A pictorial tour of Bradford city centre - part 1

A pictorial tour of Bradford city centre Part I - RETAIL

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I got my camera out well over two years ago, meaning to pop back to take the few remaining shots I wanted before uploading the photos to my blog. I didn’t get round to getting back with my camera until over a year later (when due to the Bradford Sky Ride I wasn’t able to get the best shots anyway). The sheer enormity of the task caused me to procrastinate further, and it’s only now that I’ve got round to putting it in any kind of order ready to go on the web. I’ve split the tour into parts for ease – and can’t guarantee when the next instalment will be ready – but today’s post will concentrate on Bradford’s department stores and markets.

The stories behind these buildings are a combination of research, reading and a fair amount of folklore. Unfortunately, I don’t have sources for many of them due to them being from articles, books, blogs and websites that I either don’t still have, lent out, lost the link for, etc. So don’t take these histories on face value – the stories are there for interest only.

I hope you enjoy these snaps!

Manningham Lane Retail Park

We begin our tour with this horrendous photograph of a fairly uninspiring looking retail park at the extreme north of Bradford city centre (I was unable to get a face-on picture due to the skyride). The unprepossessing edifice does nothing to belie the fascinating past of this plot of land. The site on which Manningham Lane now stands was in its previous incarnation the home of Busbys Department Store – known as the “Harrods of the North”. A photograph of the Busbys store from the 1930s is shown on the Telegraph and Argus web site.

Busbys was known among Bradford’s children as the store where the real Santa Claus visited – clearly, those who were taken elsewhere were hoodwinked into seeing an imposter!

The store’s edifice was adorned with the slogan, “The Store With The Friendly Welcome”, and speak to Bradfordians of a certain generation and they will confirm that the slogan was accurate. Rumour has it that the store’s founder, Ernest Busby, was torn between setting up in London and Bradford, but chose Bradford because it was projected to be more successful than a London store at the time.

The store was taken over by the Debenhams department store chain in 1958 and eventually closed in 1978. It was razed to the ground by fire in 1979.

Brown, Muff & Co

Brown, Muff & Co was Bradford’s second department store and by all accounts was more upmarket than Busbys. The company was bought by the Birmingham based Rackhams Group in the 1970s which was in turn subsumed into the House of Fraser chain.

Notice the Bradford boar above this former entrance to Brown & Muff. Bradford Council does a far better job of telling the legend of the Bradford Boar here,

The store ultimately closed in 1995 to be replaced with a selection of businesses including Dillon’s Bookstore, a Birthdays card shop, Boots the Chemists, Virgin Records and Wendy’s Hamburgers. I’ve been told – but can’t verify – that the Bradford branch of Rackhams was profitable, but that the House of Fraser Group was suffering at the time from a cash-flow crisis which required it to release funds. How much truth there is in this story I have no idea, but if it is true it is almost as sad an end to a Bradford institution as the fire at Busbys.

Once the Muff family had made their fortune, they moved from Bradford to Ilkley and simultaneously changed the family name from Muff to Maufe, inspiring the famous Bradford sense of humour to concoct the following ditty:

Here in Bradford it’s enough

To be known as Mrs Muff

But out in Ilkley, next the Wharfe,

’Tis better to be known as Mrs Maufe

Sunwin House

Bradford’s third department store was built in the 1930s as the Co-operative Emporium. The name ‘Sunwin’ was chosen as the building is on the junction of Sunbridge Road and Godwin Street. Yorkshire Co-operatives used the name Sunwin for all of its department stores – with the exception of the Shipley branch which was called Victoria House, and for other businesses such as its car dealerships and security alarm division. The name lives on in the form of Sunwin Support Services, which is the Co-operative Group’s in-house maintenance division.

When Yorkshire Co-operatives (which was based in Bradford) merged with United Norwest to form United Co-operatives with a head office in Stoke on Trent, the combined group decided that it no longer wished to be in the department store business, resulting in the retail estate being sold. The Bradford branch was sold to the T. J. Hughes department store chain, which closed following the company’s liquidation.

