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Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, 8.6 miles (13.8 km) west of Leeds, and
16 miles (25.7 km) northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897. Following local government reform in 1974, city status was bestowed
upon the wider metropolitan borough.
Bradford has a population of 293,717, making it the thirteenth-most populous settlement in the UK. Bradford forms part of the West Yorkshire Urban Area
conurbation which in 2001 had a population of 1.5 million and is part of the Leeds-Bradford Larger Urban Zone (LUZ), the third largest in the UK after London and Manchester, with an estimated population
in the 2004 Urban Audit of 2.4 million.
Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Bradford rose to prominence during the 19th century as an international centre of textile manufacture,
particularly wool. It was a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution, and amongst the earliest industrialised settlements, rapidly becoming the "wool capital of the world". The area's access to a
supply of coal, iron ore and soft water facilitated the growth of Bradford's manufacturing base, which, as textile manufacture grew, led to an explosion in population and was a stimulus to civic
investment; Bradford has fine Victorian architecture including the grand Italianate City Hall.
The textile sector in Bradford fell into a terminal decline from the mid-20th century. Since this
time, Bradford has emerged as a tourist destination with attractions such as the National Media Museum and Cartwright Hall. However, Bradford has faced similar challenges to the rest of the
post-industrial area of Northern England, including deindustrialisation, housing problems, social unrest and serious economic deprivation.
Since the 1950s Bradford has experienced significant
levels of immigration, particularly from Pakistan. Bradford has the second highest proportion of Muslims in England and Wales outside London. An estimated 101,967 people of South Asian origin reside in
the city, representing around 20.5% of the city's population, with this figure projected to rise to 28% by 2011. Bradford is often cited as one of the prime examples of 'parallel communities', where the
population is effectively segregated along ethnic, cultural and faith lines.
Etymology
The name Bradford is derived from the "broad ford" at
Church Bank (below the site of Bradford Cathedral) around which a settlement had begun to appear before the time of the Norman Conquest ("Bradeford" in the Domesday book of 1086). The ford
crossed the stream called Bradford Beck.
History
Early history
Bradford was first settled in Saxon times
and by the middle ages, had become a small town centred on Kirkgate, Westgate and Ivegate. Destroyed after an uprising in 1070 against the Norman conquest. Bradford grew slowly over the next two-hundred
years as the woollen trade gained in prominence. The Civil War caused a decline in the industry but with the accession of William and Mary in 1689 prosperity began to return. The launch of manufacturing
in the early 18th century marked the start of the town's development while new canal and turnpike road links encouraged trade.
19th century and the Industrial Revolution
At the turn of the 19th century, Bradford was a small rural market town of 16,000 people, where wool spinning and cloth weaving was carried out in local cottages and farms. The Industrial
Revolution led to rapid growth, with wool imported in vast quantities for the manufacture of worsted cloth in which Bradford specialised, and the town soon became known as the wool capital of the world.
Yorkshire had plentiful supplies of soft water, which was needed in the cleaning of raw wool, and locally mined coal provided the power that the industry needed. Local Sandstone was an excellent resource
for the building of the mills, and with a population of 182.000 by 1850, The city grew rapidly as workerw were attracted by jobs in the textile mills. Such unprecedented growth did create problems,
however. With over 200 factory chimneys continually churning out black, sulphurous smoke, Bradford gained the reputation of being the most polluted town in England. There were regular outbreaks of
cholera and typhoid, and only 30% of children born to textile workers reached the age of fifteen. Life expectancy, of just over eighteen years, was one of the lowest in the country.
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Lister's Mill during redevelopment in 2004
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To support the textile mills, a large manufacturing base grew up in the city providing textile machinery, and this led to diversification with different industries
thriving side by side. Bradford's manufacturing history includes the Jowett Motor Company, which had many great achievements during its 50 years of existence.
Recent history
The textile industry began to fall into terminal decline in the 20th century. A culture of innovation had been fundamental to Bradford's dominance, with new
textile technologies being invented in the city; a prime example being the work of Samuel Lister. This innovation culture continues today throughout Bradford's
economy, from automotive (Kahn Design) to electronics (Pace Micro Technology). Wm Morrison Supermarkets was founded by William Morrison in
1899, initially as an egg and butter merchant in Rawson Market, operating under the name of Wm Morrison (Provisions) Limited.
The grandest of the mills (no longer used for textile production) is Lister's Mill, the chimney of which can be seen from most places in Bradford. It has recently
become a beacon of regeneration in the city after a £100 million conversion to apartment blocks by property developers Urban Splash.
