Cloze Test Bradford
Could Bradford be the
Shoreditch of Yorkshire – or is it the next Detroit?
High
levels of unemployment and poverty mean Bradford is often dubbed Britain’s most
struggling city – can local developers kickstart 1) __ revival?
I
first fell in 2) __ with a long lost Bradford. The 3) __ I
worked in briefly in my youth still had mills towering 4) __ 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 5) __ north,
which was jammed with Rolls-Royces.
Today this 6) __ is unrecognisable. A third of
adults are 7) __ of work; 40% of the 8) __ wards are in the poorest 20% in
Britain. It 9) __ the country’s youngest population and
the 10) __ level of child poverty. Few would believe that Bradford is 11) ___
than Bristol or Newcastle, yet it 12) __ endure regular citation as “most
struggling city” and “Britain’s Detroit”.
Bradford council’s chief executive, Kersten
England, is a woman 13) __ a mission. She burns with a determination to pull
the city around, and 14) __“to make Bradford the
Shoreditch of Yorkshire”. She declines to join the northern chorus 15) __ more
grants, subsidies and attention 16) __ London. She has given 17) __ on
competing with her neighbouring rival, booming Leeds. She wants “not to do
things, but to help others to do 18) __” – to facilitate the 19) __ of an
“alternative Bradford”.
England has a 20) __ on her hands. The
once-noble Darley Street is appalling. The place is dead, its facades boarded
up or squatted 21) __ charities, and upper floors lie 22) __. 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.
‘Britain’s Detroit’ … City Park in Bradford. Photograph:
Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
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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 23) ___ £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 24) __ it that last year she persuaded Princess Anne –
hardly a hipster – to declare 25 __ open.
The Shoreditch model requires others to flock 26)
__ Sunbridgewells, but this has 27) __ 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 28) __ 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.
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 29) __ 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 30) __ only a few live there. As yet they are less a hub than an oasis.
Once largest silk factory in the world, Lister’s Mill has
now been redeveloped into housing. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for 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.
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.
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