In April 1962 the Daily Mail sent a reporter to Bradford, capital of the woolen textile district in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Known for its enormous factories and warehouses of blackened sandstone, Bradford was a Victorian city dominated by the legacy of early industrialization. But now, so the Mail's headline went, a new Bradford was slowly rising “as white as wool” in the midst of the Pennine hills. It would be a modern, even futuristic, city: “By 1970 a new white central city, designed for a new multi-level style of living, will have risen out of the black acres of the wool men. … Indeed, fings ain’t what they used to be. The sense of confusion, change and growth in the wool city today is vast, stimulating and provocative.”Footnote 1
Bradford, according to the report, was throwing off its Victorian past and remaking itself through the transformation of its city center and the construction of an ambitious network of urban motorways. In retrospect, this dazzling vision of Worstedopolis as a city of the future is not without pathos. For, in little over twenty years, Bradford was to become a byword in Britain for planning blight, urban deprivation, and racial tension.
This article is about the planned modernization of Bradford in the postwar decades and the subsequent collapse of that project starting from the later 1960s. In a sense it is a familiar story of hopes raised and dashed, yet the purpose of this article is to raise questions about the story of postwar city planning developed in recent historiography through the dramatic and neglected example of Bradford. Much of the recent literature on urban Britain in the postwar period has centered on London and, to a lesser extent, the new towns like Stevenage and Milton Keynes; the work of Frank Mort and Mark Clapson has been especially pioneering here.Footnote 2 We know considerably less, however, about the life of the major industrial and port cities, such as Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, between the 1940s and the 1970s.Footnote 3 This reflects in part the fact that the landscapes of urban industrialism have been regarded quintessentially as the product of the nineteenth century. Such is especially the case with the old manufacturing districts of Lancashire, north east England, and West Yorkshire, Bradford's locus. These were the landscapes of the industrial revolution, the legacy of which seemed to permeate the stone-and-brick world even after decades of corrosive deindustrialization.
An important conceptual effect, however, is that it has become difficult to envisage the “industrial city” in Britain as a twentieth-century phenomenon, so overdetermined does it appear by its nineteenth-century origins. Yet urban industrial growth persisted, whether in the form of new zones in established manufacturing centers, such as Manchester's Trafford Park in the 1930s, or with the building of whole industrial new towns, such as Peterlee in north east England after 1948. The Bradford of the 1960s, glowingly depicted in the Daily Mail, was a further instance of these endeavors, a striking attempt to modernize the Victorian industrial city. “Urban renewal” was the term coined for such a process, a phrase originating in the United States and circulated among architects and planners in Britain as of the late 1950s. However, there have been few systematic studies of urban renewal in Britain's industrial cities before the 1980s.Footnote 4
This absence of an industrial dimension has wider implications for the debate about the impact of modernism on urban planning in Britain from the 1930s onward. A recent literature has tended to play down that impact. Noting the zeal for urban planning in “austerity Britain” in the immediate postwar years, for example, David Kynaston speaks of a modest, “humanist” modernism. In a perceptive reevaluation of the effects of planning on town centers, Peter Mandler likewise refers to the “gentle modernization” of the early 1950s. Planning historians have further drawn attention to the influence of conservation as a guiding principle of planners’ practice as against a root-and-branch approach to urban renewal.Footnote 5 While this emphasis is a useful corrective to an earlier historiography focused on the large-scale reconstruction of heavily bombed centers like Coventry and the East End of London, it underestimates the scale and rapidity of urban transformation in cities such as Bradford, which did not suffer substantial bomb damage, as well as the powerful modernist vision that infused the processes of transformation at multiple levels.Footnote 6 Not only Bradford but also other industrial cities like Birmingham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne witnessed a radical makeover of the urban landscape between the 1950s and the 1970s; this was popularly mythologized by the Bull Ring and Spaghetti Junction in the case of the former and by the notion of a British Brasilia in that of the latter.Footnote 7
In part this is a debate about what is meant by “modernism” (with an uppercase or lowercase M), a term rarely employed in the lexicon of social and cultural history. Architectural historians have tended to restrict it to a canon of architects and iconic buildings, whose urban exemplar is Le Corbusier and the Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles. Nevertheless, one of the early manifestos of architectural Modernism, the Athens Charter of 1933, had at its center the “functional city,” with its four principles of work, residence, recreation, and circulation.Footnote 8 Town planning also fell within the ambit of modernist ideas in Britain, even if more traditional impulses soon reasserted themselves in architectural circles after the war. As John Gold summarizes the view of British architects and planners in the mid-1950s, “Whatever the doubts, nothing had yet happened that remotely diluted either the broad social consensus that favoured change in pursuit of progress or, more specifically, the idea that modernism was an integral part of progressive visions of the future. It offered seemingly logical and unambiguous solutions to previously intractable urban problems and, through being largely untried, enjoyed the immeasurable advantage of being untainted by the ways of the past.”Footnote 9
Bradford, of course, was not Marseilles or London; no buildings were put up here that were likely to enter the Modernist architectural canon. What was practiced, as in so many other British cities, was rather a banal urban modernism, based on functionalism rather than the iconic, a modernism of office blocks, urban motorways, and car parks, not of landmark buildings. Diluted and vulgarized they may have been, yet the principles that guided Bradford's postwar reconstruction were recognizably modernist in inspiration. They included the partition of the city into distinct functional zones, including the hierarchical division of center and periphery; the conception of planning as an objective, neutral, and rational exercise; and perhaps above all, the belief in the modern as the guarantor of efficiency, progress, and human satisfaction.