Unfortunately, Bradford seems to have been the major loser in the merger between Yorkshire Co-operatives and United Norwest.

Lingards

Bradford’s fourth department store, Lingard’s, was one of the the city’s few casualties of the Luftwaffe, but reopened after rebuilding. Ultimately taken over by United Drapery Stores, who had a second store in Kirkgate known as Ludlow’s, the store ultimately closed its doors for the final time in March 1977. UDS had planned to take a department store unit within the new Kirkgate (Arndale) Centre under the name Allders, but never moved in.

Lingard’s today operates as an amusement arcade and nightclub, a shadow of its former self.

Bradford’s markets

Time was – not all that long ago – that Bradford had four permanent municipal markets within the city centre. I recall visiting them all as a child but the number of markets now stands at two.



 The Kirkgate Shopping Centre contains the Kirkgate Market, and itself replaced the original Kirkgate Market on the same site. The original market was built in 1878 and was enormously popular with Bradford’s shoppers. There was huge opposition to the (then) Bradford Corporation’s plans to demolish it and the rumour goes that the demolition began on Good Friday, 1973, so that by the time anybody could get through to somebody to complain four days of demolition would have passed thus rendering the damage irreparable . The replacement – the Kirkgate Arndale Centre (now known as the Kirkgate Shopping Centre) – was built by the Arndale Property Trust, which was also responsible for the demolition of the Swan Arcade to make way for Arndale House in Charles Street.

The large and distinctive iron gates from the old market were supposedly kept for ‘safekeeping’ to be reinstalled after the build, but they went missing following demolition and have never been found. A similar story is attached to the Talbot dog that once adorned the Talbot Hotel in Darley Street.

A photograph of the original Kirkgate Market can be found at this link. Baxendall’s Café, which can be seen in the T&A’s picture, can be found in the ‘new’ market too.

Rawson Market was the city’s meat market. It was vacated temporarily by the council in the 1990s for a full refurbishment, with the stallholders temporarily decanted into a temporary Rawson Market. Ultimately, the council ran out money mid-conversion and had to abandon the project, with the stallholders being moved (again) into John Street Market.

After a failed plan to launch an Asian themed market on the site, it was finally purchased by Manchester based Modus properties, who redeveloped the remnants of the building as a shopping centre anchored by the Wilkinson chain.

James Street Fish Market abutted Rawson Market and closed at the same time. This was one of its understated entrances, the other being at the top of the same street. The market was linked by a walkway to Rawson Market. You can see from the picture that the council haven’t bothered to remove the sign yet – a clear indictment of their respect for our city centre!

John Street Market ultimately took over the former stalls of both Rawson and James Street Markets and was subsequently rebranded the Oastler Shopping Centre – a completely ridiculous name that gives a totally wrong impression of what is inside. This is nevertheless a fantastic market with several decent butchers and greengrocers, as well as a Morrisons supermarket, which was deemed controversial at the time of construction but allowed the Corporation to build the market without recourse to borrowing.

This is the temporary market built to house the stallholders uprooted from Rawson Market during its ill-fated refurbishment. Ultimately the businesses were moved into John Street Market, which can be seen in the background. The temporary market has lain empty since. It strikes me that this would be the perfect location for the ‘Bradford souk’ idea that keeps raising its head – it’s already designed as a market with all of the internal infrastructure in place.

Putting this together has taken several hours, so whilst I will upload some more of the pictures I’ve taken, this may be some time away. If there’s any part of aspect of the city centre you’d like me to feature next, let me know and I’ll write the next post around it!

As divisive in death as in life - why I won't be dancing on Thatcher's grave

It should come as no surprise that the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death at the Ritz Hotel yesterday has provoked such a huge reaction across the world. The difference in the types of reaction shows that she is as polarising in death as she was in life – at one end of the spectrum people are figuratively dancing on her grave; at the other end is a call to respect the dead and remember that, even if we didn’t like her policies, her children and grandchildren have lost a mother and a grandmother.

