We were treated to Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow cabinet, who delivered a presentation and answered questions for around 90 minutes. All in front of the nation’s media, with live TV and internet broadcasts. Naturally, security was tight, and access was limited. Only university staff and students, Labour Party members, and invited members of the media where permitted. This included heavyweight political correspondents such as ITV’s Robert Peston, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and Sky’s Adam Boulton.
I was unable to get a seat, so I had to watch from one of the balconies above with no view of the stage. Corbyn got a really warm reception, particularly as the majority of people there were university staff. The biggest cheers were in response to Labour’s policies regarding ending hospital car parking charges, renationalising the railways, and, predictably, ending university tuition fees.
From the university’s perspective, it was great to see a high profile event run so well. This was despite it having been planned at such short notice. But we have form here: seven years ago, then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to us to make a speech the day before the 2010 General Election. And the university’s first chancellor, back in 1966, was Labour prime minister Harold Wilson; this was something that Corbyn referenced in his speech.
I’m a Labour Party member, so I’ll be voting for Labour next month anyway. Brexit aside, I was very impressed with what Jeremy Corbyn promised us yesterday if elected. Sadly, that’s a big ‘if’; despite recent improvements, Labour are still trailing significantly in the polls. We’ll see what happens come June 9th, when the results will be clear.
All of the above is my own opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer.
Low Moor is technically a re-opening of a station that was closed in the 1960s, following the Beeching report. It used to be a junction station, with a branch line heading down the Spen Valley through Cleckheaton and Heckmondwyke. That branch line was closed, and is now the Spen Valley Greenway, a segregated footpath that I’ve walked a few times (but curiously never blogged about). Low Moor station has an exit onto the Greenway, improving access to it.
For a couple of years in the 1990s, the land once occupied by the old Low Moor station was used for Transperience, a public transport museum. I wrote about it a few years ago despite having never been; it closed due to a lack of visitors, and therefore money.
The new Low Moor station has been quite a long time coming; plans have existed for some time. Its construction has also taken far longer than planned. The local area was a major coalfield, and, during work to build a lift shaft, an uncapped mining shaft was found that didn’t exist on any plans. The station should have therefore opened in 2016, but, hey, better late than never.
The start of construction was also held up due to the need to get a standards derogation for the curved platforms. Modern stations have dead straight platforms, to minimise the gap between trains and the platform edge. Low Moor station is on a curve, and so there are a number of ‘Mind the Gap’ warnings around.
The new Low Moor station
So what did I find when I visited? Well, it’s very similar to most new stations that have opened of late. As you’d expect, it is (almost) fully wheelchair accessible; the only exception being the steps down to the Greenway. A ramp for cycles has been provided (but was fenced off) – this seems like a curious omission. Lifts provide access to the two platforms, which surprised me slightly. The station is unstaffed, so if the lifts break down, there’s no assistance for wheelchair users. I’m guessing large ramps would have added to the cost; the station already cost over £10million to build.
As mentioned, Low Moor station is unstaffed, so there’s no ticket office. There is a machine by the car park, however, which has around 100 spaces. When I visited today, there were around 20 cars parked up. Which isn’t a lot, but the station has been open less than a fortnight, and there are almost no road signs to it. I expect that, in time, it’ll be signposted from the nearby M62 as a park-and-ride facility for those travelling into Leeds and Bradford.
Services
Which brings me to the train services. There aren’t many of them.
After spending a lot of money on a new station, you might expect there to be a regular train service. But the majority of train services on the Calder Valley line whizz through Low Moor station without stopping. There’s a basic hourly service in each direction: one northbound to Bradford and thence onto Leeds, and one southbound to Halifax and Huddersfield. There’s no direct service to Manchester Victoria.
Grand Central, the open access operator which runs trains between Bradford and London King’s Cross, stop most of their trains at Low Moor, so there is a link to the capital. But these trains only run four times a day in each direction.
It’s a shame that Low Moor hasn’t got a great service, especially considering the money spent. Improvements should, however, come with time. The Calder Valley line is undergoing a multi-million pound upgrade this year, which should see more and faster trains. At present, only 4 trains per hour can use the line in each direction; the upgrade will add a fifth path and hopefully more. This should mean that more trains can stop at Low Moor without existing services having to slow down.
The poor service frequency was part of the reason why I made my visit to Low Moor by car, rather than by train. I’m hoping that getting there by train will be easier in the not too distant future.