Bradford represents an extreme case of the processes of urban reconstruction that overtook British cities between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s. Nationally, it was an extraordinarily widespread phenomenon, with an estimated 400 urban renewal schemes under way across the country by 1965.Footnote 10 Overall, these decades witnessed a more rapid transformation of Britain's towns and cities than any comparable period before or since. In one sense, then, the experience of Bradford throws into relief trends more widely visible elsewhere, but it also exemplifies a strand of that transformation that has been overlooked in recent accounts—that of the industrial city in which a program of urban modernism was implemented, untouched by historic or conservationist tendencies. In the first part of this article, I trace the development of city planning in Bradford from the 1930s to the 1960s. I shall then draw out the significance of these developments for what I have termed urban modernism. The third section discusses the disintegration of this program of urban modernism between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. Finally, in the conclusion of the article, I return to some of the comparative issues addressed here about the scope of urban modernism in British postwar cities and the historiography of planning and urban change.
Remaking Bradford
Postwar Bradford was still in many respects a Victorian city; its population had increased only slowly since the 1880s and had remained virtually constant at just under 300,000 between the 1940s and the 1970s.Footnote 11 It was routinely referred to as the world center of the wool textile trade, a position that had been established in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite losses in productive capacity and employment between the wars, wool textiles remained the centerpiece of the local economy in the three decades after 1945. The textile industry employed 40 percent of the city's working population in 1948, over three-quarters of whom were women; the next largest source of employment was engineering (with 13 percent), in which firms were themselves frequently bound to the woolen industry through the manufacture of textile machinery.Footnote 12 The great stone mills with their smoking chimneys dominated Bradford's skyline, while massive warehouses and the neo-Gothic wool exchange loomed over the central area. Such was the historic importance of wool that its affairs occupied the almost exclusive attention of the city's premier business institution, the chamber of commerce, founded in 1851; it was not until 1965 that the chamber elected a president whose background was not in textiles. Similarly, it was to the woolen mills that migrant labor came, first from southern and eastern Europe, then in the early 1950s from Pakistan and India. Wool was an international and imperial enterprise, and men from the Indian subcontinent arrived in Bradford along the routes of postcolonial labor, in response to the shortage created by the immediate postwar boom and the legal ban by the Labour government on women working night shifts. Wool spinning and weaving were classed as women's work; single Asian men therefore took on jobs in the mills deemed both feminine and unsocial by a local white population.Footnote 13
While this historical legacy, inscribed in Bradford's topography, buildings, and statuary, was often invoked as a source of local pride, the city's unplanned character had attracted criticism from as early as the First World War. A town planning scheme had been first initiated by the city council in 1917. Between the wars Bradford was surveyed, new streets were built, roads were improved, and fashionable zonal theory was introduced.Footnote 14 Reforms were piecemeal, however, and the central area was left more or less untouched. Planning orthodoxy of the period held that Victorian industrial cities like Bradford were ugly, formless, and anachronistic, places where “lava streams of irrupting urbanism seem to flow blindly in natural devastating confusion,” in Patrick Abercrombie's words in 1933.Footnote 15 The city's authorities had long been of a similar mind. In the later stages of the Second World War, a vigorous debate ensued in the city council as to how reform should be accomplished, what type of professional was required to lead it, and what model of redevelopment was appropriate. Critical to the debate was the idea that Bradford required expertise and a plan fitted to its needs as an industrial city. For this reason it was Max Lock, well known for his ambitious wartime proposals for the transformation of the steel and chemicals town of Middlesbrough, who was invited to address the corporation on the subject of town planning in January 1946.Footnote 16
In appointing a person to lead the process of urban transformation, however, the city council did not look to the emergent profession of town planning or that of architecture, which provided the background of many of the high-profile planners of the war-time and postwar years, such as Lock, Abercrombie, and Coventry's Donald Gibson. Instead they opted for the figure of Stanley Gordon Wardley. Like Francis Forty in London, Wardley's background was in civil engineering, a neglected but nonetheless significant influence on British town planning from the 1920s. Born in London in 1901, he graduated in engineering from London University in 1925 before working with the large building contractor, McAlpine. In 1930 Wardley moved into the sphere of municipal works at Leicester, specializing in road construction. From there he rose to become city engineer at Wakefield, the county town of the West Riding of Yorkshire, in which he led the way in implementing a scheme for the redevelopment of the city center. Early in 1946 Wardley moved again to Bradford, where he spent almost twenty years with an ever-expanding title: first city engineer and surveyor to Bradford Corporation, and subsequently also town planning officer and director of housing.Footnote 17 In conjunction with a powerful Labour alderman, R. C. Ruth, Wardley was reputed to control twelve council departments by the early 1960s. Largely unknown outside Bradford, Wardley was a very public presence in it, wielding greater power locally than even his more famous contemporaries like Donald Gibson at Coventry and Konrad Smigielski at Leicester. At his funeral in 1964, the presiding minister could justifiably claim that “his name is written into the very stones of the new Bradford.”Footnote 18 Wardley was not a Labour Party wheeler-dealer, however, but a technocrat who seems to have had limited interest either in politics or financial gain. Referred to by the Bradford press as the “grand designer,” Wardley conformed to the model of the paternalist expert that David Matless has noted among Abercrombie and other planners of the period: aloof, autocratic, and committed to generalized “improvement.”Footnote 19
In substance Wardley's twenty-year Bradford Development Plan, approved by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and published in 1953, was conventional for the period. It followed established zonal theory in seeking to move industry, warehousing, and residential population out of the city center, to create new council and industrial estates on the urban fringe, and to divide the city center itself between different uses: business, shopping, civic, and entertainment. Slum clearance was to be vigorously pursued, and an elaborate system of ring roads was to be built around the city. So much was standard in postwar urban planning and followed guidelines laid down by the Labour government in publications such as Design and Layout of Roads in Built-Up Areas and The Redevelopment of Central Areas.Footnote 20 As in other cities, too, the plan was the subject of an exhibition, held at Cartwright Hall in 1947 as part of the city's centenary, and public responses were solicited on its proposals.Footnote 21
Within the plan, industry received particular attention, Bradford being described at the outset as “a great textile city.” Detailed prescriptions were made to encourage centralization of manufacturing functions within wool textiles by promoting large integrated mills in which combing, spinning, weaving, and dyeing would be concentrated in a single space rather than dispersed across different parts of the city.Footnote 22 However, Wardley and the council were only too aware of the limits of municipal authority with regard to industrial production and its location. Most of the larger works could not be relocated to new sites because of the scale of investment in existing infrastructure and the intimate link of the mill with workers’ housing in the ecology of the factory community.Footnote 23 Powers over location were further restricted by the controls exercised over the siting of new and expanding firms by the Board of Trade under the Industrial Certificate system arising from the Distribution of Industry Act of 1945.Footnote 24 The thrust of national policy toward locating new firms in the so-called development areas, such as Merseyside and north east England, did not benefit Bradford since the city was not perceived to have industrial or unemployment problems. Within Bradford itself, the civic and business leadership, represented by the city council and the chamber of commerce, made consistent avowals of their mutual closeness, the mayor holding a permanent position on the chamber's executive body in recognition of the local authority's special support for business and wool textiles. In practice, though, relations were intermittent; Wardley did not speak directly to the chamber about the city development plan until 1963.Footnote 25 The chamber itself was highly suspicious of any intervention in industrial enterprise by either national or local government, this remaining a consistent tenet of its policy throughout the period. Business was a private affair, and the wool textile industry itself was not under serious threat of nationalization.