It smacks of hypocrisy to have respect for somebody in death for whom one held little respect when she was alive. Thatcher may have died, but the effects of her policies live on today, both in terms of the aftermath of her decisions all those years ago, which have made a lasting impression, and the policies of the current ConDem coalition which should leave nobody in any doubt that Thatcherism is alive and well.

Thatcher’s Conservative government’s policy of selling the country’s council housing stock, while prohibiting local authorities from using the revenue generated to replace them, has left a generation without access to affordable homes.

Her anti-unionism decimated whole communities centred around the manufacturing and mining industries, many of which have still not recovered today. Even civil servants at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham were prohibited from joining trade unions. But Thatcher’s anti-unionism wasn’t restricted to employees of the civil service and nationalised industries – her support of Rupert Murdoch’s controversial move of News International from Fleet Street to Wapping kyboshed the careers of not only of those printers who worked for the Sun, but those of every other Fleet Street newspaper, which swiftly followed suit.

The privatisation of our railways has left Britain with the most expensive train fares in Europe, with many of today’s ‘private’ rail franchisees being European state-owned operators, and one by a company which, despite receiving millions in public subsidy, has its head office domiciled in a tax haven. The privatised water companies have also been found to have engaged in tax avoidance, and the privatised gas and electricity firms have put consumers at the mercy of swings in wholesale prices.

The atrocious decision to cut free milk from children over seven in schools won’t have led to her own children going without – she could afford it – but how many children whose families weren’t so fortunate had to forego vital calcium so essential for growing teeth and bones?

Her decision to axe the metropolitan county councils almost certainly had far less to do with their efficiency than the fact that the heavily industrialised areas of Tyne & Wear, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, South and West Yorkshire, and the West Midlands had an ideology incompatible with her own. It was an affront to democracy.

Sadly, the consequences of Thatcher’s actions weren’t confined to these shores. Her refusal to implement economic sanctions on South Africa allowed the appalling Apartheid regime to continue, causing untold unnecessary suffering and death in the country. One person died yesterday. How many died as a result of her inaction?

Margaret Thatcher's is not a life I think that we should celebrate, but I will not be dancing on her grave either. We cannot pretend in death that the actions of a the Iron Lady when she was alive did not happen, and I can honestly say that there is no love lost. I certainly don’t think she should be given a ceremonial funeral, which is to all intents and purposes a state funeral without the hassle of obtaining parliamentary consent. I hope that her policies rust with her.

Why Workfare will do nothing for the Employment Crisis

I was delighted to learn that Cait Reilly has been successful in her legal challenge against the government’s ‘Workfare’ scheme in which benefit claimants can be required to work unpaid for up to six months or risk having their benefits axed.

The government attempts to justify the scheme by asserting that, under it, claimants gain valuable, transferrable, employment skills while businesses get to trial staff on a risk-free basis at no cost to them. Sounds like a good deal, right? No.

The scheme effectively amounts to requiring claimants of Jobseekers’ Allowance, worth £56.25 per week, to work for free for up to thirty hours a week for employers in the private sector. As the government can make benefits contingent on attending Workfare placements, that amounts to total consideration of £1.88 per hour. Even in the entry-level positions that Workfare generally places people, the companies would have to pay someone they actually employed to do the job at least £6.19 per hour, which is the National Minimum Wage.

The Workfare system does nothing to cut the benefits bill, because it is the government, and not the employer, that foots the bill for the benefits while the claimant is on placement. This effectively amounts to the taxpayer subsidising private enterprises by providing a workforce free of charge.

But what of the supposed enhanced employment prospects of the claimants put into these placements? Only 3.5% of people referred to the work programme have been able to find paid employment lasting six months or longer. What can we make of the balance of 96.5%? Are they, as our leaders might suggest, scroungers and shirkers (such emotive and pejorative language being par for the course in the ConDem Coalition)? Did all of the 96.5%, as some might say, just "go through the motions" and not learn from the experience, that being the reason they can't get a job?

