Bradford 2025: 'Why we're sharing the stories of city's last generation of millworkers'

For the past two years, that period has been the focus of a heritage project by Shipley-based arts organisation 509 Arts. Lost Mills and Ghost Mansions records what life was like in Bradford’s textile industry from 1970 onwards, telling stories of lifelong friendships, romance, accidents, arguments, industrial disputes and everything in between.

Memories of those times were at risk of being forgotten, says Alan Dix, artistic director, so the project was a way to document those stories for generations to come. An online learning zone already contains more than 80 hours of recordings but Alan and his team were keen to find new ways of replaying those to an audience – and so the idea for Unspun Stories was born.

Running later this week in Loading Bay, the new pop-up arts venue for Bradford 2025, it is an immersive digital portrayal of Bradford’s late 20th century textile heritage, created by 509 Arts and the Colour Foundry. The 20-minute installation, which runs continuously on a loop throughout the day, blends archive film footage, audio recordings, projections and soundscapes with recorded interviews from those who worked in the mills during the ’70s, ’80s and ‘90s.

Nicolas Lewis is one third of the Colour Foundry, a mixed media art collective featuring a composer and musician (him), visual artist Fabric Lenny and projectionist Urban Projections. They were faced with the “beautiful problem” of selecting stories to feature in the piece, wanting to explore that textile history through a contemporary lens, with striking visuals and vibrant sounds and music.

“Our piece doesn't tell the stories in a lot of detail. It's more of an artistic reaction and an artistic representation of them,” says Nicolas. “But because it is a compelling piece, I would hope that people get interested and get their curiosity sparked. Hearing those voices of people describe their jobs and what they used to do and how they used to feel about working in these mills is a big thing and something that lots of people don't get a chance to hear.”

“We just had the best time talking to people about those times," Alan says. “The thing that we really discovered more than anything else was people absolutely loved working in the mills. And that quite surprised me really because the story you quite often get is it was hard and it was dirty and filthy work and we got low wages. And of course, all of that was true as well.”

There used to be over 350 working mills in Bradford, those behind the Lost Mills project say, and even in the 1970s the city was a global textile producer. But in the last 50 years most of the mills have closed. Some have been demolished, and others have burnt down. Some now stand derelict and abandoned, whilst others have been repurposed, finding new life as factories, offices and city apartments.

Thousands of people worked in the industry, taking on roles from designers and salespeople, to weavers, washers, menders and spinners. Today, only around 20 mills remain in business, 509 Arts say, and “Bradford’s great textile buildings and the people who worked in them are slowly disappearing”.

“We wanted to capture that last generation of millworkers for all sorts of reasons,” Alan says. “One was partly because they were very different from previous generations. They were much more diverse. There were people from all over the world working in the mills particularly from South Asia – Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

"But also because we wanted young people in particular to learn about mill life in a different context other than a Victorian clogs and shawls and big frocks kind of way. We wanted to make it more contemporary. We wanted to talk about Ford Cortinas and flares and when the world was orange, and the music of those times.

"I came to live in Bradford in 1967 and there were mills everywhere. The textile trade dominated Bradford but it was still in the world of Abba, and Bollywood, and all sorts of things. So we wanted to reflect those times.”

The majority of the millworkers they interviewed felt passionately about the industry, Alan explains. “Almost everybody we spoke to was over the age of 60 – most of them were over 70 – and they often said that their children, and particularly their grandchildren, didn't really understood what they did and what the textile industry meant for them.”

Bradford 2025 is an opportunity to showcase that, as part of the year-long programme celebrating the city’s culture and heritage. “(Unspun Stories) is a chance to tell the story of Bradford's textile industry, which still to this very day we live with, in a different, exciting and imaginative way. We live with it in our buildings and in the generations that have worked in the mills and the stories they've got. It’s something we don't ever want to be forgotten.”

- Unspun Stories runs from March 26 to 30 at Loading Bay in Bradford. An online version will be available afterwards.