Yet Bradford's status as an industrial metropolis was a continuous contextual pressure in the planning process. In part it reflected the expectation inherited from the 1930s that the corporation would take a lead role in attracting new businesses to the city and in retaining those already established; even during wartime this was understood to be one of the corporation's main responsibilities.Footnote 26 New council housing, the top municipal priority in the 1950s, with over 25,000 corporation houses and flats built by 1968, was justified on industrial as well as social grounds, meeting the needs of what was envisaged as an expanding factory labor force.Footnote 27 Industrial concerns also underpinned the twin priorities of the development plan from the later 1950s onward, the building of the ring road system and the reconstruction of the city center. The geographical isolation of Bradford from its neighboring cities, Leeds and Manchester, as well as from London and the South, was an obsession among business leaders, and speedy transport links were continually emphasized as the hallmark of a successful industrial economy.Footnote 28 Furthermore, as in towns like Coventry and Birmingham, a thriving commercial center was projected as the essential complement of the modern manufacturing city.
The demolition and reconstruction of what was termed the central area was the most visible and spectacular sign of Bradford's postwar reincarnation, the transformation of the old industrial city into the new. It was accomplished with remarkable speed, broadly in the decade between 1955 and 1965. Not only was Bradford's planned rebuilding exceptional for its scale and rapidity, but it was also unusual in the consistency of its vision and application. While elsewhere in Britain city plans were often slow to be put into effect and were diluted in the process, Bradford's development plan remained little altered in its successive versions and was largely implemented.Footnote 29 The scope and pace of change is apparent in the numbers of compulsory purchase orders and the detail of committee business recorded in the annual reports of the city council between 1955 and 1965.Footnote 30 “Old warehouses and office blocks, decrepit shops and cafes, have been removed from the scene in an all-out demolition assault,” the Yorkshire Post reported in November 1960. By 1963 the Bradford Corporation could boast that it was five years ahead of schedule; “the heart of the city has literally been torn apart,” the Post admiringly commented, and in its place a “new white architecture” was soaring “into the sky.”Footnote 31 The whiteness of the Portland stone used for the new office blocks was a consistent theme of newspaper reports in the early 1960s, contrasting with the smoke- and weather-blackened stone of the older Victorian buildings and proclaiming the unabashed modernity of Bradford's rejuvenated center. By 1965 even Victorian institutions such as the town hall and the wool exchange had undergone extensive cleaning to bring them into line with the new white architecture.Footnote 32
With factories and, where possible, warehousing removed, the city center was redesignated as the shopping and commercial hub for the surrounding industrial hinterlands. National shopping chains like C&A and Arndale were attracted, and state-of-the-art high-rise office blocks were built, occupied by building societies and insurance companies, including Bradford and Bingley, the Provincial, and Sun Alliance. Initially the developers engaged by the city for retail and office construction were local, but by the later 1950s, major national companies had been enticed, such as Laings and Hammersons. The nine-story tower block built as the headquarters of the Arndale group, shopping mall developers, was designed by a North American firm, John Graham and Company of Seattle and New York, in conjunction with a more familiar figure in speculative building in northern England, the architect John Poulson.Footnote 33 This mixture of local, national, and international interests in the redevelopment of British city centers in the 1950s and 1960s was not uncommon. As Peter Mandler has observed, it reflected the conjunction of planning with its apparent obverse, market-driven property development, seen most clearly in high-profile London buildings such as Centre Point and the Shell Centre but also evident in speculative capital projects in city centers around the country.Footnote 34 In accordance with the development plan, central Bradford was divided into a series of functional zones: a civic precinct, with new municipal offices, law courts and police station; an educational zone, including the Margaret Macmillan Training College for teachers and the Institute of Technology, built in 1962 and to become the focal point of the new Bradford University three years later; and an entertainment area, including the old Alhambra Theatre and a new tower block, appropriately named Wardley House in 1965, containing a theater, an ice rink, and offices.Footnote 35 The whole reconstruction process was considerably aided by the fact that large parts of the city center were corporation owned as the result of purchases made before and during the Second World War. Consequently, not only was Wardley's position as “grand designer” strengthened but so too was the council's hand in its dealings with private developers.Footnote 36
Last but not least, the postwar plan for Bradford envisaged an intricate system of ring roads and expressways around and across the city. This was Wardley's chef d’oeuvre: he built a national reputation as a road planner, and the network fitted with his engineering conception of the industrial city as a “rational” arrangement, a “vital organism.”Footnote 37 Ring roads and urban motorways had a prehistory before the Second World War in Continental Europe and North America, but they were not part of the urban landscape of Britain. Alker Tripp's Town Planning and Road Traffic, published in 1942, is generally considered to have been instrumental in spreading the word, citing the “battle-level” casualties of over 2 million injured and 68,000 traffic deaths before 1939 as a call to action, and the postwar Labour government included ring roads as part of its guidelines to local authorities.Footnote 38 The quadrupling of private car ownership between 1950 and 1970 and the publication of the highly influential Buchanan Report, Traffic in Towns, in 1963 steadily increased the pressure on politicians and planners. By the mid-1960s, the construction of urban as well as national motorways was accepted as a political and economic priority.Footnote 39 Wardley's system followed the approved model, with three concentric rings, the inner ring placing dual carriageways at the heart of Bradford. Wardley took particular pride in the generous width of the ring roads, which spanned thirty-five meters, as well as the enlarged arterial roads that helped to create a web of expressways crisscrossing the city. Pedestrians moved between parts of the central area via a network of underground subways, the central area being designed to operate as a Buchanan-style multilevel environment. Car parks were likewise designed into the urban fabric, placed on the rooftops and in the basements of new office blocks as well as on purpose-built “multi-storys.” The urban motorway system, with its accompanying features of junctions, subways, and car parks, was the most visible embodiment of the postwar city as a networked infrastructure. It took time to engineer into place: although much of the road and subway network was operational in the early 1960s, it was not completed for another decade. For Wardley himself, the motorway system was the lynchpin of his plan for industrial Bradford. “The volume of road traffic is the measure of the success of a town,” he wrote. “It is communications which make a town.”Footnote 40 Even if, overall, the changes were uneven in effect, the speed and scale of Bradford's reconstruction was visible to everyone who witnessed it. A local historian has commented that, between 1955 and 1965, Bradford “experienced its most profound physical transformation for nearly a century.”Footnote 41