There are an estimated 463,000 positions currently available, and these are being chased by 2.68 million people currently in the dole queue. That’s nearly 6 applicants for every single job, before you even consider people currently in work and looking for their next position, which makes every vacancy even more sought after.

Ms Reilly wasn’t in paid work, but she already had an unpaid placement in a museum that was very relevant to her existing skills and experience and no doubt would have been valuable in helping her to secure paid employment in her field of expertise. To force her to give up one unpaid position in favour of another one stacking shelves in Poundland, which is far less relevant to her skills and experience, is beyond perverse.

This isn’t about pride or a belief that the position was below her (she has since taken up a paid position in a supermarket) but the principle that if work is available it should be paid. If Poundland need a shelf-stacker, a cashier, a cleaner or anything else they should employ and pay one.

Which is precisely why Workfare won’t do anything for the employment crisis. Why would any employer hire and pay a member of staff if they can get one for free from the government? Every Workfare placement is one less job on the market, and therefore one less opportunity for a claimant to enter paid work. Workfare itself is constricting the supply of jobs, meaning that the volume of applicants for every vacancy won’t be heading south any time soon.

Farewell, Nawaab. It was good while it lasted.

I received some sad news a couple of weeks ago. My favourite Indian restaurant has closed down for good.

Nawaab, on Manor Row in Bradford, was closed the last time I was back home before Christmas, with a sign on the door advising that it was being refurbished. This was of course a disappointment at the time - mainly because I was hungry - but I looked forward to going back when I spent some time in Bradford over the Christmas holidays. I took a look at the place on my way to the tweetup at the Sparrow. I was gutted to find not only was it not open, but that the sign advising it was closed for refurbishment was gone.

I scrambled around for some optimism. "Maybe they replaced the windows and didn't put the sign back up," was about the best I could come up with. In truth, I knew deep down what the situation was, but didn't want to accept it. But I got the truth when I visited Nawaab's sister restaurant in the Bradford suburb of Tong.

I asked what was happening with Nawaab in Manor Row and was told in no uncertain terms it had closed for good. It transpires that the Nawaab restaurant group actually sold the Bradford restaurant - despite it being the original - three years ago. The new owners had been trying to get it to work but couldn't manage it. The waiter I spoke to blamed it on Bradford's city centre economy - or, to be more precise, the lack thereof.

If you're in any doubt of my genuine love for Nawaab, you can read my review on Tripadvisor, written in April last year. And I am genuinely sad that the restaurant's closed because I really, really liked the food. But worse than that is what it means for Bradford.

To be fair, Nawaab had been pretty quiet for a good few years. I remember going about ten years ago and it was packed to the rafters. They used to give a discount to Bradford City season ticket holders and on matchdays it was full of football fans on their way back from Valley Parade. Slowly but surely the numbers dwindled. On a few occasions our table has been the only occupied one. It was surely only a matter of time. 

The top end of Bradford had been in decline for years - the relocation of Christopher Pratt's department store to the city east of Pudsey probably being the most devastating blow I can think of in recent-ish times. 

But confidence seemed to be slowly returning to the area. Manningham Lane Retail Park - for years a scruffy hole of a place - got a full refurbishment and new tenants including Toys R Us, Dreams and Jollyes - not the most exciting of retailers, but better than Netto and Poundstretcher which came before them. The Sparrow Bier Cafe opened around the corner, and most recently a new wine bar, the Courtroom, opened on Manor Row. Added to the existing businesses - including furnisher Table Decor and coffee shop Feroni's, things seemed to be looking up,

It could even have been the stalled development of Westfield, at the bottom end of the city centre, that was making the top more attractive to businesses.

I'm sad that I can't eat my favourite curry any more (it's also worth mentioning that Gordon Ramsay-featured Prashad has left Bradford proper and moved out to Drighlington, a village with a Bradford postcode but in Leeds Council's area) but am hoping that it's not a sign of what will happen - again - to the area. With any luck, this will be an isolated incident and will not have an adverse effect on the surrounding businesses which have expressed confidence by investing in the area recently. 

I damn well hope so.

Bradford's had more than its fair share of knocks. It really can't afford another.