Bradford's urban environment needs more greenery, parks and pleasantness not another grand development

Bettering Bradford will need a dramatic improvement in the economic realities of the city but rather than push water uphill focus on greening urban areas and giving more folk a stake in their city

Six years ago I wrote about the blowing up of Jacob’s Well, a 1970s office block largely populated with Bradford Council officers (who they did move out before going boom) and suggested that the approach we take to regeneration in places like Bradford is ineffective and, largely speaking, economically illiterate:

“Another ugly concrete lump is removed from the skyline of Bradford following in the unmissed footsteps of the National & Provincial Building and soon to be joined by some equally foul tower blocks running up Manchester Road out from the city centre. Elsewhere in the city centre there are plans to demolish the Oastler Centre and the now empty Morrisons Supermarket attached to this market. After a tragic fire, Drummond Mills a short walk from here has been cleared leaving behind another few acres of open land. Add in land at Leeds Road, at Barkerend roundabout and alongside the former Forster Square station yard (now featuring a bunch of retail sheds). What we have is a huge amount of land, supposedly for development. The problem is that everyone knows that this development isn't going to happen because most of the land has no - or even negative - value. Even a site at Fairweather Green, halfway to popular Thornton village remains derelict because the cost of remediation, highways and related infrastructure makes building houses there impossible without subsidy.”

When Bradford (and the unmissed Regional Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward) commissioned a masterplan in 2001 and appointed architect Will Alsop the result was an anti-development plan. Alsop didn’t tell us to play the established style of regeneration involving lots of lunches with property developers and endless chatter about leveraging property value using state subsidy. Instead Bradford was told to knock down all the ugly stuff and replace it with a park. At the time, partly because of Alsop’s style and partly because of a precious row about an ugly brick box that used to be a big cinema, the local reaction was less than enthusiastic. Worse, the people appointed to lead on the implementation of the masterplan (under the creative title of Bradford Centre Regeneration) were people from that world of property development and chatter about leveraging values.

Today the triumphs of that regeneration initiative are the excellent City Park, an underwhelming shopping centre and a City Centre in what feels like irredeemable decline. The Council has proceeded with regeneration and shifted from a focus on using public funds to ‘lever in’ private investment (or paying the property developer’s margins as I prefer to put it) to a do-it-yourself model. The change wasn’t some sort of grand ideological shift but a realisation that, even with a big bung of public funding, property developers took one look at Bradford and took the train out of town. The strategy looks at first a bit like Alsop’s approach: consolidating declining markets into one new building and proposing to demolish the 1960s Kirkgate Centre and John Street Market and its attached multi storey car park. Of course Alsop wanted to then turn these new open spaces into parks but that wouldn’t do for Bradford Council so they returned to the old game of public-private partnership supported by central government regeneration funding.

When writer Ed West visited Bradford the result was a lovely article about the City’s architecture and history that, as so often with writing about Bradford, is almost tearful at the sadness of all that fading beauty:

“It is certainly not ugly, and today includes 3,723 listed buildings, many of which are derelict, with a distinctive style resulting from the dominance of local architecture firms - unlike in many more recently-built cities which employ a form of global design that really could be anywhere.

Yet it suffered heavily from post-war ‘improvements’, including a shopping centre which is soon to be pulled down. Forty years ago my father described it as ‘a maze of ring roads and hideous blocks and flyovers and desolation’ and that ‘Manchester looks almost untouched in comparison’, although he was something of a glass-half empty man.

The beauty adds both charm and tragedy, since no British city fell further in the 20th century – with perhaps the exception of Liverpool.”

If you start on the edge of the new City Park and walk up Thornton Road you quickly reach an area of crumbling, largely derelict and abandoned mills and warehousing, the Goitside. It is, of course, a conservation area and, like everywhere in the city, filled with amazing listed buildings. The Goitside was where Bradford’s industrialisation began. Before the great mills were built at Manningham, Barkerend, Saltaire and West Bowling this was the heart of Bradford’s wool industry. If Little Germany was where the woolmen displayed their wares, Goitside was where they made that cloth. I’ve suggested that a radical government might relocate parliament to Bradford making use of the Goitside to house the politicians and bureaucrats.

