Yorkshire Music: News and Updates

During a trip to Bradford city centre today I stopped in at a friend's workplace, the Tourist Information Centre in Centenary Square. They're running an exhibition there at the moment that's trying to give out the message to tourists that Bradford has so much to offer it can't all be taken in in a single day, encouraging them to spend more of their time and money in the region.




As part of the exhibition, there is a small cinema screen that has four videos available to view about Bradford and the surrounding area: it's history and culture. I've got to admit that, even as a born and bred Bradfordian, I was blown away by most of what I saw - it was really the first time I've watched anything on the screen that's shown this city, nestled in the 'grim' North of England, in a properly positive light. It reminded me of how important Bradford once was - truly a city on the global map, producing goods of all kinds for a worldwide market. The films also touched on the many groups of people from different geographic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds that this region has welcomed over it's history, and it attempted to explain, albeit briefly, the reasons for the ever changing population here.

Living in Bradford, I get used to hearing people speaking about the place as a run-down, dirty and dangerous city that's not worth shopping in, let alone visiting for any other recreational reason. I think the films currently showing at the Tourist Information Centre, though, would perhaps convince some of the population who hold this view that Bradford is actually a truly magnificent city with a wealth of history and a bright, positive and wonderfully multi-cultural future, if only we Bradfordians will embrace it and see it through.

One of the most pleasing aspect of the films was Joolz Denby's contribution : a poem simply titled Bradford. It is certainly worth a read so I am going to republish it here (if you want to find out more about Joolz or read more of her work you can visit her website by clicking here) :


The wind blows hard today, across the city
lying crouched in its deep-sided valley.
The air is laced with the smell of clean stone
and the dusty purple heather that drapes
across the far horizon like a dropped scarf.
If I stop and listen I can almost hear,
faintly, like the faded thread of a song from an older age,
the cries of foxes that dance
in the moorland coverts and the blurred whirring
of kestrels riding the soaring thermals.

I walk over the crest of the hill and start down into Town,
past the intricate raggle of little shops that
embroider the road side and spill their
treasures onto to the pavements.
All the world is here, laid out in patchworks
of drenched and brilliant colour;
dazzling pyramids of oranges from Morocco
like clotted sun, topiary broccoli, dark
green flounced cabbages and rich spinach,
feathery plumes of coriander and
gleaming scarlet apples bursting with temptation.
We want for nothing - watermelon, tender papaya,
smooth, languorous mangoes and luminous persimmons;
sometimes there are figs, their smart suede skins
the colour of bruises hiding gritty red flesh
so sweet, it tastes like the perfumed breath of angels.
I eat them with good Greek bread,
baked by serious Ukrainian men, craftsmen,
and I smile, thinking, in this town, we can eat like
princes for a pauper’s fee.

I fill my bag with fruit and wander on,
window-shopping, my eye caught by the fabric shops
that burst with rolls and bolts of lace, and lamé
metallic and dangerous as deep water,
with satin, crepe and polyester
crusted with sequins, bullion and tiny mirrors,
foil stamped, hologrammed and photo-printed,
fabric patterned in every possible way;
striped and checked, hazy with impossible flowers,
stark with calligraphic motifs repeating and repeating
unknown phrases in an unknown tongue.

Brilliant as some dead caliph’s treasure
the windows blaze with textile gems;
sapphire and emerald; ruby, heavy turquoise
and white that glimmers with the blue sheen of
Chomolungma’s distant snows.
One window is all pinks; from summer’s dusky rose
through bubblegum, Shocking to a
shell pink so faint it’s hardly breathing.
And best of all, so beautiful it makes me sigh,
a half unrolled length of pure, gleaming
silk that fades from blood red to the pink
of a desert sunset and back again.

But I walk on, down into the valley and the
secret stone puzzle that’s the City.
Above me far overhead, wind-driven clouds unfurl
like great tattered banners, whipping through the blue
like flying prayers; they twist and roil like a time-lapse film,
cinematic, impossible and always with us in
this place so dominated by vast, untameable skies.

Stark against the huge backdrop of the clouds stand
the monumental sandstone buildings,
the Wool Barons proud and unflinching legacy,
palaces of trade that couldn’t be built now,
will never be built again by modern hands
no longer trained to patience and the skills
that turned the primeval bones of earth into carvings
as dense and intricate as nature herself.

Glancing up I see faces, plants and creatures made from stone
decorating every cornice, edge and buttress;
petrified sailing ships in full rig and portraits of
adamantine queens in medallions set on the
slab-sides of crumbling, forgotten towers.
Camels stride past pyramids cut out of stone by
men who would never see such things for themselves.
In the hundred niches that pock the great cliff of city hall
blind saints and craggy kings gaze into nothing
bound by masonry ropes and sandstone swags of ivy.
On other walls, griffins perch on acanthus twists
and arabesques, curlicues and cutwork
so deep you can stick your fingers in it
foam, twine and snake up spires that
reach greedily for the golden light that daily
turns their crushed crystals to living amber
for a few brief moments of glory . . .

I go to the Wool Exchange, that Temple to
the trade that made the city famous;
high up under the canopy of its arching,
ribbed roof that vaults to a ridge
like a mediaeval galleon upturned,
and beached on a city street,
painted wooden archangels crowned in antique gold pray
with knotted, steepled hands.
Once they were mute witnesses to the swirl and play of money
on the trading floor beneath them,
now the city seraphim watch ordinary people
buying books and drinking coffee;
but they don’t mind - they stretch their stiff, gilded wings
over everyone, young and old, and we’re all in their charge.

And I sit down for a minute, amongst the books
and think of the town, stretching out and away
from here; dark and bright, beautiful and ugly,
the high-sided wind-scoured canyons of the deserted mills
telling their silent stories of what has been and what will be;
the deaths, the births, the fighting and the love,
all the humanity of it, gathered from every place in the world,
and all of us, everything, under the infinite night-sky now,
a silver twist of crescent moon fragile as a girl’s first earring
visible even over the streetlights sodium glare,
and I think - this is where we live, in this stone maze,
in this northern city, under the terrible stars, and we belong.

- Copyright for this poem is owned by Joolz Denby, 2002