New Roads to an Old Town: Bradford 1987-1989

for editorial use see Alamy

The Bradford born artist David Hockney once described my home town as the ultimate working-class city. The once world centre of wool production gave this West Yorkshire area its nickname ‘Worstedopolis’. This was the site of the infamous 1890 Manningham Mills strike and founding of the Independent Labour Party after the United States imposed a tariff on foreign cloth, leading to cuts in wages throughout the British textile industry. A century later, de-industrialisation and decline in British manufacturing took hold: civic pride was replaced with second hand shops, salvation army hostels, unemployment, political conflict and racial and religious tension. Optimistic entrepreneurs began to breathe life into the old town, with an attempted resurrection of the city as a centre for art, culture and tourism; but would it be the same old story?

These are the first ever pictures I made as a young documentary photographer. The late 1980s was a time of rapid change. Alterations in the landscape, with a modern duel carriageway being built right through the heart of the city, where once cobbled streets and small lanes ran, reflected changes in the economic, social and political fabric. Bradford became a microcosm of changes in the country as a whole. Eric Pickles from Keighley, the more prosperous region, became council leader. Hand picked by then Prime Minster, Margaret Thatcher - a divisive figure testing out her Neoliberal free-market policies - he proceeded to bulldoze through drastic cuts to the council workforce and began the contracting out of services to private profit making companies against a resistant population: there seemed to be a demonstration every week, culminating in the mass burning of poll tax bills which reverberated back down to London, where 100,000s of people demonstrated against the tax in Trafalgar Square culminating in Thatcher’s forced resignation.

Its unsettling looking back at these old photographs, a way of work and leisure long since gone: video shops and amusement arcades, unemployment offices, Christmas day in a homeless hostel, children gambling, pensioners protesting and racist graffiti on the walls. Strange how, although things have changed materially, the same issues resurface in the present day. Photography helps us understand our past and even more importantly, helps us re-imagine the future.

Garry Clarkson March 2020

With thanks to Dr Robert Perks and Stephen Mayes for invaluable advice and Jamie Collier and Simon Weldon for help in the archiving of these photographs.

Garry Clarkson

Please refresh the page

An unknown error has occurred