Bradford as a city context

The city of Bradford has a proud history as a major engine of 19th-century manufacturing that made it one of the wealthiest cities in the country. It expanded in the 19th century as a centre of textile manufacturing and, like many cities of its kind at the time, its expansion was rapid. As technological innovation moved textile production from small hillside village communities into the concentration of factories, embedded in the hub of canals and railways that made them viable, then so, too, the face of Bradford changed. Large aspects of Bradford's contemporary physical fabric owe much to this period of radical transformation.

Historically, Bradford is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. Nestling in Bradford Dale, it was well supplied with water but surrounded by steep-sided hills that made it unsuitable for agricultural development. Fieldhouse (1978) suggests that this topography had an impact in determining the character of the developing community, noting that in the 17th century:

Manufacture and industry, then, has a long association with the developing wealth of Bradford, and the opening of the Bradford Canal in 1774, linking Bradford to the Leeds–Liverpool canal, and hence to both coasts, did much to provide a critical infrastructural element to the rapid expansion of Bradford in the latter part of that century. As the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, Bradford was blessed with a propitious mix of natural resources, including coal, iron and local stone for building mills and houses. The technological innovations in the cloth and wool industries provided the impetus that radically changed the demography of the North West and Bradford, as power looms and new combing machines effectively put an end to the homebased industry by the middle of the 19th century.

The development of the textile industry in Bradford was reflected in the burgeoning growth of mills and the complementary terraced housing for their workforce. The speed of this development was echoed in the attendant social misery of many of the workforce, who worked in exploitative conditions and lived in unsanitary accommodation.