It was another rough week for my home town with Bradford afforded the dubious title of the worst place in Britain to live.
Time to make a case for the defence then.
Bradford’s Bouncing Back was a campaign – amongst several others – from the late 1980s which demonstrates how long the place has been in the doldrums.
Now I admit to having been highly critical of the place in recent years and, at times, close to giving up and packing up like many have done in their thousands.
Where to though and why; home is, after all, where the heart is. And there is something very special about Bradford folk.
Comparison site uSwitch looked at more than 130 UK council areas…26 different lifestyle factors, from employment rate and average gross income to house prices, hours of sunshine and school exam results. The Independent.
Click on the link if you are planning your move to Utopia but what can we really glean from pointless surveys like this?
Four out of the top ten areas to live in are stated to be in Scotland. If you want to go live on a freezing deserted hill full of sheep in a land run by a delusional little woman who hates the English then fine.
Surveys of this type are largely bollocks. Only the sad and lonely actually answer their home telephones these days, only the desperate respond to surveys.
Call centres, staffed by disinterested kids ticking boxes whilst checking out Celeb News, will hardly offer us ground breaking insights into social attitudes.
Of course, there are parts of Bradford that are utterly hopeless; one of these is situated in the centre and houses a secretive little group known as The Council.
The only hope is that the expensive lake surrounding them will one day overflow and we will never hear from them again as we seek a brighter future for our City.
This is a proud city with a history to be celebrated, low on our luck for a while maybe, but you cannot keep a true Bradfordian down for long.
We have stunning architecture dominating the urban areas and a beautiful rural sprawl that consists of the Bradford Metropolitan district albeit, in recent years, our leaders have had desires to destroy this.
If they took any lead from this survey at all then it would suggest their current house building policy misses the mark completely.
Bradford residents were found to have low employment rates along with some of the lowest gross disposable household incomes, at £13,654 per year, but also some of the highest rents, at £90.60 a week.
Explain now the lust for executive homes on green fields?
As far as the ridiculous plans to destroy what remained of the city centre, fortunately, common sense saved the day and the Southern “visionaries” left us in peace, once they had stuffed their pockets with wads of our cash.
We then endured a hole the size of a misdirected US bomb in our city centre for almost a decade. And, in a city bereft of attractions save for the marvellous Alhambra Theatre, a sinister plan seemed set to allow the famous old Odeon building to be destroyed.
A decade which began with the riots of 2001, passed with one of the biggest cities in Britain devoid of any reason to go visit and, more crucially, spend time and money. Most of us living on the edges simply looked further outwards; it seemed the centre had been abandoned.
The age old issues around the challenges of multi-culturalism were also never going to find long lasting solutions here in Bradford. To pander to minorities was an insult to many; speak the unspeakable but many Bradfordians felt marginalised.
For a long time this was not a happy place, compounded by ineffectual and weak leadership locally and largely ignored nationally as a blot on the landscape.
However, there is at last real hope largely because size really does matter. Bradford is the sixth largest city in the UK, bigger than Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester; you can only ignore size for so long.
Westfield’s emergence from the big empty hole is evidence that retailers crave scale just as politicians do votes. As a consequence we are currently seeing inward investment at levels not witnessed for generations.
There is clearly a long way to go and recent research from Loughborough University (July 2015) found that Bradford was again top of the table, this time for over-55’s seeking to move out.
This may be misleading though because moving out may well simply be further out into the outlying areas which, by the way, are outstandingly beautiful. The inner city though has serious challenges.
Many of our schools are failing and the reasons are complex. In our primary schools there are over 150 different languages although I understand Old Etonian is not one of them.
Equally, conveniently lumping the blame on Eastern Europeans is more evidence of the stunted intellects we suffer. Educational attainment in Bradford has been an issue for a very long time.
We also have a lack of highly skilled jobs and, until our educational standards improve, employers will not see Bradford as a location of choice. The driver of our old wealth, the textile industry, has long gone.
What we do have is spirit and that, above all else, has been evidenced in buckets by the people who are driving Bradford’s renaissance.
A trip to the thriving Independent Quarter – North Parade – confirms Bradford’s ability to dust itself down, cock a finger to the world and get on with life.
We have to shake the ingrained pessimism, evidenced by reactions to the plans for the Odeon as a mid-sized entertainments venue. Cities much smaller than Bradford enjoy similar venues so why not here?
Westfield is undoubtedly key as it’s success will drive the regeneration of the surrounding areas such as Little Germany, home to some of the best architecture of it’s type in the UK.
This place will never be perfect but Bradfordians are proud people. Given something to be proud of like a revitalised town centre with a quality retail and entertainments offering this place can pull itself up.
Surely, even our hopeless Council cannot muck this one up?
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