Urban Modernism
Such was the outline of Bradford's planned redevelopment between the 1930s and the mid-1960s. It was a program of transformation that was carried through on the basis of modernist principles, yet principles that were embedded in a language of technocratic pragmatism—“a rational approach capable of practical realisation,” as Wardley himself put it.Footnote 42 As he described himself in a paper given in 1960, Wardley was a civil engineer before he was an architect or town planner, a member of the Council of the Institute of Municipal Engineers from 1958.Footnote 43 Nevertheless, ideas drawn from urban modernism infused the process of transformation, starting from Wardley's own elevation as master planner, the “grand designer” single-handedly responsible for the vision of the new Bradford. A year after his death in 1965 the Bradford Bystander consecrated Wardley's work on its front cover, citing the poet John Milton beneath a picture of the city's new white skyline: “The hasty multitude Admiring enter’d, and the work some praise, And some the architect; his hand was known In heaven by many a towered structure high, Where sceptered angels held their residence And sat as princes.”Footnote 44
The development plan was modernist too in its conception of space and time. The space of the city was understood as abstract and homogeneous. Although the plan, in Geddesian fashion, was based on a prior survey of Bradford's topography, economy, and spatial form, there was limited acknowledgement of societal complexity. So while it followed contemporary practice in affirming neighborhood units, the plan contained little sense of different communities or social needs. The view taken by the whole planning apparatus was a monosocial and monocultural view, in which the needs of citizens would be met en masse, with the exception of the wealthy, who were tacitly understood to exist outside the community of need and thus outside of the planning process. The only social entities entering the development plan were “workers,” who were constituted as the prime objects as well as beneficiaries of the planning process; 84 percent of Bradford's population was classified as manual workers in 1971.Footnote 45 Furthermore, this was a wholly white working class: while women's existence was acknowledged in the guise of workers and shoppers, the city's expanding Asian and Caribbean population was invisible in the plan and its various successors.Footnote 46
The model of space and time deployed was equally rudimentary. Bradford was perceived from the planners’ eye view, as suggested both by the miniature replica of the redeveloped city that stood in Wardley's office and by the predilection for aerial views of construction, utilized by both the planning authorities and the popular press in their reportage of urban transformation. In the latter case, helicopter-eye views of works in the city center were favored, allowing for a stark “before” and “after” perspective on progress.Footnote 47 Temporality further entered into proceedings in the form of abstract ideas of efficiency and rationality. A continuous leitmotif in the development plan was how long it took people and goods to move from one zone or activity to another—from factory to warehouse, bus station to office, and home to work. The plan was innocent of people's actual, complex relationships to place, space, and time and to the way that these were used in practice. It dealt in clock time, not lived time. Yet oral testimony reveals temporal complexity, evident in the mobile working careers of women workers in Bradford as compared with their male counterparts, for instance, and their intricate juggling of paid work, child care, and the demands of home and relatives. Migrants from the Indian subcontinent likewise followed different rhythms from the local white population, an Indian wife recalling the shame of being reported to the police by English neighbors for cooking after midnight during Ramadan.Footnote 48 Furthermore, the tendency of the planners to see the city as a whole as ripe for redevelopment made the built environment appear ephemeral, capable of endlessly being made over. Obsolescence was built into postwar urban modernism: building materials were recognized as having a maximum thirty-year shelf life, and local authorities would place “tickets” on buildings so that they could be demolished at the allotted time. In Birmingham, indeed, the city engineer, Herbert Manzoni, argued that modern buildings should have a built-in redundancy equivalent to as little as fifteen years. In Bradford, too, the local authorities increasingly became aware by the 1960s that issues such as slum clearance would not be solved in a once-and-for-all fashion but necessitated a continuous cycle of physical renewal.Footnote 49
The correlative of these modernist impulses was hostility to any form of historicism, notably the idea of the city as a temporal palimpsest. Wardley's development plan represented itself as a caesura between the present and a past that was the locus of environmental problems, not charming relics. “Bradford is not a City which can claim to have any Ancient Monuments, and it has few buildings of any historic interest,” the plan flatly asserted, and this was a viewpoint that was echoed in the local press throughout the 1950s and the 1960s.Footnote 50 Thus the Yorkshire Post depicted Wardley as “a man of vision, capable of seeing where Bradford has gone wrong in the past and how it may be improved in the future.” The main problem, the Post continued, were the great, stone warehouses of the Victorian era, “ugly windowless buildings, the product of enterprise without civic responsibility.” Wardley himself took pride in his “scheme for sweeping away the litter of more than a century,” although, given shifting public opinion by 1964, he was wise enough to draw the line at the Gothic town hall, where his own office was located, praising its technical “craftsmanship.”Footnote 51 Even among those with preservationist sympathies, the demolition or neglect of old buildings was seen as the inevitable “price of progress.”Footnote 52 Unsurprisingly, given such official attitudes, the city council was slow to take advantage of the Civic Amenities Act of 1967, which empowered local authorities to create conservation areas for places requiring historic protection; in Bradford itself the only area to be so designated was the Cathedral Precinct in 1973.
