Roger Mosey: I'm proud my home city of Bradford wants to make a Great Exhibition of itself

There were comparatively recent times when that might have been the only case that worked, but the bid for the Great Exhibition of the North offers something a lot more exciting. There’s a chance to argue that this is a city on the way back up: that it has, by its own efforts, stopped the spiral of decline.

Nowhere in the North is more deserving of recognition for pulling itself back from the brink – and creating a vision of what the city of the future might look like.

But it’s still the case that Bradford needs help to finish the job, and it merits a time in the spotlight to make outsiders reappraise their dull old clichéd views of the place.

I have lived in eight locations in England. It’s 35 years since I left Bradford, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that there was a time in the summer of 2012 – as the BBC’s director of the Olympics – when I thought London was the greatest city in the world.

But for all my time in the South, and now in Cambridge in the East, I’m honoured to call myself a northerner; and Bradford will always be special, the place that started me off on my journey and the place that I still think of as home.

The Bradford of my early childhood was smoke-ridden and grimy: a pioneering industrial city which had been the wool capital of the world and now wasn’t. It still had the glories of its Victorian architecture, its hills and valleys and its connections with the beauty of Yorkshire – but it was losing its confidence and facing tough times. We would sometimes make defensive jokes about where we came from: “Bradford. Somebody has to.”

In recent decades, things have never been easy for Bradford. There was the gut-wrenching horror of the fire tragedy at Valley Parade; there were the riots at a time when community tensions were at their height; and the prolonged crisis in the local economy made it hard for people to take pride in their city. It felt like only Bradford could demolish a shopping complex to build a new one and then have the plan collapse so that the centre of the city became notorious for its giant hole in the ground.

But it was at that time that I spotted once again what makes the city work. Bradfordians treated the whole episode with humour and with their characteristic resilience – “we’ll get it sorted”. I saw the activities of the council, too: never giving up with the developers and pressing ahead with ambitious ideas for the City Park. The transformation of the city centre is remarkable, not least because it could have all gone the other way: there could have been devastating and permanent decline.

Bradford has too often been ignored by the national politicians, who seem to think that Manchester equals the Northern Powerhouse or that all roads and railways should lead to Leeds.

It is a flaw in our strategic thinking that big cities next to even bigger cities risk losing out, despite having the human resources and enterprise to make a tremendous contribution to the country.

So Bradford has pulled itself up by its bootstraps. It has performed the tough job of making a highly diverse community work together. It would be foolish to pretend that tensions don’t still exist, but prosperity would be the greatest single contribution to easing those.

So, of course, would higher educational attainment – and I was enormously impressed by the young people I met at a University of Bradford graduation ceremony who have made the system work for them. They were an exemplar of what a talented, multiracial population looks like, and it was an emotional moment to see proud families from all over the world gathered to celebrate success that has been burnished in Bradford.

If you add in a little Dynamo and Zayn Malik, the city has produced individuals who illuminate many fields of activity with their creativity, and it has shown how a Victorian city can start to transform itself in the 21st century. It has given exiles like me who go back there the anticipation that everything might be possible if the city, the county and the region are given the kind of support they deserve.

That’s why I so strongly support Bradford’s bid to host the Great Exhibition. It has the history; it has the grit that has brought it back from the brink; and it has the “can do” attitude that will make this enterprise a success. Some of the ideas are, quite simply, inspirational.

My home city is about its location and its buildings but most of all about its people and the spirit that unites us as Bradfordians. It’s time to write the next chapter in the story of this great city.

Roger Mosey is Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and a former BBC executive.