WERE you living or working in Bradford in the 1970s and 80s?

PhD student HANNAH PARKES is working on a social history project about the district in the 70s and 80s and is carrying out interviews with people who lived and worked here during this period. She is keen to talk to a range of people, from different backgrounds, and hear “stories of everyday lives”.

Here, Hannah reveals more about the project:

Many conflicts and controversies occurred in Bradford in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a period of colossal demographic changes and economic turbulence, during which Bradford was home to mass deindustrialisation and Peter Sutcliffe’s murder spree.

Beautiful Victorian buildings were replaced by brutalist, concrete architecture, unemployment rates rose dramatically, whilst numerous strikes, protests, and demonstrations swept along the city. From the 1976 ‘battle of Bradford’ clash with the National Front in Manningham to the tragic 1985 fire at Valley Parade, this period saw the image of ‘bad news Bradford’ prevail nationally; a reputation the city has struggled to shake off since.

Mainstream academic accounts often ignore Bradford or, when the city does feature, the focus tends to be on issues of disadvantage, discrimination, or religious extremism.

My PhD research project, funded by the School of History at the University of Leeds, aims to reveal people’s everyday experiences of Bradford in the 1970s and 1980s. It will explore the stories of Bradfordians who lived, worked and socialised in the Bradford Metropolitan district. It hopes to uncover the complicated realities of ordinary life in this period and counteract the ‘doom and gloom’ depiction of Bradford which we are so often presented with.

This project needs participants to take part in oral history interviews. The interviews normally last around one to two hours and are informal; there are no set questions and no right or wrong answers!

Potential topics of conversation might include where you worked, your favourite subjects at school, how you spent your social time, your favourite haunts and drinking holes, the sports teams you supported, the meals you ate, the music you danced to... essentially how you experienced Bradford.

I’m particularly interested in issues of community and belonging, and how these might have shaped your daily life.

The only requirement is that you have memories of the Bradford district in the 1970s and 1980s and are willing to chat. This includes areas such as Saltaire, Bingley and Denholme, as well as the city centre. I’m a Haworth girl myself!

It is important that the study represents Bradford’s diverse and multicultural population, so I welcome responses from members of Bradford’s various ethnic, racial, and religious communities.

The research is for a document of around 100,000 words. The aim is for this to eventually become a book or a journal article.

There is also a possibility that the interviews will be stored in a historical archive in the future.

* If this project is something you might be interested in taking part in, please email me so I can answer further questions. My email is hy21hrp@leeds.ac.uk