A multi-million pound textile archive due to open in Bradford next year will attract designers from New York, Paris and Milan and put the city at the heart of international fashion design, according to industry experts.

And it could form a central plank of the continuing renaissance of the Yorkshire textile industry.

The 27,000 square foot archive, costing more than £2 million, is to be sited at Lister's Mill in Manningham and will be an amalgam of existing collections.

The project - "achieved against all the odds" - has taken four years. It has been masterminded by Gary Hiley of the Bradford-based Confederation of British Wool Textiles and influential industry figure Edward Stanners, who outlined progress to members of the Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield Textile Societies.

"This is an extraordinarily exciting time for Bradford," said Mr Stanners. "I think we should grasp that and say that it's an exciting time for the industry.

"There's no reason why the archive can't put us massively on the map as far as design houses like Ralph Lauren and DKNY are concerned.

"Maybe you can say this is an end to the attrition in the industry. The design houses in Paris and New York could come here and we could sell them designs for £1,000 but we could say to them that if they made the fabric locally they could have it for free."

He said there been a great deal of support for the venture, which would also include research facilities and workshop units for new textile entrepreneurs.

With many people still regarding Bradford as a centre of design excellence around the world, this would be "a massive resource", he added

Mr Hiley said Yorkshire still employed 29,000 people in the textile industry and that there were 1,000 textile and fashion graduates a year in the region.

"Our past is our future," added Mr Hiley. "The problem is that the textile design heritage of the area isn't accessible."

He said that the collection would be digitised to give greater access. And he praised Bradford Council for their "amazing enthusiasm" for the project.