The UK City of Culture initiative was founded in 2009, a year after Liverpool — like Bradford, often unfairly derided by outsiders — benefitted from being European Capital of Culture, and was intended to bring investment and tourism, as well as an increased sense of civic pride, to cities who successfully bid for it, once every four years. 

Winning the award in 2022, Bradford is the fourth host, after Derry, Kingston upon Hull, and Coventry, getting funding to improve its arts facilities and infrastructure, and staging a series of events throughout the year. Many of these are in the city’s flagship venues, notably the National Science and Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television), which underwent extensive renovation before reopening for the celebrations, but plenty will take place in the Loading Bay — a pop-up venue in a disused storage depot near the heart of Bradford’s city centre.

A boom city during the Victorian period thanks to its wool trade, Bradford was touted as ‘the City of the Future’ after World War II, but ambitious plans to reshape its centre around linking its two train stations were never realised, with developers giving precedence to ring roads. After years of post-industrial decline — symbolised by the fire at Bradford City’s dilapidated Valley Parade stadium in May 1985 that killed 56 football fans, and later the anti-BNP, anti-police riots of 2001 — plans for a Westfield shopping mall to rejuvenate the centre fell through, leaving a gaping hole at the city’s core for nearly a decade, a ludicrously on-the-nose metaphor for the impact of the financial crisis and austerity. Westfield eventually realised their plans in 2015, shortly after the area around the City Hall became Centenary Square and City Park, with two galleries, Bradford 1 (art) and Impressions (photography) forming part of the development.

The National Science and Media Museum, opposite Centenary Square, has led with a striking celebration of Bradford’s most famous artist, Davd Hockney. 

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Hockney’s ‘joiner’ photographs and films, for which he took multiple shots of a subject and collaged them into a recognisable image that represented a subjective, fragmented perspective. In July 1985, Hockney made a ‘joiner’ portrait of the museum and its surroundings. It makes the still elements — the building and the nearby statue of Queen Victoria — strange, as the images line up correctly but the joins emphasise that these are human constructions rather than natural parts of the landscape. People and vehicles gain a sense of movement, with parts of them split across several photographs: Hockney has advanced this principle ever since, culminating in the Four Seasons series of nine-screen installations made in Woldgate Woods in East Yorkshire in 2010-11. Hockney’s team fitted nine cameras, operated by remote control, to a car, choosing where to focus each, and how to fit the individual shots together. The results, presented on four walls with the audience in the centre, are captivating, as the format invites viewers to shift from the studium (whole) to the punctum (specific details), as Roland Barthes put it in Camera Lucida.

Impressions Gallery opened the year with an exhibition called Nationhood: Memory and Hope, featuring 22 works by Ethiopian artist Aïda Muluneh, shot in Bradford, Belfast, Cardiff, and Glasgow, and ‘seven rising stars in UK photography’. Artistically, Muluneh’s works are a real highlight. The contrast between the bright primary colours, drawn from the Christian Orthodox religion brought to Ethiopia by colonialists, in her costumes and make-up and the dull brick and stone locations immediately raises the possibility of a productive meeting between cultures, exhibited in a city that David Cameron notoriously criticised for its apparent racial segregation. 

The moments where Muluneh engages with Glasgow’s trade union history, as well as its role in the Empire, are especially effective. The recurrence of the female figures in robes and turbans creates genuine intrigue: why do they dress in such ceremonial fashion, and what does their make-up mean? How much of a narrative is Muluneh building, and how should we read it — especially when it’s placed alongside more conventional photographs showing the diversity of the people of Glasgow and Bradford?

In Roz Doherty’s images of The Bradfordians (2024), we learn that Bradford is one of Europe’s youngest cities, with twenty-nine percent of its population under twenty. Her subjects, of various ages and races, give interviews about their home, where their frustration at its perception by outsiders comes up repeatedly. A sign of how things can shift lies in Bradford 2025’s celebration of playwright Andrea Dunbar — the daughter of textile workers whose youthful plays about working-class life and racism set in the Buttershaw estate, The Arbor (1980) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) made her a sensation before her death in 1990, aged 29. Alan Clarke’s 1987 film adaptation of the latter, in particular, caused disquiet with its negative portrayal of the area (even though, to Dunbar’s annoyance, other writers were recruited to give it a happier ending), but now, Dunbar is widely celebrated in Bradford.

Sadly, I missed the readings of Dunbar’s works at St George’s Hall, but did catch a show at the Loading Bay — a riotously funny performance by RuPaul’s Drag Race star Ginger Johnson, which felt like it was drawing together the high glam of twenty-first-century drag shows, the knowing tawdriness of older British drag acts, and the raucousness of working men’s club comedy. The support act, British Asian drag queen Lady Bushra, who grew up in Bradford, spent some time mocking her audience for being obviously more Caucasian than the city’s demographic, reeling off other towns from which spectators might have travelled. 

Talking about her move to the US and her feelings about her home, Johnson pointed to a city in flux, as national and global movements against racial, sexual. and gender diversity advance at a terrifying pace. In doing so, she offered a glimpse of how culture might bring Bradford’s people together, helping them to hold the line against those who seek to divide them, and redefine the image of the city.