It was not only the aesthetics of Victorian architecture that were objected to but also Bradford's condition as the product of nineteenth-century laissez-faire development, which had rendered it confused, irrational, and illegible. Konrad Smigielski, then lecturer in the nearby Leeds School of Architecture and Town Planning, was only echoing wider professional opinion in 1955 when he described Bradford as “a city planned by the devil”: “Frankly, I have not seen a city the size of Bradford so chaotically planned. It is a typical inheritance of the industrial revolution and any town planning would involve surgical treatment.” By contrast, modern industrial Bradford would be ordered and logical. Following modernist priorities, the city's new tower blocks embodied clear perspectives, sharp lines, and smooth surfaces, while Wardley's road scheme envisaged uninterrupted lines of vision for the urban motorist. His objection to road junctions and bridges was that they represented an aesthetic as well as a practical intrusion: “A fine street line … terminated with a vista of equally attractive appearance is a thing of great beauty. It can be easily destroyed by introducing objects or structures that interrupt the view. When advocates of segregation suggest footways and footbridges across the streets … they are in danger of destroying one of the fundamental qualities of a great town or city.”Footnote 53
Such a perspective dovetailed with modernist predilections for strict visual symmetry. James C. Scott has observed: “An efficient, rationally organized city … was one that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense.”Footnote 54
Beyond these fundamental premises of modernist planning, Bradford's policy makers and publicists were fascinated by the city's burgeoning automatism, which they continually referenced. One of the favored tropes was the notion of urban technologies as self-activating and self-maintaining, a material world operating without human intercession once set in motion by a higher engineering intelligence. The Bradford press in the 1960s was full of such references: electrically warmed roads, electronic barriers, garage doors that opened on approach, self-adjusting air conditioning, solar paneling, high-speed lifts that “automatically returned to the floors of major demand by pre-determined timing.”Footnote 55 The Daily Mail's reporter echoed this same theme in 1962: “I drove up an electrically-warmed ramp to a rooftop car park, drank coffee in a café with splendid city vistas, strolled down through an air-conditioned supermarket, explored a semi-completed system of under-traffic tunnels for pedestrian moles.”Footnote 56 By the 1960s it was the computer that represented this new world most powerfully, a correspondent on Bradford's main business journal imagining a single mainframe machine “cosseted in its air-conditioned and temperature-controlled rooms” operating as the intelligence nerve center of the modern manufacturing enterprise. The correlate in city planning was the idea of a computerized automatic traffic system capable of preventing congestion and maintaining a continuous smooth flow of cars, while the advent of systems planning in the later 1960s linked regional planning with the computer to envision the city itself as a single, vast interrelated system.Footnote 57 Varieties of automatism characterized the urban modernism of industrial centers like Bradford, especially strongly by the 1960s when a commitment to progress was mixed with more than a dash of futuristic fantasy.
