Under a moonlit sky in sub-zero temperatures – the coldest night for over a decade – the opening event of Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture began. With the colourfully-lit backdrop of the City Hall – an elegant Victorian masterpiece that pays homage to Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio – the RISE event unfolded on a big stage centred on two scaffold structures. At various points, dancers gyrated and spun behind projected images of the city’s stone terraces, its past heroes, and industrial pre-eminence, while the full ranks of the Airedale Symphony Orchestra were ensconced in an adjacent building – protected from the numbing cold.

Under the directorship of Bradford-born Kirsty Housley, a two-hundred-strong cast made a literal spectacle of the city. This was a cacophonous mixture of rap, dance, light effects, and magic tricks courtesy of local boy Steven Frayne (formerly known as Dynamo), with the promise – unfulfilled as it turned out – of the appearance of one of Bradford’s most famous living personages, singer Zayn Malik, formerly of One Direction. It was an unashamedly populist spectacle, and over ten thousand people braved the cold to fill the city’s Centenary Square and City Park, with a similarly large crowd gathering for a repeat performance the following evening.




Like much of the marketing for Bradford’s successful bid as the 2025 UK City of Culture, the tone of RISE was one of defiant optimism. For the past few decades, and particularly after the COVID pandemic, Bradford has struggled to attract anything like the same levels of investment that have been bestowed on its near neighbour, Leeds, less than ten miles distant. The £15m of UK Government funding that comes with the award of City of Culture – for which Bradford beat Southampton, Durham, and Wrexham – is a mere drop in the ocean when compared with the quantities of money currently being funnelled into Leeds, where major commercial property schemes totalling £7.35bn are currently under construction or in the development pipeline – or Manchester, where just five months ago, a single new scheme for five new skyscrapers in the city was approved at the cost of a billion pounds. These are mind-boggling piles of money. The £100mn of investment that Bradford’s City of Culture tenure is expected to generate isn’t nothing, but in comparison, it’s clearly not an amount that’s going to turn around the city’s fortunes.

The almost miraculous transformation of a down-at-heel Glasgow into an internationally-renowned city that came in the wake of its 1990 tenure as European City of Culture seems unlikely to be repeated with Bradford. In post-Brexit Britain, this has been a story of diminishing returns for the two recipients of the scaled-down UK City of Culture: both Hull in 2017 and Coventry in 2021 received about one-tenth of the money that Glasgow got in 1990 and Liverpool in 2008 as the final city in the UK to hold the title of European City of Culture. But whatever the size of the pots of money involved, the question remains as to how much culture should go hand-in-glove with other kinds of investment that undoubtedly bring much bigger returns (at least for the investors if not the actual people who live in these cities). In today’s stagnant economic climate, with local governments still being stripped of their funding, the role of culture in kickstarting urban economies looks increasingly like wishful thinking: gone are the days when urban theorists like Richard Florida could talk of a ‘creative class’ preparing the ground for the inevitable riches that arrive when property investors are unleashed on cities.



 
Visiting Bradford for the press day that coincided with the beginning of its year-long tenure as UK City of Culture, the city itself was curiously absent from the range of events organised: first, a visit to the Impressions Gallery with its new photographic exhibition Nationhood: Memory and Hope; then a brief walk to the refurbished National Science and Media Museum; then minibuses to Salts Mill some 20 minutes’ drive out of the city; then back to the city centre, but only after dark for the RISE event. However, I managed to squeeze an hour of wandering between two events in order to see the city for myself in fabulously clear arctic sunlight.

Like Leeds, Bradford was once an industrial powerhouse – a global centre of the wool industry; and its magnificent stone buildings still project a strong sense of industrial prowess and civic pride, despite many of them being either empty or dilapidated. Both the City Hall and the fabulous Wool Exchange were designed in elaborate Italianate Gothic styles by local architectural firm Lockwood and Mawson. Despite the demolition of many of Bradford’s former textile mills, some still survive – the skyline north of the city is dominated by the vast complex of Lister Mills, once the largest silk factory in the world, and a stunning visual reminder of Bradford’s former wealth and prosperity (this complex of mills was renovated two decades ago).




But take your eyes away from the well-maintained or renovated buildings and you’ll soon see just how impoverished the city has become – empty shops are the norm, the city’s main railway station feels like it should serve a small provincial town, while the recently-refurbished Odeon Cinema (now Bradford Live, costing over £50 million) remains closed after the NEC Group pulled out of running it. At the same time, the decrepit and outdated Kirkgate shopping centre is about to be demolished to make way for the City Village regeneration project – a bold, if depressingly bland, scheme to bring residents back to the city centre.

A property developer would see opportunity in such apparent desolation – and recently the city centre has been tipped as one of the top postcodes in the UK for “investment opportunities … with an average yield of 12% putting it level with equally-exciting areas in Manchester and Nottingham”.^[1] Now this might sound like boosterism or the hot-air of investment-speak, but it’s clear that some of the rhetoric of the City of Culture organisers is trying to tap into this optimistic verbiage: a can-do attitude rather than the can’t-do message that is regarded as a long-term blight on the aspirations of the city’s populace. Indeed, this was the major theme of RISE.

In this regard, the example of Salts Mill is instructive. Even though it’s situated right on the edge of Bradford in the adjoining town of Shipley, it shows what can happen if investment is focused in a local context and driven from the bottom up.  Built by wool merchant Titus Salt in the early 1850s, this mill was once the largest industrial building in the world. Abandoned when it ceased production in 1986, it was saved from demolition by the late Jonathan Silver, who acquired it for just £1 the following year. Today, it’s a masterpiece of sensitive restoration as well as an important cultural venue in its own right: on the ground floor, framed by a long row of slender cast-iron columns and an undulating brick ceiling are dozens of works by Bradford-born artist David Hockney, who was an important supporter of the renovation of the mill. The works, part of the 1835 Gallery, is one of the largest permanent collections of Hockney’s work in the world and it’s extraordinary that you can visit it for free (along with the rest of the mill).



Three floors up is The Peace Museum – relocated last August, it was the recipient of £150,000 from the City of Culture funds. It offers a unique resource of 16,000 objects that is at once profoundly moving and inestimably tragic in its castigation of the culture of warmongering. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001, the transformation of Salts Mill was carried out entirely privately – by Silver and his family, and we press were shown round the Mill by Zoe, one of his two daughters. It’s a contemporary form of philanthropy that demonstrates that investment need not mean simply financial profit for a few who have little or no interest in local issues.

For Bradford to retain something of its unique character – whether that means its fine industrial buildings, its multicultural identity or its youthfulness (it has the largest population under 20 of any UK city) – it has to somehow decouple investment in culture from that in property, so that it doesn’t follow the example of Manchester where skyrocketing rents are forcing people out of the city (and even its surrounding satellite towns). If culture is to be for everyone – as RISE demonstrated so well – then it must resist being the handmaid of property speculators, for the investment that comes with culture is of a very different nature than that which usually attaches itself to property.

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[1] See www.cityrise.co.uk/investing-in-bradford-2024