Risposte Bradford Cloze Test
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) its revival?
I
first fell in 2)love with a long lost Bradford. The 3)city I
worked in briefly in my youth still had mills towering 4)over 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) the north,
which was jammed with Rolls-Royces.
Today this 6) Bradford is unrecognisable. A
third of adults are 7)out of work; 40% of the 8) city’s wards are in the
poorest 20% in Britain. It 9) has the country’s youngest population and
the 10) highest level of child poverty. Few would believe that Bradford is 11) bigger
than Bristol or Newcastle, yet it 12) must endure regular citation as “most
struggling city” and “Britain’s Detroit”.
Bradford council’s chief executive, Kersten
England, is a woman 13) on a mission. She burns with a determination to pull
the city around, and 14) aims “to make Bradford
the Shoreditch of Yorkshire”. She declines to join the northern chorus 15) for
more grants, subsidies and attention16) from London. She has given 17) up on
competing with her neighbouring rival, booming Leeds. She wants “not to do
things, but to help others to do 18) them” – to facilitate the 19) revival of
an “alternative Bradford”.
England has a 20) job on her hands. The
once-noble Darley Street is appalling. The place is dead, its facades boarded
up or squatted 21) by charities, and upper floors lie 22) empty. 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) invested
£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) of it that last year she persuaded Princess Anne –
hardly a hipster – to declare 25) it open.
The Shoreditch model requires others to flock 26)
to Sunbridgewells, but this has 27) yet 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) life 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) would 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) though 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.
We must make central Bradford a place in which people want to
live, not from which they are desperate to move
Bhupinder Dev
It is hard not to warm to the determination of
England and her team. Yorkshire cities are notoriously bad neighbours, and
Bradford’s rivalry with Leeds, 10 miles away, is the stuff of history. But the
city planner, Bhupinder Dev, knows his future lies in finding a relationship
with Leeds.
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The contrast is almost obscene. Leeds seems
rich. It has drawn big government investments in universities and hospitals.
Towers of luxury flats line the old canal. Smart shops define the Headrow.
Council leader Judith Blake told me her chief challenge was “an acute shortage
of skilled labour”. To her, Bradford’s value to Leeds was almost humiliating –
its unemployment rate and its output of school leavers.
Dev and England want Bradford to be
“alternative” and creative. “We simply must make central Bradford a place in
which people want to live, not from which they are desperate to move,” says Dev.
Successful Asians, he says, are drifting away to Pudsey on the Leeds road to
avoid a Bradford postcode.
The Broadway shopping centre stands amid period buildings
in the middle of Bradford. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
Bradford has tried this before. Across the
centre of town is Little Germany, a neighbourhood of handsome sandstone
warehouses next to the cathedral. It was given a conservation makeover 10 years
ago, and is home to the Bradford Playhouse and a scatter of studios and
galleries. A large portrait of the city’s favourite son David Hockney adorns
a building exterior. But Little Germany lacks critical mass and residents are
wary of the place.
The revival of Bradford as “creative” will
take a Herculean effort. Even tidying up the city centre must fight cuts of 40%
to the council budget over the past decade. The City Park cost more than £20m. The
Art Deco Odeon cinema is being refashioned as a 4,000-seat venue. The city’s
troubled museum of photography has undergone various mutations, now devoted to
“science and media”. At least Bradford’s literary festival is a star of the
north.
While music venues and arts festivals draw
audiences, they do not draw residents. Somehow life must be breathed into dead
Victorian streets and old mills. The spirit that once revived San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury, Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and the ever-cited Shoreditch
must be found somewhere. These places recovered by sucking activity and
enterprise from adjacent areas of wealth. Bradford must do that from Leeds.
The Shoreditch/Detroit model requires extreme measures. It
requires unused buildings to be released by their owners into a “down and out”
economy. They must gradually attract artists, designers and writers, people who
appear to find inspiration in dereliction. They in turn hand over to digital
entrepreneurs and other “creatives”. Bradford may not be as desperate as
Detroit, but the longer it sits and hopes, the more its centre will depopulate
and deteriorate.
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The Yorkshire economy has been tortoise to the
hare of Manchester’s northern powerhouse. It has depended on the employment
hotspots of Leeds and Sheffield, on prosperous farming and on tourism to York,
Harrogate and the Dales. This has left “cold spots” in the old mining and mill
towns, Barnsley, Rotherham, Wakefield and Huddersfield. The pits and the looms
have disappeared and nothing has taken their place.
Bradford is the most challenging by far. It is
lucky to have in England, her council leader, Susan Hinchliffe, and Leeds’s
Judith Blake, leaders of stature and intelligence, who seem to get the point of
Yorkshire’s future. They are well-placed to capitalise on a promised new dawn
in Yorkshire politics, with Labour MP Dan Jarvis who will run for
mayor of South Yorkshire. He is rumoured to have his eye on becoming mayor of
all Yorkshire, of “God’s own county”. He might start by declaring Bradford
“God’s own Shoreditch”.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/03/could-bradford-be-the-shoreditch-of-yorkshire-or-is-it-the-next-detroit-
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