Optimists’ view that positive thinking can transform a city’s image of itself

It’s the middle of the day in a hotel conference room in the centre of Bradford.

We’re a stone’s throw away from Centenary Square, the hole in the middle of the city which a misanthropic poet might imagine is the perfect analogy for Bradford. Empty, soulless, bereft of beauty.

Around the corner is the Broadways site of the Westfield shopping centre, where Bradfordians were once promised they would be able to shop to their hearts’ content. It has been turned into a garden, having lain empty since the developers pulled out of the project, at enormous cost to the council.

You might expect, with good reason, that the meeting being held at the Midland Hotel, with 200 Bradfordians in attendance, is going to be a blood letting. A chance for all and sundry to air their woes about this once proud wool town which has fallen on harder times than a cast of Dickensian characters.

Yet there is something unexpected in the air of this meeting, and it is a valuable currency in a much maligned city like Bradford: it is a sense of optimism.

“We’re going to stand up for Bradford. We’re going to start telling people what’s great about the city. It’s time for us to tell people why it’s okay to be proud to be a Bradfordian,” says Saleem Kader.“It starts with us and it starts today.”

Were Kader a politician, one suspects, he would be barracked and heckled. Were he standing out in Centenary Square, he might want locking up. He is neither of these, but one of Bradford’s many success stories.

What is more, he’s not alone. The meeting, held to mark the official launch of Positive Bradford, has attracted people in their droves because they all have something positive to say about the city and something to add to the meeting.

Kader, who is managing director of Bombay Stores, one of Bradford’s biggest businesses, which sells Asian fashion and fabrics around the world, later told me: “Everyone here today is a busy person, we have business people, the divisional commander of police, people who run arts organisations in the city. The fact that they have taken time out of their day, in the middle of the working week, to come to the launch of Positive Bradford speaks volumes about the passion we have here in the city. We want to harness that passion and use it to benefit everyone involved with Positive Bradford.”

Which is all well and good. But these are difficult times and passion can only take you so far, surely?

Adopted Bradfordian Darren Kelly runs a communication company based in Leeds. He grew up in Dublin and moved to Bradford in 1999.

“When I got here I was astounded by the beauty. We’re so close to Brontë country, the city has the most marvellous architecture and we just don’t seem to shout about it,” says Kelly. “Fortunately the people behind Positive Bradford are the sort of people that make things happen. What will stop this from being meaningless are the people behind it.

“It’s why I gave up my time for free to come here today and help officially launch the project, because I saw in those people the fact that they want to make it happen. When you set off to do something first you’re ridiculed, then questioned and then glorified.”

Positive Bradford began last year when Kader was invited to be part of a Dragons’ Den-style panel at a school. He was joined by John Tague, MD of Seabrook Group and Jane Vincent, MD of Bradford-based recruitment company Candelisa, who also founded Horizon Recruitment in the city, which was turning over £28m before she sold it last year.

Coincidentally the morning they gathered for the Dragons’ Den event, the national press were running a story that Bradford was the UK’s least desirable place to visit. The news story provided the catalyst for Positive Bradford with Kader, Vincent and Teague using their considerable skills and weighty contacts books to get people together to do something about the image of the city.

After initial meetings, the group worked with their contacts to pull together the 200 plus people who attended the launch event.

Vincent says: “What stops this from being a lot of people talking will be action. Just by bringing together in that one room community groups and businesses and individuals who have made a success in Bradford we are creating networks and contacts. Nothing like this has been attempted in the city before, where people from Morrisons can sit around a table with school groups and say, ‘How can we work together, what can we do together that will improve the image of Bradford?’ It will start in clusters and get bigger and bigger.”

What prevents this from being just rhetoric has already been demonstrated. This is Chemistry is a Bradford-based design agency which dedicated the time of its staff, free of charge, to develop a logo for the Positive Bradford scheme, involving pupils from Tong School in the creative process.

Another Bradford design company, Inprint and Design produced banners and posters for the event – again free of charge – and a website is being constructed and will be run by This is Chemistry entirely without cost to Positive Bradford.

Vincent says: “This is the point. It’s not about me and Saleem standing on a stage and telling people what we think they should do. When you have more than 200 people, all with their own skills and contacts and networks coming together like this, and all with the aim of making Bradford a more positive place, then that is how this will become a success.”

The early plans are to have a day of celebration, in Centenary Square, on September 28 this year, but the behind the scenes work began at last week’s meeting.

At the launch event the energy in the room is impressive. Only one person speaks up with something negative to say, his gripe is the way the media portrays his home city. The lone dissenting voice is out of place in this gathering where everyone is determined to concentrate on the future. That no one is here for the free coffee and biscuits is re-affirmed when the main meeting breaks into several steering groups.

Positive Bradford will be made up of a number of smaller groups which will deal with a specific area. Small and medium-sized enterprises, large organisations, the arts, marketing and media, higher secondary and primary education, and community groups all have their own steering groups. Around the Midland Hotel, which has also donated the space for free, the groups meet.

Vincent sits in the foyer of the hotel and streams of people come up to congratulate her for doing something, finally, to make Bradford a more positive place.

The key, everyone involved in Positive Bradford agrees, is to get the city believing in itself.

Vincent says: “John Teague, who runs Seabrooks, is originally from Liverpool and that is a city that used to suffer from the same image problems. The thing that you always find, however, is that Scousers are all really proud to be from Liverpool.

“They were named City of Culture, but I think a badge like that comes from inside the city, from people being proud and passionate first. You don’t do that with a clever marketing ploy and it doesn’t come from the council, it comes from the people of the city taking pride in where they live.”

With all this energy it seems there may finally be something positive to say about Bradford.