How Wardley’s plan shaped today’s city

Mr Hill was born and brought up in Great Horton and later made a career in acoustics at Salford University.

He said: “As a 65-year-old who lived through the Wardley-isation of Bradford in the late 1950s and the 1960s, Peter Matthews’s article made interesting reading – all the more for comparing the feel of reported research with personal recollections.

“The sentence about Wardley House being let to the University of Bradford and to the Prince’s Theatre was wrong in respect of the latter. In the 1947 Centenary Book of Bradford, Wardley’s plans are set out extensively.

“The city centre was to be in zones for ‘markets’, ‘educational’, ‘professional and commercial’ etc.

“The arc from the Central Library to Thornton Road was earmarked for ‘entertainments’ with the Alhambra enlarged and extended to Little Horton Lane as the “Alhambra and Opera House”.

“Wardley House incorporated a theatre as part of that zoning and for replacing the demolished, original Prince’s Theatre.

“The new theatre was never much more than a concrete shell with no decorative internal finishing and, despite attempts to find takers for theatre and/or cinema use, it was never ‘let’, as Peter Matthews claimed.

“For years its huge, curved, glazed facade stared out blankly over the city centre – the only activity inside being periodic visits from window cleaners.

“You may be interested to know that Hall Ings pinches from dual carriageway to conventional street, at the Bridge Street junction, because Wardley planned for a concert hall next to the Town Hall (roughly where the magistrates’ courts were built).

“St George’s Hall and the T&A building were to go the same way as the Georgian courthouse on Hall Ings, so that a dual carriageway could be built right through to Leeds Road.

“Your article has a photo of Wardley standing next to the model. It is very tempting to judge the man harshly. After all he more than made up for the Luftwaffe’s lack of interest in Bradford.

“What is now called ‘heritage’ was not valued back then the way it is now. However, the public mood had changed by the early 1970s and yet Bradford Council still went ahead with the disgraceful demolition of the Victorian Kirkgate Market – an error not made by the likes of Leeds, Halifax and Bolton, much to the delight of shoppers in those cities.

“What jewels Swan Arcade and Kirkgate Market could have been.”

Knock down the T&A and St George’s Hall! Is nothing sacred?

However, this correspondence makes clear that Wardley House was the office block behind Wardley Centre, which looked out on Prince’s Way. It was the latter building that was unoccupied until 1983.

Dr Matthews, who lectures in town planning at the University of Edinburgh, replied: “I did know about the concert hall plans – Mr Hill is right, it was part of Wardley’s ‘civic core’ and part of the ideas in the Ministry of Town and Country Planning’s Town Centre Redevelopment handbook.

“Regarding his point about the Wardley Centre. The theatre did remain empty until 1983 when the photographic museum moved in. But the whole complex, developed by Atlas Securities, included Wardley House, the ice rink and everything behind.

“They were let to the University until its new buildings were completed.

“My dad remembers having classes in them and also an unfortunate incident of a student falling through the roof of the temporary library on the first floor of the Wardley Centre having committed suicide from an upper floor.

“So we are both right. Interestingly, the proposals to demolish St George’s hall were stopped pretty swiftly, and there was a proposal to use Soviet technology to roll the building back a bit to produce the right width of road.

“This had already been used in the early 1950s to move the bank on Market Street to allow the new office block that now fronts Centenary Square to be built.”

Peter Matthews’s ebook, Labor Omnia Vincit: The Redevelopment of Bradford City Centre 1945-1965, is available from Amazon, priced £3.60.