Scrawled in white on a bridge outside Bradford Interchange, the words “Welcome home, sexy” have brought a smile to thousands of train passengers over the years. But whoever wrote the graffiti almost certainly never thought it would be used as a cheeky tagline for Bradford’s bid to be the UK’s city of culture.
“It’s us – it’s Bradford. It’s a bit mischievous, it’s hospitable, it’s inviting,” said Shanaz Gulzar, the chair of the city’s bid team, who admitted that some thought the slogan was “a bit too Bradford” for the judges.
It worked, however, as Bradford has beaten competition from Southampton, County Durham and Wrexham Borough County to take up the city of culture crown in 2025.
“It’s tremendous,” said Zulfiqar Ali Karim, president of the Bradford council of mosques and, as deputy lieutenant for West Yorkshire, the Queen’s man in Bradford. “A lot of people have seen Bradford as an underdog compared with other northern cities and probably wrote us off as dead and buried,” he added. “But in football terms, this is us being promoted to the Premiership.”
Bradford has felt unloved by outsiders for decades, overlooked in favour of Manchester and Leeds despite its huge potential as the youngest city in the UK.
The city that sent wool to the world had started to rediscover its self-confidence before Covid-19, with a growing cultural and independent scene, a smart public space outside the Victorian town hall, a gleaming new shopping centre and a 4,000-seat live music venue in the works.
However, Bradford is the fifth poorest local authority area in England, and the pandemic has left it with the second-highest unemployment rate in the UK, according to the Centre for Cities thinktank. The need for investment is acute, yet the city recently missed out on “Northern Powerhouse” Rail, the high-speed trans-Pennine train line that many felt would have transformed its prospects economically.
“It can feel very overlooked as a place,” said Maria Edwards, 38, watching her seven-year-old daughter, Esme Yeomans, splash around in the Centenary Square fountains on Wednesday. “We’re a dead end on the train routes. It’s massive and there’s so much to it, but it does feel undiscovered in so many ways.”
Her friend, Claudia Ingolfsson, 42, said she hoped the city of culture would bring jobs for young people for generations to come: “People go to cities like Sheffield and stay, whereas in Bradford you don’t feel that there’s a core of aspirational young professionals staying here.”
Bradford will receive an initial £275,000 to develop its plans for a year of events, along with the chance to bid for £3m in national lottery funding. The longer-term impacts should significant; nearly 800 jobs were created in Hull when it was the city of culture in 2017, and Coventry has benefited from £500m of regeneration activity since its 2021 title was announced, according to independent analyses.
The boost to morale could be as important as the extra investment. Kristian Cleworth, an arts worker, was so fed up with the misconceptions about Bradford that he set up a website to share only good news about his home city.
“We’ve almost gone along with the jokes and eyebrow-raises and we’ve not pushed the positives,” he said. “It’s held Bradford back since the 60s. The huge change in architecture and city planning – people have seen it as a loss of heritage and it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy of moaning and moaning.”
The 2001 riots, which saw some of the worst violence in mainland Britain in decades, were “ancient history” to Cleworth, 32, while Karim – who grew up in Bradford in the 1980s – said the district was now “probably one of the most harmonious cities in Europe”. Communities have learned to celebrate each other, he said, not just live alongside one another.
Gulzar said city of culture was a chance, 21 years on from the riots, to stop people from linking Bradford to disharmony. “Why are we still talking about that 20 years later? It’s part of our history, but two generations have been born and grown up since then and that’s not their lived history. Bradford is a city of the world.”
What you may not know about Bradford
• It’s the UK’s youngest city. More than a quarter of the district’s 542,000 population are under 18 – compared with 21% nationally – and 30% are under 20.
• It is the fifth biggest city in England and one of the most diverse – 160 languages are spoken by the children at the local schools.
• St George’s Hall is one of the oldest venues of its kind in the UK, having opened in 1853. Two suffragettes sabotaged a speech there by Herbert Asquith, then prime minister, in protest at his opposition to votes for women. The two campaigners, Mrs Runciman and Miss Fitch, had hidden under the stage for 24 hours.
• Bradford has more than 4,000 listed buildings, most dating back to its 18th-century heritage as an industrial powerhouse, including Salts Mill.
• It also has a world heritage site in Saltaire. Described by Unesco as an “exceptionally complete and well-preserved industrial village”, Saltaire was built by the industrialist Titus Salt.
• Many people know Bradford for its famous creatives, including David Hockney and the Brontë sisters, but few realise how close the city is to the countryside. Bradford sits on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, while Ilkley, famous for its cow and calf – a rock formation consisting of an outcrop and boulder – has stunning views and is part of the Bradford district, but feels a world away from the busy centre.
