The Story Of Bradford by Alan Hall
The History Press, £18.99

Until Bradford got a mayor, 14 aldermen and 42 councillors in 1847, it was run by a cabal of Anglican churchmen and wealthy citizens called the Vestry and then a Dickensian-sounding Board of Improvement Commissioners.

The Vestry tried to root out vagrancy and street begging, control the distribution of oat bread to the poor and stop the unauthorised sub-letting of premises to outsiders. That was nearly 300 years before Iain Duncan Smith’s bedroom tax.

The Improvement Commissioners, 58 of them each of whom had a property qualification of £1,000, were responsible for paving, lighting, policing and generally improving Bradford and the hamlet of Little Horton.

“Unfortunately the Board did not actually replace the Vestry, which still continued to meet, retaining the right to oversee poor relief and the surveying of certain streets and thoroughfares.”

The quote is from Alan Hall’s amiable stroll through 2,500 years of history. The difference between a story and a history may be no more than this: a story recounts what happened but a history tries to explain why. Joseph Fieldhouse, by his own admission, drew upon Margaret Law’s 1913 book The Story Of Bradford for his history published in 1972.

Mr Hall has drawn upon Fieldhouse, William Cudworth, Gary Firth, Horace Hird, Abraham Holroyd, J B Priestley, Jack Reynolds and Janet Bujra and Jenny Pierce for their chronicle of the recent Bradford riots.

His researches were further aided by Bradford Central Library, which sourced many of the 131 illustrations and images not supplied by photographer Sue Nayor.

Joseph Fieldhouse declared that his book was intended for the general reader rather than the professional historian, and Alan Hall has followed suit.

The bulk of his book is preoccupied with Bradford before local government reorganisation of 1974, although the chapter dealing with Bradford’s changing population, Towards A Multi-Ethnic City, encompasses past and present.

Traversing familiar landmarks – the Civil War, Non Conformism, Industrialisation, the First World War, the decline of textiles, the Bradford City Fire, the burning of the Satanic Verses, the disturbances of 1995 and the rioting of 2001 – he admits that his “fifteen short chapters” are not comprehensive.

The coming of the railways gets but a single line. Fieldhouse is more expansive on the subject. But whereas Fieldhouse has only one paragraph on the Independent Labour Party, Mr Hall has two pages. Dissent is one of the book’s threads.

Bradford post-1974 gets only 28 pages. The ten-year saga of Forster Square and Westfield’s shopping mall is dealt with in five lines and is described as a “large empty space” rather than the shrub-filled rusting crater it actually is.

“By 2013 it seemed to many of the more jaundiced citizens of Bradford that the Council’s propensity for producing grandiose schemes and elaborate promotional campaigns was often little more than elaborate window-dressing. But others were cautiously optimistic...”

Ah, where would we be without cautious optimists?