Across the city you’ll find places gradually declining to the same crumbling ruins we see at Goitside. Thousands of square feet of warehouse, closed factory, once thriving office and retail are now, at best, occupied with carpet warehouses or cheap storage, but often simply empty, abandoned and awaiting the seemingly inevitable fire. It seems strange there that, given this surplus of Victorian magnificence, the Council proposes to build a new ‘City Village’ with 1000 homes, offices, shops and a couple of pocket parks. Surely the £30m ‘investment’ from the Brownfield Infrastructure and Land Fund would be better spent turning those abandoned Goitside mills into homes?

My argument is that the economic realities of Bradford mean that land in the city is, in effect, valueless. People will point to property selling and notice little fluctuations in values but it is still true that you cannot build homes, shops or offices in the city and make money. Unless you get dollops of central government or local council cash. Recent developments like One City Park, Bradford Live and Darley Street Market have only happened because the state has paid for them, One City Park remains half empty (and the only occupant relocated from elsewhere in the city centre), Bradford Live has cost the Council over £50m, and the new market building will cost £31m - little of this money will be recouped. And the city will have new empty, abandoned spaces awaiting plans, cash and builders. The site of Jacob’s Well, blown up in 2019, is now just an unused surface car park and the only profitable use since the demolition was hosting a tent for Covid testing.

As I suggested back then we need to green the city, stop worrying about ‘leveraging values’ or development vehicles and just plant trees:

“Which means we should green the city - rewild it even. Instead of trying to find a developer to build another ugly square box on the Jacob's Well site (that we'll have to knock down in 25 years), let's turn it into an orchard, get some beehives, plant some trees - rewild the centre. And let's do the same for all those other empty, derelict and unattractive sites that litter the centre of our city - instead of growing houses that we don't really need (at least if the house prices are a guide to demand - which they usually are) lets grow trees, have allotments, perhaps a duck pond, maybe a maze for kids to get lost in.

Instead of building houses on that Drummond Mills site and the other big clear sites in Manningham, let's cut and cover - putting car parking underneath parks, recreation and open space. And then let's gate off all those narrow terraced streets nearby to provide safe outside space for the families in those homes. Let's set a target of pedestrianising half of our inner city terraced streets - we'll see the great benefit of fewer kids run over and lots fewer young folk with asthma. I know there'll be people - mostly men - who'll moan about not being able to park their car in the living room but the world is changing and Bradford can be ready for a society where car ownership isn't an assumed status and where driverless cars, buses and taxis provide safer transport for all.

Imagine the difference if, in twenty years time, flying over the city means looking down onto woodland, park, orchard and meadow rather than urban decay and crammed, amenity-free housing developments rejected by the better off and dominated by social housing and the private landlord.”

And while we’re planting those trees, maybe we can use the regeneration money to save the crumbling buildings in our city conservation areas. Maybe try some radical ideas like giving people free urban homesteading in lovely old but empty buildings if they promise to tart them up a bit, plug the leaks and bring some activity to otherwise inactive places. And for the big empty sites on the edge of the inner city create similar schemes where people can plonk a caravan, put up a park home or build a useful little workshop. Maybe we could take one of those spaces and make it somewhere where Bradford’s car fanatics can gather and show off their motors. It would be better than trying to stop them with PSPOs and fines.

Bettering Bradford will, in the end, need a dramatic improvement in the economic realities of the city. Regeneration may make a few parts of a place look a bit nicer but there’s precious little evidence that regeneration has any long-term impact on local economic growth. So maybe, rather than push water uphill, cities like Bradford need to focus on greening urban areas and, in doing so, perhaps help shift attitudes. And, even if economic fundamentals don’t change, people will have a slightly smarter place in which to be poor.