Splendour that is lost forever

If only Roger Suddards were still alive. The Bradford lawyer and English Heritage commissioner, who died in December 1995, had much in common with the late Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman.

Sir John visited Bradford in the 1960s and was appalled by what David Hockney called “The improvements”. Mr Suddards, who was equally passionate about great historic buildings, had a professional involvement with the Sam Chippindale Foundation.

Sam Chippindale and Arnold Hagenbach set up the Arndale Property Trust, which built 22 American-style shopping malls in the UK, including one on the site of Kirkgate Market in Bradford and a smaller one in Shipley.

These developments entailed the demolition of Victorian buildings, a dilemma for forward-thinking but civilised men of culture like Roger. He understood the drive in architecture to ‘make it new’, particularly after the war, though I think he had reservations about the way the past was knocked down to make way for it.

Nikolaus Pevsner, author of the comprehensive book The Buildings Of England (1951-1974), wrote elsewhere in 1968: “The public at large is only just getting over its giggles where Victorian building is concerned. Few still are ready to look with open eyes and open minds, and even the experts who spend their time among buildings of power and elegance have only rarely accepted the duty of seeing and evaluating what is comparatively so near to them in time.”

The quote comes from Gavin Stamp’s lengthy introduction to his own book, Lost Victorian Britain, in which some of Bradford’s demolished buildings feature, including Kirkgate Market, which made way for the brutalism of the Arndale style fashionable among architects in the 1970s.

For those who never saw the interior, which was a favourite Saturday morning haunt of the young J B Priestley, this is Stamp’s description: “Classical in style, enriched with fine sculpture by W D Keyworth. Inside, all was richly-decorated ironwork. Iron columns divided up the large internal area, creating aisles with large octagonal spaces covered by glass domes; more iron created frontages for the perimeter shops, above which were high-level arched windows like elaborate fanlights. The iron was originally painted in a green and gold bronze colour… “Bradford was shocked when it was announced in 1973 that the whole building would be demolished to make way for an Arndale Centre… demonstrations against the market’s destruction took place locally. But Bradford Council remained unmoved and the building came down the same year.”

The ten chapters of Gavin Stamp’s black-and-white illustrated book are devoted to buildings of iron and glass, railways, hotels and buildings for pleasure, commercial buildings, industrial buildings, places of worship, public buildings, private and public institutions, domestic architecture and country houses.

This book shows that Bradford wasn’t the only northern city in the cocky 1970s to turn up its nose at its Victorian heritage. Handsome and stately buildings in Hull, Preston, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool were also subjected to the wrecking ball by developers with little or no environmental perception.

Even now, looking through this book, I’m not sure if we have learned the lesson that good buildings make citizens feel better.