Bradford City of Culture 2025 and the responsibility of enhancing a cultural ecosystem
Around a month ago, I popped up to Bradford with a mate Sophie who lives nearby. Like a true creative placemaking cliché, I wanted to dive into some of the programming commissioned through Bradford’s City of Culture 2025 designation. Bradford was a place I barely knew, and I was itching to soak it all in and discover some truly special culture.
On our first night, we caught Kailey, a vivid comedy-drama written by Kerry Wright and performed at the new Loading Bay. This disused storage depot on Duke Street has been brilliantly transformed into a temporary multi-art cultural hub, a testament to sheer pluck and ingenuity. It perfectly embodies the tangible energy buzzing throughout Bradford and its surrounding region, a great reminder that with a bit of creativity, culture can find a home anywhere.
Set in Bradford, Kailey tells the story of an 18-year-old lead character on the cusp of adulthood, grappling with the reality of having a parent in prison. It delicately captures that period where you're veering between brash self-actualisation and the puzzle of leaving childhood behind. Kailey is dynamic, punchy, witty, and tender. Written by a Bradford-based playwright, workshopped nearby, and informed by her lived experience, the play’s performance at Loading Bay felt inevitable and organic: the right piece of theatre, at the right time, and importantly, in the right place. The energetic audience that night clearly agreed, lapping up local references and sharing glimmers of recognition. People were entertained and proud.
Visiting We Will Sing in Salt Mills, a Bradford City of Culture 2025 commission
The next day, we ventured up to Saltaire to see more. Potent and moving, We Will Sing fills three cavernous spaces on the top floor of Salt Mills and is the latest gobsmacking installation from visionary American visual artist Ann Hamilton. Commissioned through the City of Culture program and curated by June Hill and Jennifer Hallam, it's inspired by the area’s extraordinary textile heritage. It instantly became my favorite installation of 2025.
Responding to the question “what does the future need to hear?”, We Will Sing spans artforms and materials, incorporating songs co-written and sung by Bradford’s communities, large textile hangings, draped cloaks and imposing stones, it says something profound about place, history and memory. The installation is squarely inspired by its stunning space: circling loudhailers blaring snippets of folk song play with echo and reverberation, giant swathes of fabric unspooling from the ceiling cut new perspectives, and a monumental large-scale tapestry featuring devotional good luck charms bless the communal experience. It’s an immersive treat to wander through and witness Hamilton’s unfurling excitement about the place she has found herself within: snippets of uncovered knowledge are breathlessly laid out in a series of large-format newspapers hung throughout the space. Ali Lycett’s illuminating and tender short documentary Hands of We Will Sing is a must-watch, an illuminating companion piece that speaks more to Hamilton’s practice and her fruitful collaboration with a network of Bradfordians, from wool merchants and weavers to community groups and schoolchildren. We Will Sing simply couldn’t exist anywhere else. The place has informed the work, Bradford’s communities are the collaborators—it is uniquely made for here and now.
Thinking about both cultural experiences, I left Bradford mulling over the creative flows and energies that make a large-scale placemaking intervention like City of Culture so compelling. Yes, it’s crucially important that resident creatives—professional and not—are given the opportunity, resources, and attention to create and nurture work. But that’s not all that needs to happen. Becoming a City of Culture includes a responsibility to signpost inwards, reaching further afield to invite artists to explore a fertile but unfamiliar creative playground. In that way, everything gets tumbled together: local people and guests practising creativity, being inspired by it, learning from it, connecting through it.
Bradford’s year as City of Culture isn’t just a festival; it’s an opportunity to stimulate a translocational, rooted and expansive ecosystem of cultural production. It’s simultaneously a platform and an invitation, a welcome and an infrastructure.
Based on what we got to see, Bradford is absolutely nailing it and their success is a delight to witness. If you haven’t had the chance yet, take my advice and get on the train to experience it yourself! Learn more about upcoming events here.