WORLD Curry Festival founder Zulfi Karim says when this year’s event in Bradford ‘pops up’ it will be different but the best yet, despite the organisation losing thousands of pounds in a devastating fire.

The blaze that tore through Manningham’s historic Drummond Mills complex in January this year destroyed the Festival’s head offices and storage space where it was developing a curry academy and kept the expensive equipment it had built up over the seven years since the event, that attracts curry chefs and food fans from all over the world, was first held.

Mr Karim, who was putting on a curry festival show in Malaysia at the time of the mill fire, said the Bradford spirit kept him going and helped him resist the easy option to take a year out to get back on track.

He said: “We will rise from the ashes and we will be back this year. We have been recharged with the energy of people who have kept nudging us to keep going. I call it the Bradford spirit. It would have been easy to take a year out but we had so many people behind us, supporting us that it wasn’t an option at all.”

His task has been to re-invent the festival for 2016 keeping up the same high standard as previous years but without the props, kitchens and equipment that were lost.

Instead of having a single site for the event, there will be a host of pop-up locations across the city where people least expect them, said Mr Karim.

“Instead of people coming to us, we will be taking the festival to them. We are looking for ideas of places that belong to the people and where people gather. It could be a restaurant or even someone’s home. People and places will be the theme. It’s going to be a festival across lots of places, that will be the driver,” he added.

The World Curry Festival lost its entire infrastructure in the Drummond Mill blaze leaving Mr Karim searching for a new base in the city to work from. Offers to hot-desk have come from a number of organisations and groups including Bradford College and Bradford Synagogue but a permanent, big space is essential.

“Finding an alternative site to re-house the festival base is proving difficult. We don’t want to leave our Bradford roots behind, after all its the curry capital but we need more than just office. We need floorspace if we’re to continue where we left off from and develop our cookery theatre for our chefs to do tasters and to create our academy,” he said.

And added: “We are in our seventh year and have come a long way in a relatively short space of time. We are becoming a regular fixture in the Yorkshire calendar and a recognised international event so we have further to go and want to do it from Bradford.”

The dates for this year’s festival will be announced later this month. Mr Karim added: “The fire it seems has given new life to the festival.”