Bradford

Bradford, the former wool capital of the world, grew up very quickly after a long childhood. It was a Saxon village up to the Norman Conquest, when it suffered the same fate as most settlements in a north of England 'harried' at the behest of William I.

Domesday Book describes it simply as 'waste'. Over the next 200 years it slowly recovered, and in 1251 received a market charter from Henry III. By then its staple industry was established thanks to its location. Sheep grazed the high moorland across Yorkshire and soft water, filtered through the peat and ideal for washing wool, ran through the valleys.

The town became the meeting place for weavers of cloth, who brought their 'pieces' to market to find buyers. The quality of the material soon established its own reputation. Little touched the quiet life of the town nestling in a small spur off the Aire Valley. The highest drama in 600 years came in the Civil War when, besieged by Royalists, the town's defenders hung sacks of wool from the tower of the parish church to protect it from the artillery of the Earl of Newcastle.

The Earl had promised to put the whole place to the sword but, during the night, a ghostly figure interrupted his sleep at Bolling Hall, imploring him: 'Pity poor Bradford'. It unsettled him enough to persuade him to let the people live.

The most radical thing to happen to Bradford was the discovery that steam power could replace water power and human or animal muscle in manufacturing. Bradford's geology put it at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It sat on deposits of coal and iron ore. Textile manufacture was no longer a cottage industry but big business. Workers left the land for the city, to earn their living in the mills and factories. Nowhere did this happen more dramatically than Bradford, where the population soared in the first half of the 19 th Century.

The coming of the canals in the 18 th Century and the arrival of the railways in the first half of the 19 th gave the cut-off little town an outlet to the outside, and Bradford's worsted cloth suddenly had the world as its marketplace.

But the Yorkshire expression 'where there's muck there's brass [money]' could have been coined for Bradford. Hard-driving industrialisation and a rising population brought social problems, mainly from the filth which accumulated in the canal and the beck which had once been the water supply but was by 1840 an open sewer. Cholera, typhoid and anthrax (sometimes called woolsorter's disease) were frequent and unwelcome visitors.

In 1847 Bradford was granted borough status and elected its first local government representatives, who began to clean up the town. Efficient sewerage and clean water supplies began to cut the toll of disease. By the middle of the 19 th Century Bradford was wealthy and money began to produce buildings like the town hall, the Wool Exchange and St George's Hall, which still stand today.

By 1897, when Bradford became a city, not only were there great buildings, but there was the basis of a social welfare system to look after the people who helped build them.

In schools Bradford pioneered meals, health care, swimming baths, nurseries, dentistry (it was a Bradford MP, W E Forster, who in 1870 pioneered the first Act of Parliament which was to give every child in Britain a free education).

In politics, Bradford was also a pioneer. The Independent Labour Party was born in the city out of a long and bitter strike over pay cuts at Lister's Mill in the 1890s. (Lister was later to give the city its largest park and its art gallery).

Prosperity reflected the world's slump and boom up until the Second World War, after which artificial fibres and cheap imports dealt the textile industry many body blows. Since then Bradford has been finding new directions in education - it achieved university status in 1966 - microtechnology, leisure and - perhaps surprising itself - tourism. Its proximity to the Yorkshire Dales National Park, its friendliness (it seems to have absorbed successive waves of newcomers from around the world, starting with Ireland, through Eastern Europe, Russia and Germany to the Caribbean and the Indian Sub-continent with less strain and animosity than other English cities) and its industrial heritage make it attractive to visitors.

Even in the centre of Bradford, you are never far from the surrounding moorland - a fact which influenced some of its most famous artistic sons - the novelist and playwright J B Priestley, the composer Frederick Delius, and the contemporary artist David Hockney