On Wednesday Culture Secretary Chris Smith MP pays a rare visit to Bradford to open the unique Yorkshire Craft Centre, a £4m development at Bradford College's School of Art, Design & Textiles. What will he see? Jim Greenhalf reports.

To get to Bradford's very latest cultural artefact you have to turn right at the college's Westbrook Building in Great Horton Road.

The Yorkshire Craft Centre itself is tucked away behind the School of Art, Design & Textiles off Carlton Street.

Part refurbishment and part new-build, it contains studios and workshops that boast a myriad of facilities for those with an artistic bent.

Within its bright new walls are the capabilities for creating jewellery and trying out bronze casting, life drawing and working with textiles, wood, ceramics and plaster.

There's a photographic studio, a studio for environmentally-friendly crafts, a cyber-caf and a machine that dispenses bottles of spring water for those who find the central-heating just a little bit parching.

Vanessa Scarth, the manager of this splendid centre, believes it is one of a kind in the entire country. What's so special about it, then?

"It's for the public and students, exhibitions and course work," she said. "We expect about 8,000 visitors a year. They can come in any time the students are not working. There'll be about 500 students from the School of Art, Design & Textiles using the facilities," she said.

The other welcome aspect of the centre is the mixture of lecturers and students across the age range. For example, Anne Crowther shunned the bright lights and came to Bradford from London's Central School of Art, set up her own business, and now heads up the centre's environmentally-friendly crafts department.

She displayed some examples of her naturally-dyed wool artefacts, setting them off against a beautiful blue ceramic piece by Jenny Bevan. Anne's department is expected to have between 60 to 80 students.

One of the mature students in painting and textiles is Caroline Hepworth, now in her third year. She was making intensively sharp black marks with a thick pencil on paper in the drawing studio when she explained why she had taken up art and what she thought of the new centre.

"About ten years ago I was told I had cancer. I decided to stop working so hard, stop doing things purely for other people and do something for myself, " she said matter-of-factly.

"I believe a lot of cancer patients are people who have had their lives repressed in some way. They tend to live for other people and don't live their own lives.

"I joined the Access Art Course at Todmorden, which takes a lot of older people."

And from there it offered her a whole new perspective on life.

"It gave me a chance to find out who I was."

And it gave birth to an unusual approach to her work.

"A lot of my work is trying to come to terms with dying, with death. Death is ignored in our society. Some of us have to come to terms with it. I deal with what is called The Abject, things which disgust and attract us - sex, death, food. This is definitely not therapy, it's fine art. Art can be therapy; sometimes they come close together, but there is a difference," she said.

Caroline, who lives near Saddleworth Moors at Huddersfield, has an exhibition at Bradford's South Square Gallery, Thornton Road, for four weeks in May. Its title is Chance Meeting with a Dead Crow.

She is very happy with the centre. "It's an extremely congenial place to work. I looked at Bretton Hall College in Wakefield but they had no concept of how to fit in a part-time student. But here the boundaries are loose, the staff are fantastic, most of them, eager for you to learn and to give you their time.

"They understand that you have a job, a family and they are exceedingly accommodating in fitting their education to my life, which is why there are a growing number of students coming to this college," she added.

That's important. Spanking new facilities, however modern, do not a college nor a craft centre make.

More than environment and ambience, the difference is made by the attitude of the people involved, by the mixture of ages and experience. Education, as Chris Smith will undoubtedly endorse, is for life, not just a few years in late teens.

At any rate the Secretary of State will have the chance to prove this because Vanessa Scarth is going to ask him to engage in a bit of glass-blowing.

Talking of which, there is a magnificent stained-glass window nine metres high which can only be seen in its entirety from the outside. Inside, the architect has rammed a staircase up against it so that only portions of it glow in the sunlight.

The window was based on an original painting by 11-year-old Abdul Waheed Khalifa who attends Bradford's Chellow Dene School. His picture won a Schools Showcase competition run by the School of Art, Design & Textiles.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.