Tristan and Isolde
on White Abbey Road
Robert Galeta
The opera poster was on a bus-stand a few yards from a Bentley sportster parked on the pavement in front of what were council houses, and down the hill from Atlas St. Only the latter, given my bus is usually by now full of a dozen nationalities, is perhaps partly capable of making sense of our surroundings. On the other hand, Atlas St. was so named in another time with a different mix of assumptions.
Like comparable places swept by modernity, Bradford was and is a city of the new. Evaluating the social and economic reasoning for various urban layers is a vital responsibility for the process of rational and imaginative aims; what worked in this built and natural environment for living and what didn’t. Understanding via seeing is an important part of this, not least because it is in principle available to all of us. Unfortunately only in principle, because the modern technologies of official seeing- photography and film- have also too often been used to falsify and portray untruths.
The late french film critic Serge Daney used a simple but telling phrase to describe the challenge of putting truer images before us, in this case by Fellini:
‘Without him we might definitively forget what it looks like, Rome and its traffic jams...a hotel stuck up anywhere...’*
So what it looks like isn’t simple; it is refracted through the expectations of certain genres, formal motives, particular agendas. It’s with all this in mind that the Bradford Grid is a valuable project; an ensemble considered attempt to see what Bradford now looks like, historical, personal, communal.
*Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs a main, cinema, television, information Lyon 1991 p.78
The cars that ate Bradford *
Robert Galeta
High-performance cars seem high on the agenda of Bradford 2005. This is equally true of Leeds and Manchester, but in those cities it goes along with the show-off presence of cranes over building-sites. There is some of this in Bradford too, but largely just to replace worn-out postwar developments under-ambition prevented replacing twenty years ago. Cars n’ malls, no direct prose-line, then, to J.B.Priestley’s Margin released.
Might we be experiencing a definitive conceptual cut-off from Priestley and earlier writers about Bradford? The city has been nothing if not an accretion of people and projections, porously there for the latest conversation on the bus, in the market, in the pub. Make-do and mend, brushed aside at all costs by modern capitalism, is still on its first wind in many Bradford lives but, uncannily, alongside the cars.
Omissions on the Bradford Tourist Map 2005 are a plaque on Manningham Mills or thereabouts for the part-birth of the Labour movement following 10,000 people demonstrating in the streets in 1890. Or an invitation to see the angels in the ironwork roof-supports of Lilycroft School across the road, one of the first Board Schools in the country. Then back to the second plaque on the mill to celebrate Manningham Mills Community Association’s work in helping to give it new life, an ongoing example of cross-cultural and cross-age effort (one amongst others in the city of course).
As in other towns and cities in the ‘Heavy Woolen District’,
the rural has a kind of indiscriminate presence, close-up, as in the many
becks, and in the immediate distance, the hills. At the weekend you went
to Baildon Moor to breathe and relax, and look ambiguously back at the city
where others were still working overtime. The hills feel very old. Cartwright
Hall Museum used to have a model tableau of neolithic settlements, and Ilkley
Moor has numerous remains of standing stones. I think you can see the planet’s
time** in the mineral glitter in the stones on the hills as well as in a
city-centre wall. I still pick up a little of its sand blown from wherever
to the bottom of Thornton Road on a dry spring day. By it used to be strands
of unwashed wool escaped from bales.I made a pact with a friend some years
ago to resist using the phrase ‘that used to be’ in relation
to Bradford places and premises, because what had replaced them was of so
little quality (the modern concept of the city came from the nineteenth century
and must retain some of its feel and functions however it adds to and renews
them). So let me break the pact. Some wet fields on Warren Lane in Gilstead
are now a kind of cartoon housing development at the back of which rises
Baildon Moor. The visual and emotional effect for me is of a sad collage,
from which emerge more cars. The expansion of the city outwards in the decades
after 1810 must have appeared shocking, as was the visual and sensory state
of the river Thames in London. I make the correspondance to raise this point:
if we are in a new conceptual time, our environmental challenges are surely
one of its framing motifs; our version of the gap between myth and reality.
*Thanks to the 1973 Australian film, The cars that ate Paris
**Thanks to the designer Ettore Sottsass’ notion of ‘the planet’s
planet’
(This essay was written for the Bradford Grid Project’s inaugural exhibtion at Gallery II, University of Bradford, April 2005.)