Yesterday’s newspapers covered the results of a ‘quality of life’ survey that stated that Edinburgh is the best place to live in the UK, and Bradford is the worst. Whilst I’ll agree that Edinburgh is a wonderful (if expensive) city, there is no way that Bradford is the worst place in the UK. And I’m speaking as a former Bradford resident who still works there and travels to the city at least five days a week.
The survey came from a press release put out by uSwitch.com. uSwitch is not a thinktank, local authority or university, or indeed any kind of organisation involved in research. It’s actually a price comparison web site, designed to help you find cheaper deals on phone, internet and energy contracts. So clearly, this ‘survey’ is about getting publicity and press coverage, rather than a serious piece of research.
Bradford is apparently “let down by low disposable income, low employment, high rent and crowded schools”, according to the press release. There are issues with schools in Bradford – as someone who works in education, I’m very much aware of this. But I dispute the high rent claims. uSwitch claims that average rents are £92.60 per week, but a few minutes on Rightmove showed a wide range of properties for less than half of this.
Whilst disposable incomes may be low, so is the cost of living – food is cheap, as is public transport.
In 2007, Bradford was named Britain’s greenest city and is home to several large public parks, including the award-winning Lister Park, Horton Park, Peel Park and the new City Park in the city centre. You can get out into the countryside quite quickly, unlike in many other cities. And my employer, the University of Bradford, recently won a Green Flag award for its campus.
Hull also did poorly in the ‘survey’, coming second from bottom. This is despite it being named City of Culture 2017.
In essence though, is there really anything to be gained from highlighting the ‘worst’ cities in the UK? Sure, it gets a bit of publicity for the company releasing the survey. But it then leaves those cities and its employers and representatives with the job of mopping up the damage to their reputation. It’s rather mean of companies like uSwitch to publish these ‘surveys’, especially when they don’t seem to understand the implications for the cities named.
In any case, the ‘best’ or ‘worst’ city to live in depends on a lot of factors, some of which will be unique to each person. Given the choice between Bradford, and, say Bracknell in Berkshire, I’d happily choose Bradford. But there are also places like Sowerby Bridge, where I now live, that now meet my needs better than Bradford does. A survey based on a few generalised measurements isn’t actually all that helpful.
If you’re like me, then this may be the first time you’ve heard of a musical theatre adaptation of Herman Melville’s famous book. The musical version dates from the early 1990s – it had a brief run in London’s West End at the Piccadilly Theatre, but closed after a four month run due to poor reviews. Don’t let that put you off though.
Moby Dick! The Musical is essentially a meta-play – a play within a play. It follows the girls of St Godley’s School – faced with closure, they put on a performance of Moby Dick to raise money to save the school. Whilst the cast is predominantly female, the role of the headmistress/Captain Ahab is usually played by a male actor in drag.
Christine has been working on the show for months now and it’s been great to see it come together. There’s just a few more rehearsals before it opens on Thursday night, with further showings on Friday and Saturday.
You can buy tickets online – they’re £10 each, or £8 for concessions. If you’re local to Bradford, it would be great if you can come along and support the students who have worked so hard to put on this show. I hope I’ll see you there!
Last night, I went along to the opening night of the new Bradford Brewery. Once it’s fully up-and-running, it’ll be the first brewery in Bradford city centre since the last one closed in the 1950s.
Whilst the brewing equipment is still being assembled, the Bradford Brewery’s brewpub, The Brewfactory, opened yesterday. As well as various beers and ales from other local (and not so local) breweries, there is the first of the Bradford Brewery’s own beers available to purchase, called The Origin. It’s an IPA – smooth with a slightly spicy after-taste, although overall I found it a little bland. It’s being brewed at the Baildon Brewery for now until the on-site equipment is up and running, which should be within a couple of weeks.
The brewery is located in a small former factory building on the corner of Westgate and Rawson Road, behind the Oastler Centre, with the pub occupying most of the ground floor. As a factory, moisture meters were built there to measure moisture in wool (to discourage dampening the wool to increase its weight), and its industrial past is reflected in the decor. It’s a bit sparse at the moment, but then the place has only just opened after all.
North Parade
The Bradford Brewery is just around the corner from North Parade, home to Bradford’s independent quarter and an increasing number of bars. I wrote about the Record Café last year, which joined The Sparrow and Al’s Dime Bar on the same street. The Brewhouse is another bar due to open there shortly.
