Bradford's role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this very well. Nowhere on this trip would I see a city more palpably forlorn. Nowhere would I pass more vacant shops, their windows soaped or covered with tattered posters for pop concerts, in other, more vibrant communities like Huddersfield and Pudsey, or more office buildings festooned with TO LET signs. . . . Once this was one of the greatest congregations of Victorian architecture anywhere, but you would scarcely guess it now. Scores of wonderful buildings were swept away in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to make room for wide new roads and angular office buildings with painted plywood insets beneath each window. . . .
In a modest cluster of narrow streets on a slope just enough out of the city center to have escaped the bulldozer, there still stand some three dozen large and striking warehouses — though that word barely does them justice — mostly built between 1860 and 1874 in a confident neoclassical style that makes them look like merchant banks rather than woolsheds, which together make up the area known as Little Germany (so called because Germans for a time dominated the woolen trade). Once there were many other districts like this — indeed, the whole of central Bradford as late as the 1950s consisted almost wholly of warehouses, mills, banks, and offices singlemindedly dedicated to the business of accumulating, sorting, and trading wool. And then — goodness knows how — the wool business just leaked away. It was, I suppose. the usual story of overconfidence and lack of investment followed by panic and retreat. In any case, the mills went, the offices grew dark, the once-bustling Wool Exchange — the central market for wool traders — dwindled to a dusty nothingness, and now you would never guess that Bradford had ever known greatness.
Of all the once-thriving wool precincts in the city — Bermondsey, Cheapside, Manor Row, Sunbridge Road — only the few dark buildings of Little Germany survive in any number, and even this promising small neighborhood seems bleak and futureless.
References
Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island. N. Y.: Avon, 1996, Pp. 173-75.
1 April 2008