BRIDGE Street is alive with crowds - men and lads in caps, women and girls in shawls - for the livestock fair.

There are carousel rides, stalls selling nuts and brandy snaps, and man with a monkey perched on his shoulder grins at the camera.

The charming scene is from a fascinating new DVD looking back at life in bygone Bradford. Using archive cine film and a wonderful collection of old photographs and maps, Bradford The Way We Were - produced by Britain on Film exclusively for the Telegraph & Argus - explores the city’s extraordinary growth from a country market town to a thriving industrial nerve centre. Along the way it gives a shocking insight into Victorian slums; recalls the excitement greeting the railway, and uncovers Bradford’s hidden past. The archive footage reveals why Bradford came to be known as ‘the Venice of the North’, while gaining a reputation as the dirtiest town in England, and the violent events of an industrial dispute. We see what was left of Lingard’s department store after a bomb fell on the city centre, and discover why the sinking of the Lusitania was a disaster for Little Germany.

The DVD, which brings to life many events using reports from the T&A archives, takes an entertaining, revealing journey through the city’s past, into the hurly burly of life as far back as the 1800s. The scene is set with the unveiling of Bradford’s Queen Victoria statue; a monument symbolising the city’s transformation under the monarch’s reign. Before highlighting the Victorian legacy of grand architecture and elegant parks - architectural masterpieces such as the Wool Exchange and City Hall earning the city the unlikely title of “Venice of the North” - the film uses old maps to trace Bradford’s early history, when it was home to just over 6,000 people, built up in a hub of streets around Market Street, Bridge Street, Westgate, Ivegate and Kirkgate.

Manningham Lane, says narrator Richard Vernon, was so narrow a horse and cart had difficultly passing through.

The increase of worsted production changed Bradford, and the film looks at the role played by the Leeds Liverpool and Bradford Canals. With the harnessing of steam power in the first half of the 19th century, Bradford’s skyline changed beyond recognition in just three decades. “Bradford was the place to be for the movers and shakers of the textile industry,” says Mr Vernon, adding: “Merchants from Germany beat a path to Bradford” as the camera pans across the imposing Gothic showrooms and warehouses of Little Germany.

One of the busiest places in Victorian Bradford was Forster Square, which stood at the heart of the city’s communication network. Already bounded on one side by the LMS railway station, when electric trams were introduced Forster Square was the obvious choice as the hub of the local transport system. At the end of the working day, city workers clamoured for the tram back home, at weekends trippers queued to board trams for local beauty spots, and on match days, football specials ran from the island platform to Valley Parade.

The birth of the Leeds and Bradford Railway Company sealed its status as a modern city - the fastest developing city in the country - and excited crowds assembled to watch trains. Some people climbed onto roofs of houses,”so eager were they to see the doings of the day”.

Bustling street scenes and smoky images of mill chimneys reflect the changing times, and there is stark footage of the consequences of 19th century population growth. Barefoot children are gathered on narrow backstreets as the film lifts the lid on Bradford’s filthy slums. This was a time when the average life expectancy of Bradford’s working classes was 18 - and less than a third of children reached the age of 15, due largely to disease caused by pollution and overcrowding. Most victims of the cholera 1849 epidemic were buried in St Peter’s (now Bradford Cathedral) churchyard, which was so overcrowded there were bones sticking out at the surface. The film highlights the social hierarchy at Undercliffe Cemetery , and the beginnings of Scholemoor Cemetery.

Hordes of mill workers pour onto cobbled streets, with two men among them having a brawl, there are Bradfordians at leisure in Peel Park and Lister Park, the city’s “green lungs”, and in June, 1897 the streets are awash with flags and bunting, celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and Bradford’s becoming a city.

At it’s heart, Bradford was still a market town, and the camera pans over Kirkgate Market, the lower half opening in 1872, and the top half opening 10 years later. One of the country’s finest covered markets, it had its own abbatoir.

Footage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s funeral takes the film into the First World War, and there’s a poignant glimpse of the Bradford Pals before they set off for the Front. Young men in suits and caps file into the Mechanic’s Institute recruiting office and, in uniform, march through the streets against a frenzy of patriotic fervour. Pals are filmed saying goodbye to families at Forster Square station in February, 1916. “Many of them would never see Bradford again,” says the narrator, as the camera casts its eye over photographs of the dead and missing in the Bradford Daily Telegraph.

The ugliness of war was felt back home, following the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, when Germans in Bradford fell victim to the public backlash. Women at Manningham Mills refused to work with Germans, and German people were banned from Bradford’s parks.

In Second World War footage we meet evacuees with gas mask boxes around their necks, and accompany crowds turning out for Churchill’s morale-boosting visit, when his speech urged Bradford to “go forward together.”

With charming footage of holidaymakers heading to Blackpool - 1,100 crammed onto a train - this film is a remarkable journey into Bradford at work, at war and at leisure.

* Bradford The Way We Were is available priced £15.50 plus £1.50 P&P from the Telegraph & Argus on (01274) 705275.

Call in to our Hall Ings front reception or post a cheque made payable to Newsquest, to: The way we were DVD, Telegraph & Argus, Hall Ings, Bradford, BD1 1JR.

Included with the DVD is bonus film The Way We Were in the 1950s, a nostalgic look at Fifties Britain.