My abiding Bradford memory is of the aftermath of the terrible fire at the Valley Parade football ground in May 1985, which claimed 56 lives. As a young reporter on a Yorkshire paper, I had been sent to the scene to write what was then quaintly called a colour piece. There was precious little colour anywhere when I arrived. The air was thick with the stale stench of smoke and the atmosphere laden with grief. When a hardened Fleet Street hack tried to light his cigarette outside the charred ground, two residents of Manningham Lane screamed at him. In a nearby pub, seemingly oblivious to the tragedy, an ageing stripper danced to Ruby Turner’s ‘Move Closer’ as sweaty businessmen leered at her and gulped their lunchtime beer. This was a city fractured and forlorn.
’Twas ever thus. In 1840, as the industrial revolution gathered pace in this famous centre of the textile industry, the German poet and occasional revolutionary Georg Weerth wrote: ‘Every other factory town in England is a paradise compared to this hole.
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