Nick Ahad: Careful what you wish for Bradford or the city could become one giant shopping centre

With a play to write, a TV project and a few other projects to juggle, I’m trying to get ahead of myself, writing my Yorkshire Post pieces as far in advance as possible. So apologies in case an administrative error means you end up reading something meant for a future edition of Culture...

So here we are in 2025, the year I thought we might finally all get hoverboards. February now, still no sign. I’m pinning all my hopes on next year. Yes, 2026 is bound to be the year we all get hoverboards. We live in hope. Speaking of optimism, good news out of Bradford this week. The last of the city’s remaining monuments built with money from the city’s glorious industrial past has been razed to the ground to make way for a boutique shopping centre.

The Wool Exchange, which once housed a quaint old thing called a ‘bookshop’, has finally gone and with it, the last vestige of culture in the city. The branch of Waterstones (I still say losing the apostrophe began the inevitable slide into extinction) which once sat inside the 1864-built Wool Exchange, is no more. A bookshop (really kids, we used to have them) inside what was the commercial heart of one of Europe’s richest cities: it was the perfect symbol of how art and commerce can co-exist and how if you build a city without culture, you’re creating an edifice without a heart.

How I wish the folk at the National Media Museum had believed that. Here we, are, just a decade on from the decision to allow 400,000 objects from the Royal Photographic Society to be transferred from Bradford to London and Bradford is a cultural wasteland. How different things could have been. Once the collection left, it was a final nail in the coffin. Bradfordians, the argument went, couldn’t care less about culture – how could they? If they were happy to let such cultural vandalism happen right under their noses, what further proof was needed?

Bradfordians spent years arguing that all they really wanted was a shopping centre and in 2015, a decade ago, they got it. They flocked to it. All ‘they’ want is to shop. It’s why the former Odeon is now a shopping centre, the Alhambra a Wetherspoon’s (they kept the apostrophe, just saying) and the Media Museum a shopping centre. Leeds, went the argument ten years ago, reinvigorated itself by becoming the ‘Knightsbridge of the North’. Why shouldn’t Bradford rise like a phoenix, with several shopping bags in its beak? So here we have it, 2025 and all culture has been eridacted from Bradford. Bravo, city leaders. Such vision. Must dash, going shopping, then off to see a new exhibition in one of the dozen galleries in Leeds. Canny Loiners.