A decade in Bradford: Bishop reflects on highs and lows

NEXT year will be bittersweet for the city of Bradford. 

Amid all the pomp, noise and ceremony of the City of Culture celebrations, 2025 will also mark the 40th anniversary of the Bradford City stadium fire, which killed 56 spectators during a football match at the Valley Parade ground on 11 May 1985.

“That story,” said the Bishop of Bradford, the Rt Revd Toby Howarth, who has been 10 years in the job this month, “is a story of trauma and loss, and death, and destruction.

“But what has come out of it is the Burns Unit and the Bradford sling. Many of the people who lived around the Valley Parade were Bangladeshi Muslims. Their parents used to tell them ‘don’t go out on match day because you might get beaten up’ but on the day, they were the people who opened up their homes, let people use their telephones, gave blankets, looked after the victims. 

The Right Reverend Toby Howarth (Image: Newsquest) “And now we have the Bangla Bantams community - the fan club - which has won national awards and has had programmes made on it in the national media. So there is a sense in which Bradford has taken that story of death, and, without ‘dissing’ it - without trying to dumb down any of that sorrow - has said actually, there is more to this.

“There is life, there is hope, there is new stuff. There is a different narrative that we can build and I think that, for me, is the key to where Bradford is at the moment.”

A file picture of the annual memorial service where victims of the devastating Bradford City Fire are remembered

Certainly, there is a great deal of renewal going on again in Bradford, which the Bishop has noted with some interest over his tenure.

“When I first came to Bradford there was a black hole in the middle, a big grey pit. It was dreadful, absolutely dreadful – the defining picture of Bradford. 

Recalling the day the Broadway Centre opened in 2015, he said: “I can’t remember ever being as emotional at the opening of a shopping centre! It was a profoundly emotional moment.

Singer Alexandra Burke opening The Broadway, Westfield's new £260m shopping centre, in 2015 "It felt like after the financial crash, the austerity and everything for Bradford, that what’s really, really important is that we have places that people can come together across communities. 

“There was a hole. And then you had the Odeon, and then, bit by bit, the media museum is developing, it’s getting a makeover – the Alhambra, and One City Park.

Bishop Toby said the city was rediscovering its ‘smile’, referring to the shape from Broadway, round to City Park, then to Bradford Live, then Fountains Church.

The Fountains Church (Image: T&A) “But there was a real rotten tooth in there, and that was Glydegate behind the Cenotaph. So five years ago we bought that and we started the first new Anglican church in Bradford -  the Fountains - for years and years and years. And now we are celebrating our fifth anniversary - so it felt like we are part of what I call the ‘Bradford smile’.

“In many ways, this is a real high. If you go to the dentist it’s not always the most pleasant experience. What’s been going on in the streets of Bradford and the roadworks and the closing of the Interchange - all of that has been extremely difficult. 

“When I sit in traffic or mull over the difficulties of travelling around the city centre I think ‘Toby, this is like being at the dentist. When this is all over, this will be worth it!’

“It does feel like there’s some great stuff going on in Bradford, but it’s also a really challenging time.”

The city centre pedestrianisation works, as seen at the junction of Hall Ings and Bridge Street on October 4, 2024 (Image: T&A) During that fateful year for Bradford in 1985, a young Toby Howarth was unknowingly preparing for the job he would be offered almost 30 years later – a time which he describes as “a calling”. While studying philosophy at Yale University in the States, he was offered a scholarship to study overseas.

“I proposed I would go to Pakistan and do some work with refugees from Afghanistan because the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan at that point, and there were a lot of refugees in Pakistan.

“So I spent some time with them, mostly just teaching English, but also chatting with people who had enough English for me to speak with, and there was a moment there when I realised that I had never really come across Muslims in that depth before. 

“I had gone to school in London and I of course knew Muslims, but I hadn’t really clocked that here was a group of people who were believers like I was a believer - I was a strong Christian at that time - but who believed slightly different things. 

“And yet in some ways I felt I had a lot more in common with these people in Pakistan, these Afghan refugees, than I did with my friends at college in the States. Culturally we had a lot in common, but religiously, we didn’t.”

“It almost felt like a calling at that point - that God was somehow saying to me, ‘whatever else you do in your life, I want Islam to be a part of it’.”

After ordination, Toby was a vicar in Derby, then in Birmingham, and later in Rotterdam, for a Dutch church working with Moroccan and Turkish Muslim communities. This was followed by a job with the Archbishop of Canterbury, concentrating on interfaith relations. He has also lived in India.

Fast forward to 2014, and the new Bishop soon realised that Bradford did things differently as soon as he looked at his diary during his first days in the job.

“Sometimes it can take a Bishop a long time to get on to the radar, for example, of the chief executive or the leader of the council,” he said. “I have a colleague who took a couple of years, really, to get into that office. 

“When I came into this job, when I first got my electronic calendar, there were already meetings every six weeks put into the diary. I asked my PA what they were about and my PA said to me ‘these are meetings with the chief executive’.

“So what that says to me is that Bradford is a city that ‘does God’ or ‘does faith’ - and there is therefore a real openness to the role of a Bishop as there is to the role of the Council for Mosques and the Hindu Council and the Council for Sikh Gurdwara, the Synagogue – all of these are taken seriously in an extremely positive way. 

“That may have come from particular challenges that Bradford has had, but for me it’s a really positive thing and it’s meant that when I started as Bishop I wasn’t just looking inwards at the Church - there was this huge wonderful part of the job which was about engaging with the city and district. Engaging with the council, engaging with businesses, with schools, all of whom were welcoming me in. And that’s been one of the great things that I have valued over the past 10 years. 

“I’m not sure I would have been as keen to be Bishop anywhere else, to be honest - I think one of the great things about Bradford is that it’s a city that does faith, and does faith well."

• Tomorrow in Part 2 of the interview, Bishop Toby talks about the openness of Bradford people and how the city has 'got under his skin' since he arrived here