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The famous Salts Mill, a UNESCO World Heritage Site
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Salts Mill is another large mill that has a new life in the modern era. The mill is occupied by high-technology companies, contemporary design shops and
gallery spaces. It is the hub of the world heritage site of Saltaire, three miles (4.8 km) north of the city centre.
In January 1989, copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses were publicly
burnt in Bradford, and the city's Muslim community took the lead in the campaign against the book in the UK. In July 2001, ethnic tensions led to
serious rioting in Bradford, leading to a report describing Bradford as fragmented and as a city of segregated ethnic communities. Bradford has
suffered from deep-rooted de-industrialisation, and has some of the poorest levels of social deprivation in the UK, with widespread pockets of exclusion and
rates of unemployment in some wards exceeding 25%.
Geography
Bradford is located at 53°45′00″N 01°50′00″W (53.7500, -1.8333)1. Topographically, it is located in the eastern part of the moorland region called the South Pennines
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Panorama over Bradford, 2006
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Unusually for a major city, Bradford is not built on any substantial body of water. The ford from which it takes its name
(Broad-Ford) was a crossing of the stream called Bradford Beck. The beck rises in the Pennine hills to the west of the
city, and is swelled by tributaries such as Horton Beck, Westbrook, Bowling Beck and Eastbrook. At the site of the
original ford, just below the present Bradford Cathedral, it turns north, and flows more or less straight towards the River
Aire at Shipley. Bradfordale (or Bradforddale) is a name given by geographers to the valley of Bradford Beck (see for
example Firth 1997). It can reasonably be regarded as one of the Yorkshire Dales, though as the site of a big city, it is often not recognised as such.
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Leeds and Liverpool Canal (Bingley)
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The beck's course through the city centre is entirely underground, and was mostly so by the middle of the 19th century. On the 1852 Ordnance Survey
map of Bradford it is visible as far as Sun Bridge, at the end of Tyrrell Street, and then again from beside the railway station at the bottom of Kirkgate. On the
1906 Ordnance Survey, it disappears at Tumbling Hill Street, off Thornton Road, and first appears again north of Cape Street, off Valley Road, though
there are further culverts as far as Queens Road. This is substantially the position today.
The Bradford Canal, built in 1774, took its water from Bradford Beck and its
tributaries. This supply was often inadequate to feed the locks, and the polluted state of the canal led to its temporary closure in 1866: the canal was closed in the early 20th century as uneconomic.
'The Channel' is another facet of the Alsop plan, envisaging the creation of a new canal-side community through its reopening.
Demographics
As of the 2001 UK census, Bradford had a population of 293,277. There were 106,680 households in Bradford, and
the population density was 4,560 inhabitants per square kilometre (11,820/sq mi). For every 100 females, there were 92.9 males. Bradford has the youngest, fastest growing population outside London.
The census showed that 69.3% of Bradford's population was White, 1.9% Mixed Race, 26.1% South Asian, 1.3%
Black and 1.4% from other races. 22.1% of the population are of South Asian origin, representing the highest
percentage in England and Wales excepting the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Nearly half of all Asians living in
Yorkshire and the Humber live in Bradford, with the central wards of Bradford Moor, City, Little Horton, Manningham and Toller each having large majority Asian populations.
It is forecast that a combination of growing population movement, large-scale immigration and the phenomenon of white
flight will mean that no race will hold a demographic majority in Bradford by 2016. Bradford has a large Islamic
population, with 16.08% of the wider city identifying themselves as Muslim in the 2001 census. 60.14% were Christians,
1.02% Sikhs, 0.95% Hindus and 13.3% were identified as having no religion. The percentage of Jews, Buddhists and those following other religions each amounted to fewer than 0.5% of the city's population.
The ONS Regional Trends report, published in June 2009, showed that most of Bradford suffers from the highest levels
of deprivation in the country. Infant mortality stands at double the national average, and life expectancy is considerably
lower than in other parts of the district. Bradford has one of the highest unemployment rates in England, with the rate of inactivity amongst Minority Ethnic groups standing at almost 60%.
The crime rate in Bradford is significantly higher than the national average. In July 2006, the think tank Reform calculated
rates of crime for different offences, relating this to populations of major urban areas (defined as towns over 100,000
population). The study ranked Bradford as the second most dangerous urban area in England and Wales with 98.3
serious offences per 1,000 population, behind Nottingham. Bradford was shown to have the highest level of gun crime in
the country, and was amongst the top 5 for incidents of burglary, assault and vehicle crime.
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