The Collapse of Urban Modernism
In February 1965, the architect of the new Bradford, Stanley Wardley, died suddenly from a heart attack. He was replaced by Harry Cooke, an internal appointee who continued to implement Wardley's grand design for the city over the following years. By the later 1960s, however, the grand vision of modern Bradford was to come under pressure from a variety of directions. Criticism, in fact, was not new. As early as December 1952, a prominent local architect had warned that the freshly approved development plan would “devastate” the city and that the length of time taken to implement it would be such that the plan would be outdated before it was even complete. At a public inquiry into the plan two years later, it emerged that basic features, including the building of a new transport interchange and bus station, had not been properly costed. “If the Plan contains an obvious stroke of lunacy,” a lawyer asked, “what else may it contain?”Footnote 58 Professional disquiet gradually intensified. Concern among a small number of conservationists over the demolition of prized buildings, such as the Kassapian warehouse in 1957, swelled to encompass a larger swathe of public opinion by the time of the razing of the Swan Arcade in 1962, in which local figures like J. B. Priestley and David Hockney were involved.Footnote 59 At the time of Wardley's funeral in February 1965, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, the principal daily newspaper, acknowledged that local opinion on the planned modernization was divided both within the city and beyond it. “The future will judge,” a lead article portentously asserted, “whether Bradford's city centre stands high, medium or low in comparison with others at home and abroad.”Footnote 60
In the years immediately following Wardley's death, in fact, public controversy over the new Bradford became intense and open. In October 1967, two leading architectural critics, Ian Nairn and Patrick Nuttgens, launched a sweeping critique of Wardley's Bradford in a BBC television documentary entitled “The Glory That Was Bradford.” Targeting the revamped city center, they denounced the “false idea of grandeur,” the “slab-sided monotony,” and the “wind-swept pavements,” this last exacerbated by the effect of wind tunnels caused by the multiple tower blocks. “There is no individual interest at any level,” Nairn concluded of the new cityscape. “The rooftops are the worst of all. In the middle is an insipid glass panel, and flat anonymity at the bottom. If you add it all up, you get a long yawn where you used to get excitement.”Footnote 61 Nairn, of course, was a notorious architectural iconoclast, but the fact that the program was broadcast on national television ensured publicity locally; the letters page of the Telegraph and Argus gave full vent to heated local opinions for more than a week. Criticism quickly followed from a different quarter, a director of the Arndale Trust, owners of the city's biggest shopping center, condemning Wardley's inner motorway system for the “mess” that was Bradford: “We have a situation where you have to go underground like a mole to avoid traffic or climb rails like Tarzan to cross the road.”Footnote 62 A year later the pedestrian underpasses were rendered unusable following flooding caused by torrential rains, and there were the beginnings of a litany of complaints about planning blight, with office blocks left vacant and unused, including, symptomatically, Wardley House. At the first meeting of the Bradford Area Development Association in January 1969, the 400 members were informed that the Wardley Centre Theatre had stood empty for over three years with no sign of a play in sight; by the early 1970, several floors of Wardley House had been reduced to temporary overspill accommodation for the fledgling University of Bradford.Footnote 63
The cumulative effects of this mounting unease with Bradford's modernist makeover were several. The first by-product was a general mistrust of “planning,” a reaction evidenced much more widely by the later 1960s. A Bradford business journalist reflected in 1966 on the gradual draining of meaning from the concept of planning and its likely consequences: “Looking back over recent months and years, I get the impression that while talk about planning has greatly increased, it has not in fact materialised—in terms of practicable, sensible and far-sighted planning. Plans and planning measures do not seem to work as expected, if in fact they work at all. … As things stand at present I think we might all be better off if there were to be a moratorium on all plans and planning.” Looking to the future, he foresaw “a vast reaction, a crusade against planning.”Footnote 64
Opposition to physical changes in the city's landscape led to public criticism of the agents of change, in the council and the planning office in particular, focused on the issue of corruption. As elsewhere in industrial England, Bradford's modernization was haunted by suspicions of shady deals between officials and developers. That corruption was indeed rife in parts of British local government was borne out by a series of legal cases in the 1970s involving individuals like the notorious architect John Poulson and T. Dan Smith in Newcastle and Birmingham's chief architect Alan Maudslay and a local firm of developers, Ebury and Sharp.Footnote 65 Following an investigation in 1968, four officers of the City Architect's Department in Bradford were convicted in the autumn of 1969 of corruption arising out of the allocation of work to private contractors. The city architect, William Brown, was likewise found guilty of accepting stays at a string of luxury hotels in Paris, Berlin, New York, and elsewhere between 1964 and 1967, paid for by local firms with whom the council had dealings. While the misdemeanors of Bradford's officials were relatively minor by comparison with those in other big cities, the whiff of sleaze and corruption tainted local politicians and planners alike.Footnote 66
More generally, the organized manifestations of opposition to the planned transformation seem to have overlain a deeper vein of antipathy to the altered landscape. In the early phases of the production and publication of Wardley's development plan, public (as opposed to local professional) opinion appeared broadly supportive. Despite the sporadic opposition of the small if swelling conservationist lobby in the later 1950s, wider popular opposition only seems to have grown with the most intense phase of redevelopment after 1960, involving shops, office blocks, and the construction of the central and civic rings. An ingratiating interview with Wardley in 1964 could not wholly evade the issue of mounting criticism, noting that while “members of the public have railed and wrangled,” the city engineer had “enjoyed fairly consistent support from members of all shades of political opinion.”Footnote 67
No official survey of public responses was undertaken by the council in the 1960s, but surveys following Wardley's death in 1965 continued to depict local opinion as divided. On the eve of the BBC program on Bradford in 1967, the Telegraph and Argus canvassed public views with some, predominantly younger people, especially women and migrants, supportive of the changes to the city on the grounds of increased light and convenience. “I like the new development, it's modern, convenient and I find it stimulating,” reported a twenty-six-year-old Pakistani, Nazir Hassan. But the attitudes of other inhabitants were damning. For a middle-aged woman, all was confusion: “The roads are always up, buildings are changing all the time and Bradford has completely lost its character.” According to a man in his sixties, “It's no longer Bradford to me, but just like any city anywhere.”Footnote 68 Following the broadcast of the BBC program, the letters page of the newspaper reflected a similar division, some praising the developments on the grounds of economic necessity (“It is the centre for the woollen industry; modernisation is essential to keep Bradford in this position”), others hostile (“The town should be renamed as it is not Bradford any more”). Within this broad division, however, there were distinctions. Thus even those well disposed to the changes to the shops and offices were often critical of the dislocation caused by the inner ring road to the integrity of the central area.Footnote 69 By the early 1970s, criticism was more regularly voiced within the city council itself. According to one Labour councillor in 1971, the plans for the outer ring road, now called the South Radial Motorway, placed Bradford behind rather than in the vanguard of contemporary urban practice: “I think we are the only City in the country which is still encouraging traffic to come into our City centre. … Let us learn from our mistakes.”Footnote 70 For another, the council had been too slow in taking up the challenge of historic conservation and was negligent of the city's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architectural heritage.Footnote 71 In short, a political and popular consensus around urban modernism that seemed firm in the early 1960s had disintegrated ten years later.
