Bradford photographer Roz Doherty says, when she was younger, people she met on holidays would ask where she was from.
“I’d say I was from just down the road from Leeds.”
She laments that her gritty home city in West Yorkshire has for decades laboured beneath a reputation for “being just a little bit rubbish”. “But really”, she says with restored local pride, “it’s not”.
Bradford has also struggled at times to shake off a darker image.
Many outsiders still associate the city, which has one of the biggest Asian communities in Britain, with infamous race riots that ripped through it in 2001. In more recent years Bradford has also been tarnished in the eyes of some of its detractors over allegations of child sex abuse “grooming gangs” targeting vulnerable teenage girls.
Last week local Tory MP Robbie Moore told the House of Commons that grooming gangs had “haunted” the city for decades. He predicted the scale of the problem would eventually be found to have “dwarfed” Rotherham, where experts have estimated that 1,400 white girls were abused by mainly Pakistani-British gangs over 16 years to 2013.
Moore’s high-profile intervention amid a fevered recent national debate in Britain on grooming gangs could hardly have come at a less convenient time for authorities in Bradford, as they limbered up last week to launch its turn in the spotlight as the UK’s City of Culture for 2025 – Hull, Derry and Coventry were all previously chosen.
Bradford’s organisers shook off any negative attention to launch the year in front of 10,000 freezing locals last Friday at Centenary Square, a handsome plaza in the centre of the city. It began with an outdoor extravaganza, Rise, which leant on spoken word poetry and rap, acrobatics and a magic show to acclaim the former textile mill city’s modern artistic heritage and its denizens’ defiant Northern English attitudes. It also notably celebrated Bradford’s Asian links.
The warmth of the message contrasted with the weather: Rise was held in temperatures that plunged below minus three degrees. The grit on the icy streets appeared to match the resolve of the locals, who were determined to see their city portrayed, for once, in a positive light.
A roster of upcoming local artists such as Doherty have joined other more-celebrated Bradfordians, such as pop art veteran David Hockney and magician Steven Frayne (formerly known as Dynamo), to take part in the year-long, £44 million (€52 million) programme of events for the City of Culture celebrations.
The organisers of the Bradford 2025 programme told locals at the official launch that “our time is now”. Meanwhile, they may be hoping the city’s future can escape being tethered to an image borne of dark fragments from its past.
“We’ve had a lot of bad press over the years, but [now] we’re really building it up,” said a local music scene organiser known to locals by her sobriquet, Charlotte the Magpie. She was among arts sector volunteers helping to shepherd visitors for last week’s launch. She was also one of several people associated with the event who highlighted the racism-fuelled riots that gripped Britain during the summer, and the fact that, this time, their city had avoided being involved.
As violence engulfed other cities in early August, worried local officials and community organisers were said to have held daily conference calls in anticipation of trouble in Bradford, where almost one-third of the population is of Asian descent and more than 8 per cent was born in Pakistan.
But while riots broke out in nearby Yorkshire towns such as Rotherham, Bradford remained calm; local police ended up being sent out of Bradford to help quell the riots elsewhere.
“We [local activists] told them [the authorities]: ‘We’re solid,’” says Charlotte the Magpie. “We said [to the police]: ‘There’s no need for you guys. We’ve dealt with all this before. It’s all cool’.”
The 2001 riots that tarnished Bradford’s reputation among some outsiders were sparked when far-right protesters gathered for a rally in the city centre. They ended up clashing with local British-Asian youths, which resulted in one of the Muslim counter-protesters being stabbed. Fringe elements of both sides then began three days of rioting, with trouble among the local Asian community centred around the immigrant enclave of Manningham, north of the city centre.
‘My main hope is just that people like our city. I know that sounds really simple, but it is also important to me’
— Roz Doherty, Bradford photographer
Several reports commissioned by the then-government led by Tony Blair called for initiatives to rebuild trust between the communities, as well as local police. Bradford, while still suffering the ill effects of social deprivation – the unemployment rate is stubbornly high at 8.4 per cent amid one of the youngest populations in England – appeared to salve some of its social wounds.
However, the focus over the last decade on grooming gangs has also presented fresh challenges for how the city is viewed by other Britons. There have been high-profile prosecutions for the grooming of vulnerable teenage girls, including a ring of 12 abusers in nearby Keighley who in 2015 were given sentences of up to 20 years for a range of offences including rape.
Those involved in the City of Culture bid see it as a way of helping Bradford change how it is viewed by others – the city’s sense of pride in itself has always been undimmed, they say.
“There was a need for something to change the perception of Bradford,” says Kanturk, Co Cork-born Miriam O’Keeffe, a former BBC staffer and charity worker who two years ago joined as operations director for the 2025 City of Culture programme.
“There was a sense that people from outside didn’t understand the city. You need a moment to put yourself on the map. Even within Bradford there is still a lot of nostalgia about its past in the 1950s and 1960s when it was a mill town and had equal status with Leeds. But the City of Culture award, and the Rise show are all about reflecting the city that we are now.”
The Bradford 2025 programme includes a new photography exhibition, Nationhood: Memory and Hope, at the city’s Impressions gallery, led by renowned Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh. The contributions from local exhibitors such as Doherty, however, caught the eye last Thursday in advance of the City of Culture launch and Rise.
She photographed a diverse range of local young people against a backdrop of soft light inspired by the unique claret and amber colours of Bradford City football club – its Valley Parade stadium sits in the heart of Mannigham near where the riots took place almost 24 years ago.
Doherty’s pictures exuded optimism and she focused on the youths’ “hopes and dreams” for the city: “The younger people that I photographed were all beaming with civic pride.”
What about Doherty’s hopes and dreams for Bradford?
“My main hope is just that people like our city. I know that sounds really simple, but it is also important to me.”
The 12-month series of events including shows and exhibitions culminates in December with the awarding in the city of the prestigious Turner Prize for art – past winners have included Damien Hirst.
Being designated the UK’s City of Culture may not solve all of Bradford’s problems – the local council almost went bankrupt last year and Bradford Live, a performance venue built with £44 million of public money, lies empty because the council has been unable to find an operator. Yet organisers believe the culture status is still galvanising locals.
“The people who live in a place have to own it,” says Shanaz Gulzar, the creative director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. “They have to care about it and show up for themselves too. Bradford is multilayered. We are the UK in 2025.”
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