The latest city to win the cultural crown must now work to transform its citizens’ hopes and possibilities
Bradford is celebrating: it has won the competition to become UK city of culture 2025. It will be the second Yorkshire city to be thus crowned since Hull enjoyed the title in 2017. And, like Hull, it has a lot to gain. It has long been overshadowed by its neighbour, Leeds, home to Opera North, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and now Channel 4. One of Bradford’s most prominent institutions, the once-magnificent National Science and Media Museum, hit the headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons. Having been through severe funding cuts, two changes of name and the controversial removal of 400,000 photographic images to the Victoria and Albert in London, the museum has experienced what a cynic might think of not so much as levelling up as levelling down.
But Bradford has a great deal going for it. Its cultural history is rich: JB Priestley, the author of the evergreen play An Inspector Calls, was a son of the city. His English Journey tracked a deeply divided, Depression-afflicted nation, and was part of a cultural tide that brought the Labour party to power in 1945. In Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the unthinkably early age of 29, Bradford birthed a major playwright who articulated with precision the texture of working-class life under the Thatcher government; her plays The Arbor and Rita, Sue and Bob Too stand as masterpieces. Her life in turn was documented by the film-maker Clio Barnard (born in nearby Otley), another of whose remarkable films, The Selfish Giant, is set in the city. In David Hockney, Bradford has a global artistic titan. Ten miles to the west lies Haworth, home of the Brontë sisters.