Good quality new bars are always welcome in Bradford and hopefully a sign that the trend for pub closures might be easing, at least in certain areas. The Brewfactory certainly has a great selection, with eight handpulls for cask beer, several more keg pumps and a variety of canned beers. It’s aiming towards the top end of the market – the only mainstream beer available on tap was Amstel with most of the rest coming from independent microbreweries.
Whilst The Brewfactory will be the home of the Bradford Brewery’s beers, the brewery has ambitious plans for production once its equipment is commissioned – with the aim to produce over 10,000 pints per week. So hopefully their beers will be widely available across the region, and maybe even further beyond. And conveniently, they’ve been able to start production (albeit offsite) just in time for next week’s Bradford Beer Festival in Saltaire.
I wish the team behind the Bradford Brewery the best of luck – their plans have been in the pipeline for a long time, and it’s great to see them finally coming to fruition. It was busy when we visited last night and I hope that it remains so.
Last night I went to a preview night at Bradford’s newest bar, The Record Café, on North Parade. Officially it opens tonight, and it will be a great new addition to Bradford’s new independent quarter.
The Record Café is three things. First and foremost it’s a bar, with four hand-pulled cask beers and six keg beers, along with a fridge full of bottled beer. Most of the beers are either British (Saltaire, Great Heck, Brewdog and Camden Town were present when I visited) or American, including the Anchor Steam Brewery’s Porter available in a keg – this is the first time I’ve seen their beers in anything other than a bottle in this country. There were also a small number of bottled continental beers, and an eclectic selection of gin that eschews the more common brands. No mass-produced mainstream lager here.
It’s also a delicatessen, offering platters of ham and cured meats – there were plenty of samples available at the preview, and it was good quality stuff. In this sense, by offering beer and charcuterie it’s a bit like Friends of Ham in Leeds, but less hipster-y.
Where it differs is the third thing, and the clue is in the name – as well as being a bar, it’s also a record shop. There’s an upstairs mezzanine where you can browse and buy records on vinyl. This wasn’t quite ready with limited stock and some decorating to do, but the emphasis will be on new music, rather than it being an exchange for old records.
It’s located just opposite The Sparrow, which was Bradford’s first ‘bier café’ – that opened in 2011, just as craft beer started becoming popular in the UK. That’s still going strong, and joins Al’s Dime Bar further along North Parade, in an area becoming known for bars serving good beer. Next year, the Bradford Brewery opens around the corner, along with another new bar called The Beerhouse and an independent cinema which will have a bar as well.
For once, it’s becoming an exciting time to be in Bradford, and I hope these bars will do something to improve Bradford’s nightlife. In recent years people have travelled from Bradford to Leeds, Halifax and Huddersfield for nights out and I hope some of those will choose to stay in the city in future.
The Playhouse has had something a troubled history. I first became aware of it as The Priestley Theatre, which had recently re-opened following a fire and subsequent extensive refurbishment. That closed down and a few years later was reborn as the Bradford Playhouse, but that too failed financially.
More recently a company called Takeover Events & Theatre Ltd, trading as The New Bradford Playhouse, has been running the theatre as a going concern, as tenants. However, the building’s owner has gone into liquidation, and so the theatre will be sold at auction next month. And there’s a real risk that whoever buys it will want to convert the building into something else.
This would be a terrible shame as the theatre still has many of its original features despite the fire damage. It’s Bradford’s only medium sized theatre, seating 290 people, and also houses a small studio space. I’ve been privileged to be able to help out with some of the shows there, such as Little Shop of Horrors which Christine performed in earlier this year. The operating team is well-connected and has been able to draw upon a lot of goodwill to get the theatre to where it is now, and it would be a huge shame if their hard work came to nothing. Especially as they have some ambitious plans to re-invigorate the theatre, with a new entrance, wheelchair access and a proper café or restaurant on site, subject to funding.
If Takeover Events can buy the theatre outright at the auction, then I’m sure it will have a bright future – I personally trust them to be able to turn it around and break the vicious cycle that has seen it closed down so many times in the past. But my worry is that it will end up being sold to someone else who will turn it into flats or offices, and an important part of Bradford’s cultural heritage will be gone for good.
So, here’s what you can do to help. If you can spare some money, please contribute to the Indiegogo campaign. They need £125,000 in less than three weeks, to be able to buy the building at auction. Also, simply buying tickets and going along to their shows will help.
