolition, which ultimately succeeded only when various people involved in the rebuild went into administration.  New plans to turn the original auditorium into a live music venue seem still to be coming along nicely, amazingly.
• We have a Peace Museum.  Never been, to my shame.  Guess that’s why I’m so war-like.
• We used to have a Colour Museum.  It’s now only open to school parties.  There is a promotional picture of me somewhere on the internet from when it was open.  Let me know if you find it.
• We have a shopping centre, which is mainly remarkable because for about six or seven years it was a giant hole in the ground which Westfield declined to build anything on.  Part of the rim of the hole was an “urban garden” for a while, which always looked a bit crap, and had to be rebuilt twice because 1. it didn’t have adequate drainage and 2. the English Defence League trashed it.
• We have a cathedral.  It’s a parish church, essentially.  We don’t have any tombs of kings (or queens, or monarchs of any other gender).
• We have Little Germany, which, as the name suggests, was an area where German migrants settled.  I don’t know much about its history, but here’s a link.  It’s pretty, at any rate.
• We have a connection to the author J.B. Priestley, who you may remember from GCSE English as  the writer of An Inspector Calls.  He lived much of his life in Bradford.  We’ve got a statue and everything.
• We have a Waterstone’s in the old Wool Exchange, which is quite pretty, and has a Café W where you can look over the vaulted interior.
• And I swear we have something else I was going to mention, but I can’t remember it.  I’ll add it as an edit if it comes to mind.  [Remembered it: curry.  We were the Curry Capital of Britain six years running.  Glasgow won it last year, boo.]

Now, you might be wondering where the pictures are.  Well, I have an exam tomorrow and simultaneously a headache and need to get to bed, but that’s the secondary reason, to be honest.  The primary reason is that pictures of anywhere in the outdoors will not entice you to visit Bradford, since we demolished most of our nice buildings in the Sixties.  Nevertheless, it’s a historic city, and probably worth popping in if you’re around.  It’s certainly not the hell I’ve often made it out to be.

But it’s still probably for the best Liverpool was the European Capital of Culture.

¹ But not the City of Bradford.  City status is complicated, which means that the City of Bradford is actually the district, including Saltaire and Haworth.  Similarly, the City of Carlisle includes large amounts of countryside, whereas most of Greater London is not formally in a city at all.

² It feels weird to describe myself as any sort of “blogger”, but the Oxford Student recently described me as a “staff writer”, and that feels even weirder, so let’s go with it.

³ Muppets from Space, if you’re wondering.  Not the best start to my cinema-going career.