Meanwhile, in the course of the 1960s, the plan to create a modern, white city was also being unraveled from another direction altogether. In 1966 an observer noted how on Sunday the city was deserted, “but in some [areas], Bradford is suddenly transported to the Indian continent, and nine-tenths of the population are coloured—and quite smart and respectable with it, as they visit the cinemas catering for their entertainment on that day, and chat among themselves.”Footnote 72 From the early 1960s, planners and the local authorities in Bradford were confronted by a new social phenomenon, the growth of a settled and expanding Asian “community.” This had not been envisaged in any of Wardley's development plans, which were predicated on the slow growth of the resident white population. During the 1950s, young men from Pakistan and India had come to work in Bradford, some 80 percent in the city's woolen mills. No definite figures exist for absolute numbers, but the population of New Commonwealth migrants is estimated to have grown from some 350 in 1953 to around 6,000 in 1961, of whom over four-fifths were from the Indian subcontinent and two-thirds from Pakistan alone.Footnote 73 These migrants were understood by the city's authorities—and for the most part understood themselves—to be short-term economic migrants, saving money to be reinvested back home by families in Mirpur, Sylhet, and Gujarat. Throughout the 1950s, New Commonwealth migrants had low visibility within the city, being perceived as workers rather than citizens and being set apart from planned housing schemes, such as the new council estates, which were designed for permanent (white) residents.
What changed this state of affairs almost single-handedly was the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962. The purpose of the act was to stem the number of migrants from the New Commonwealth (automatically coded “coloured”). In practice it had the opposite effect, increasing the migration flow and transforming a temporary population into a permanent one.
The result was the formation of new urban communities achieved through a process of planning from below. Following the rush to “beat the Act” in 1961–62, populations were swelled by the arrival of relatives from the subcontinent, including women and children. By 1966, the number of New Commonwealth migrants in Bradford had risen to 13,410; in the 1971 census, it had increased again to 20,700, and these were almost certainly underestimates.Footnote 74 Settlement patterns revealed the complexity of national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious constellations on the ground: Sikhs and Mirpuris along Leeds Road, Gujaratis and Bangladeshis in Little Horton. Community took material form in the corner shops, cafés, mosques, temples, and cinemas, which gave Pakistani and Indian populations a permanent presence in the urban landscape for the first time during the 1960s. The growth of such facilities was striking. Between 1959 and 1970, the number of Pakistani grocers and halal butchers in Bradford increased from two to 112, the number of Asian cafés from three to twenty-five. The first mosque was built in Howard Street in 1960; by 1974, there were three mosques, two Sikh gurdwaras, and a Hindu temple clustered in the central Manningham and University wards of the city.Footnote 75 In these years, “community” was being built from ground level up. Problematically for the planners, it was led by Asian and African-Caribbean populations, whose permanent presence had not been foreseen, and it was concentrated precisely in those Victorian areas of the city that had been earmarked for clearance and rehousing.Footnote 76
The 1960s, then, witnessed a spontaneous planning from below that permanently changed the physical and social landscape of cities like Bradford. It contributed largely to the emergence of the “inner city,” a term introduced into circulation by the Local Government Act of 1966, which allocated grants for the first time to local authorities with substantial migrant populations, reconstituting such populations as a significant social problem.Footnote 77 But the formation of new migrant communities in cities like Bradford also had an impact on the existing planning process as a whole. It highlighted the limitations of rigid development plans such as that made by Wardley, and it helped to hasten the demise of a planning model based on “comprehensive” controls, expert guidance from above, and unvarying, end-state objectives. Following the Town and Country Planning Act of 1968, the development plan model was to give way to the more flexible and iterative structure plan system.Footnote 78
In the end, however, it was neither popular opposition nor “planning from below” that finally undid the modernization of Bradford so much as gathering economic and industrial decline. Woolen textiles, the city's staple industry, served as the principal barometer of the city's changing economic fortunes following the war. Initially, signs were encouraging: the value of woolen exports in 1947 was double the prewar level, and membership of the wool exchange, a sensitive index of industrial prosperity, grew to 1,248 in the same year, the highest total since 1930.Footnote 79 Growth continued until the early 1950s, fueled by the postwar international boom for manufactured goods. Thereafter, however, the industry saw steady falls in output and exports. By 1958, the index for manufacturing industries showed wool textiles at only 88 percent of the 1954 output, while reductions in membership in the wool exchange, down to 1,050, reflected the inexorable hemorrhage of woolen firms, year on year. Overall, the wool textile industry lost over 16,000 workers in its different branches between 1950 and 1960, some 15 percent of its total workforce. Markers of the city's international importance also began to wane, with the U.S. Consulate closing in May 1953, and the French preparing to follow suit in 1954.Footnote 80 However, the secular decline of the industry before the mid-1960s was at least partly masked by uneven productivity, occasional periods of rising production and exports punctuating successive falls, as well as by the weak performance of the British manufacturing economy as a whole, blamed on successive governments’ “stop-go” policies.