If you have no money to spare, then please sign this petition to Bradford Council, asking them to refuse planning permission to anyone wanting to change the use of the building. That way, if another company buys it, there is a reduced risk of it being converted into anything other than a theatre. And if you’re local to Bradford, get in touch with the people running the theatre to see if you can volunteer any of your time to cut down on their running costs in the meantime.
With the new Westfield shopping centre opening around the corner from the Playhouse in less than two years’ time, the theatre could have a really bright and sustainable future for the first time in many years. So it’s critical that the theatre is saved. It will be such a massive shame if it isn’t.
This coming Thursday, my wife Christine will be featuring in an amateur production of Little Shop of Horrors, along with other students from the University of Bradford where I work. It’s on at The New Bradford Playhouse and runs until Saturday.
As well as playing a character in the show, Christine has been helping out for a number of weeks now, and I also spent much of the weekend helping and/or hindering the technical team as they set up in the theatre. It promises to be a good show, and the puppets they’re using look really good.
So, if you’re available on Thursday, Friday or Saturday nights this week, we’d both very much appreciate it if you were able to come along. Tickets can be purchased online here.
Yesterday Christine and I visited the Doctor Who and Me exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford. The exhibition honours Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary, which was in November last year. We’d been meaning to go for a while, and having realised that this is the final week that the exhibition is running we squeezed a visit in yesterday. It was also our first visit since the museum was saved from closure last year.
The exhibition is less about the show itself, and more about the relationship between the show and its fans. There are many quotes from fans, stating what the show means to them, and various objects that people have made or collected which are on display. In fact, apart from one Dalek replica, pictured above, all of the items on show have been donated by fans and are not from the museum’s own collection.
There are the usual official action figures, games, posters, annuals and video cases there, but there are also a great many items made by Whovians themselves. Some of these are drawings and paintings, knitted monsters, or hand-made TARDISes. And they all span the fifty years that Doctor Who has been on air.
It’s not a big exhibition and you can see everything within the half hour. Sadly it finishes on Sunday, so you’ll need to get there quickly if you want to see it. Like the rest of the museum, entry is free, but donations are welcome.
I’ve put some photos from my visit on Flickr. They’re all taken on my iPhone – although I did bring my Canon DSLR with me, I didn’t realise until I got there that the battery was flat.
I expect the people of Bradford breathed a sigh of relief when workmen finally returned to the site of Westfield Bradford earlier this month. This will see a new Westfield shopping centre being built, which will be the only one in the north of England (we’ll place Derby in the Midlands).
The shopping centre is due to open in time for Christmas 2015, by which point it will have been almost 12 years in the making. Demolition of the existing buildings on the site started in 2004, and was done by 2006. There followed many months where the remaining rubble was piled up and no activity, but around 2007 preparatory works began to dig a large hole for the foundations.
But after the foundations were constructed, nothing. The credit crunch, and then the recession, put paid to any further progress. The whole project was effectively mothballed. The situation was so bad that in 2010, the local council, with a financial contribution from Westfield, turned part of the park into a ‘temporary urban garden’ as there was no prospect of work starting any time soon.
All this time, the rest of Bradford’s city centre suffered. The recession didn’t help, taking with it a number of shops, but the range and quality of shops in Bradford has declined over the past 10 years. There are a large number of vacant units, and many of those that are occupied are by pop-up shops on short-term lets. There’s also been an explosion of pawnbrokers, payday loan shops and betting shops.
Last year, Trinity Leeds opened in Leeds. Though it too was mothballed for some time during its construction, it’s now open and successful, and has no doubt made Leeds an even more compelling retail destination than Bradford.
Whilst I really hope the opening of Westfield Bradford will be a turning point, and help Bradford get back on its feet, I can’t help but feel that it’s perhaps too late. What if the decline of Bradford’s city centre is actually terminal?
I’m also concerned that Westfield will kill off other parts of the city. Bradford’s existing shopping centre, the Kirkgate Centre, has generally coped well over the years, but has lost a couple of major tenants as some of the larger chain stores went under. Now it too has more than its fair share of poorer quality stores, including a recently extended Poundland. It’s also home to River Island and WHSmith, two confirmed tenants of the new Westfield centre. Marks and Spencer is opposite the Kirkgate Centre and will be an ‘anchor’ tenant in Westfield.
Still, overall I hope that Westdfield is a success. It’s a shame that a once prosperous city like Bradford has fallen so far. Not only has it dropped behind Leeds, but the smaller nearby towns of Halifax and Huddersfield, both of which have (in my opinion) a better range of shops.
