Museum has kept city in sharp focus for 30 years

That was before the Credit Crunch financial meltdown – like something out of the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street – and the subsequent Government borrowing reductions that led to Austerity Britain and the current threat to the existence of the Museum.

Thirty years ago on June 16, 1983, Lord Snowden and the National Science Museum’s director Dame Margaret Weston, came to Bradford to formally open the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. It was an act of defiance, not by them, but by corporate Bradford.

Like much of the manufacturing north, Bradford Metropolitan District was reeling from the effects of high interest rates and public spending cuts that resulted in factory closures and unemployment in excess of 30,000. Bradford had to fight for its life.

The T&A has already highlighted the story of how Bradford Council’s then-chief executive Gordon Moore persuaded Dame Margaret Weston to back the idea of bringing a national museum to the hard-hit North – a minor miracle in itself – and locate it in Bradford’s biggest white elephant, the vacant Wardley Centre.

The cost of £2.4m was offset by a grant from the European Community’s regional fund secured by Yorkshire West Member of the European Parliament Barry Seal.

After June 1983, Bradford had something extra special to magnify its ‘Surprising Place’ brand: the giant IMAX cinema screen. Leeds didn’t have one, it still doesn’t. Thirty years ago there wasn’t another one in England outside of London.

Under the guidance of its first director Colin Ford the Museum soon began to acquire galleries and exhibitions.

In August 1985, David Hockney spent three or four days at the museum publicly creating a large joiner photograph of that part of the city centre. He also gave a Saturday afternoon lecture about perspective and photography.

In 1986 a TV gallery marked the 50th anniversary of public televsion; in 1989 the Kodak gallery opened to mark the 150th anniversary of the invention of chemical photography.

Then in 1992, at a cost of only £1.25m, the Museum acquired another tremendous asset: Pictureville Cinema. It was built at another cost too, however. The popular 300-seat Library Theatre was lost and, to this day, has not been replaced. Bradford Playhouse and Film Theatre lost its £38,000 British Film Institute grant, which was re-directed to Pictureville.

It also paid the salary of Bill Lawrence, who came to Bradford from York to be head of cinema, a post he relinquished reluctantly in 2008.

He said: “That was the period of VHF when people were reluctant to invest in city-centre cinemas. Out-of-town multiplexes were springing up. So Pictureville went against the grain. The carpeting, decoration and the seats made it into one of the best auditoria in the country. The technical equipment is top notch. The sound equipment, I’m told, is the best in the world.”

Pictureville was formally opened by the Duchess of Kent. Movie producer Sir David Puttnam is said to have declared that Pictureville was the best cinema in the country.

In 1994, Bill Lawrence created the first Bradford International Film Festival. Others followed: Bite the Mango; the International Animation Festival; Cinerama Weekend; Fantastic Films and the Shine short films festival. By this time Colin Ford had left. Amanda Nevill took over and kept up the momentum of innovation.

Apart from swanky headline events such as photographic exhibitions by David Bailey and Martin Parr and the set-piece public interviewing of films stars such as Sir Richard Attenborough, Michael Palin and Jean Simmons, off-beat local events featured too.

In 1994 three famous Bradfordians, broadcaster Richard Whiteley, lawyer and English Heritage commissioner Roger Suddards and supermarket supremo Ken Morrison, came together at the museum for a performance of a J B Priestley talk about a famous wartime Bradford pie.

Mr Suddards, architect of the Bradford City Fire Disaster trust fund, died in December the following year. Richard Whiteley died in June, 2005. The pie photograph outside the museum is a nice little slice of local history.

In September 1997 the museum closed for nearly two years. The reason wasn’t a cash crisis but a cash abundance. An extensive overall costing about £16m started in November of that year. During this hiatus the museum had a temporary presence in the Art Mill, Little Germany, with Cafe Kino run by Steven Eustace, owner of the inspirational Java Cafe, then located opposite the Alhambra.

The Java shut down in March, 1999. Bradford was shaken but not stirred; three months later the museum was formally re-opened by Pierce Brosnan, then in the middle of his nine-year stint as James Bond. The Bond film that year was The World is Not Enough.

Three years later the museum put on a James Bond exhibition to mark 40 years of 007 movies, which have made an estimated six billion dollars at the box office. For 27 years they were either co-produced or produced by Cubbie Broccoli. His achievement was acknowledged by the museum in the name of its third cinema – the Cubby Broccoli.

Until last year the BBC had a radio station located in the museum. Its removal by the corporation angered Bradford South Labour MP Gerry Sutcliffe who remonstrated in vain with BBC high-ups.

The decision was all the more galling or embarrassing for, in 2006, under the museum’s new director Colin Philpott, the museum had its name changed to the National Media Museum. That was also the year that a £3m television gallery was opened.

Irrespective of the accolade of World City of Film bestowed by UNESCO on Bradford in June 2009, all was not well at the museum. Within a month the Bite the Mango Festival was scrapped and the International Film Festival was truncated by a couple of days.

Film guru Bill Lawrence had already left. Others were to follow including film festival director Tony Earnshaw. Rumours of a troubled management restructure leaked like water from a fractured pipe. In April 2011 Colin Philpott announced that, after seven years, he was leaving his £95,000-plus job.

The museum no longer has a director; instead it has a head, Jo Quinton-Tulloch.

But for how much longer?