By the late 1960s, the parlous condition of the textile trade was increasingly a matter of concern in the city and connected with urban planning. Wardley's modernization program for Bradford had received sporadic attention in the city's business press, mainly as it affected traffic and transport. In June 1963, Wardley himself was asked to present his development plan and its implications for industry to the council of the chamber of commerce, the speech being met with general satisfaction.Footnote 81 Four years later, however, a report by the junior chamber of commerce blamed the plan, and the corporation more generally, for aspects of the industrial crisis. The development plan had given “too high a priority to redevelopment of the City centre whilst leaving insufficient finance to improve the [industrial] outskirts. In particular, it is felt that industrial development must be assisted to a far greater extent.” Policy makers like Wardley were criticized for failing to create industrial estates and “modern industrial premises”; the corporation was urged to be more proactive in selling the city to potential investors as well as in completing essential transport works, such as the ring road system.Footnote 82 Wardley's development plan, in short, had come to be viewed as part of the problem rather than its solution. Indeed, the year 1967 represented something of a turning point in Bradford's modernization project, the chamber report coming only a month before the BBC-provoked debate about the new city and following fears about the demolition of the wool exchange itself, whose membership was to sink to as low as 280 by 1974. By the turn of the new decade, the woolen textile industry faced meltdown: in total the workforce in branches of woolen textiles, such as combing and worsted weaving, had almost halved since the war.Footnote 83
Other sectors of the local manufacturing economy followed the same downward path. In 1969, Baird Television suffered its first major wave of redundancies, which would lead to the ultimate closure of its Bradford factory in 1978, with the loss of 2,200 jobs. By 1972, unemployment in the city was running at over 7 percent, increasing at a rate of almost 2 percent per annum.Footnote 84 Such figures were low by comparison with what was to come under Margaret Thatcher's stringent economic regime less than a decade later, but they were still sufficient to ensure Intermediate Area status for the city in 1972, recognition of its ailing socioeconomic condition that rendered it eligible for special state-aided regional and industrial grants. Less than ten years after Wardley's death, his vision of Bradford as a modern industrial city had become a distant memory; instead, the city “as white as wool” was morphing gradually into urban dystopia.
Conclusions
In the opening scene of his 1984 novel The Two of Us, John Braine has his heroine contemplate the townscape of central Bradford in the late 1960s:
The older buildings accepted the spring with gratitude; stone both absorbs and reflects the climate and, whatever its strict definition as a substance may be, is as sentient as trees are sentient. The neo-Gothic Town Hall, the neo-Baroque Wool Exchange and the aggressively solid but irresistibly light-hearted Grand Hotel with its purely ornamental balconies and profusion of delicate ironwork all reacted as unmistakably as the human beings in the city reacted. The new buildings which had sprung up around the end of the Fifties showed nothing. The only reactions of concrete to the seasons are to stain and crumble: it's not only dead but never was alive. And the new buildings had no shape but were merely boxes, the three-dimensional applications of abstract theories—and not elegant or closely reasoned theories either. The Town Hall and the Wool Exchange and the Grand Hotel each had their own shape, their own individuality, because they each were, however imperfectly, the realization of dreams and aspirations which were not only decent and humane but not far short of noble.Footnote 85
By the late 1960s, the romantic opposition between old and new townscapes, Victorian and modernist, and the critique of the latter that went with it, was to emerge as a stock component of popularly held views of British cities. Braine's description condensed many of the charges leveled at Wardley's Bradford: the drab and repetitive character of the new architecture, its unsuitability to the northern climate, its facile appeal to a rapidly dating version of the modern.
Braine's portrait also provides us with a reminder, should it be needed, of how short-lived the historical moment of high urban modernism was in Britain, lasting less than a quarter century after the war. If the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 marked in legislative terms its inception nationwide, then the explosion of the Ronan Point tower block in May 1968 signaled its end, even if the effects of the modernist impulse were evident in British cities for more than a decade on either side. Bradford represents an especially intense example of this wider chronological sweep. The planned transformation was implemented at speed between the early 1950s and the early 1970s, with the decade 1955–65 particularly significant for the demolition and reconstruction of the city center. Unusually, the development plan was largely implemented in practice; elsewhere financial stringencies and other local factors meant that often the original plans were implemented only in diluted form.Footnote 86 In its aggressive assertion of an ideal of the industrial modern, Bradford belied the gentler model of a humanist modernism, characterized by an attachment to conservation and sympathetic additions to the existing urban fabric, which historians have recently associated with some postwar city plans. Unlike Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where the modernist vision of a “Brasilia of the North” under T. Dan Smith and his chief planning officer, Wilfred Burns, from 1960, was tempered by conservationist impulses, Bradford tended rather to follow the example of industrial Birmingham, whose postwar planning emphasized the “concrete collar” of the urban motorway system, together with the construction of the New Brutalist Bull Ring shopping center, opened in 1964.Footnote 87 In Birmingham, indeed, the priority given to the inner ring road in urban renewal from the early 1940s onward was even more emphatic than in Bradford. There were differences with other industrial cities, too. While new housing estates, such as Buttershaw, were not unimportant in Bradford's postwar redevelopment, they did not stand center stage, as in the case of Sheffield, where genuinely modernist housing experiments, like Park Hill, reflected the influence of a city architect, Lewis Womersley, as chief planner.Footnote 88 Yet in all these cities urban modernism took a recognizably similar shape, provoked by the question of how to renew, under mid-twentieth-century conditions, the built form and economic dynamism of the industrial city.
The collapse of this enterprise from the late 1960s represented a collapse of support for the principles on which it was based, above all the meliorist belief that planning by experts could engineer into place a bright new world of convenience, efficiency, and plenty. Urban modernism in Britain was a reaction above all to the dark images of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution and unfettered urban growth that formed so powerful a component of the political imaginary of the postwar years, especially that of Labour. It therefore took root most strongly in the industrial towns and cities where the legacy of these conditions appeared all too visible. What undermined this modernism in a place like Bradford was the speed and scale of the changes to the urban landscape, as well as the lack of consultation on what would be destroyed in the process. But the collapse of urban modernism in cities like Bradford was not only—as is so often assumed—an aesthetic reaction, powerful as this was among certain social groups. It was also the result of other, deeper lying, processes, notably the settlement of new migrant communities and the effects of rapid deindustrialization, which undermined the particular combination of universalism, meliorism, and technocracy that lay at the heart of urban modernism. By the early 1970s, the landscape of urban Bradford was changing less as a result of centralized planning initiatives than under the combined effects of new community formations and industrial dereliction.
