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Bradford
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In its Victorian heyday,
BRADFORD
was the world's biggest producer of worsted cloth, its skyline etched black with mill chimneys, and its hills clogged with some of the foulest back-to-back houses of any northern city. Today, the city has left this nether world behind and is valiantly laying on tourist attractions to rinse away its associations with urban decrepitude. A few spruced-up buildings and the rejuvenation of the late-Victorian woollen warehouse quarter, Little Germany, signify an attempt to beautify the city centre.
The main interest is provided by the superb National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (Tues-Sun & public holidays 10am-6pm; free), one of the most visited national museums outside London. It has recently emerged from a major refit, but still wraps itself around Britain's largest cinema screen (52ft by 64ft), whose daily IMAX and 3-D film screenings (A?5.80) are billed as "so real you'll think you're there". The museum's ground floor kicks off with the Kodak Gallery, a museum-within-a-museum which houses the contents of Kodak's private collection and traces the story of popular photography. Successive floors are devoted to every nuance of film and television, including some emphasis on state-of-the-art topics like digital imaging and computer animation, and detours into subjects like advertising and news-gathering. A walk past the restored Venetian-Gothic Wool Exchange building on Market Street provides ample evidence of the wealth of nineteenth-century Bradford. Over to the east, north of Leeds Road, the tight grid of streets that is Little Germany retains an enclave of warehouse and office buildings in which transplanted German and Jewish merchants once plied their wool trade. The buildings have enticed in new businesses and community ventures, and at the Design Exchange , 34 Peckover St (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; free), the temporary art and design exhibitions are usually worth a peek. The Peace Museum (Wed-Fri 11am-3pm, or by arrangement at other times, call 01274/754009; free), hidden away on the top floor of 10 Piece Hall Yard, opposite the Wool Exchange, is the only museum of its kind in the country, detailing the history of the peace movement with some panache. The museum will be rehoused in a purpose built International Peace Centre in 2003.
Finally, no one should pass up the chance to drop in on
SALTAIRE
, three miles north of the city, a model industrial village and textile mill built by the industrialist Sir Titus Salt, who built his fortune on the innovative use of alpaca and mohair.
Salt's Mill
, built to emulate an Italian palazzo and larger than St Paul's Cathedral in London, was the biggest factory in the world when it opened in 1853. Its 1200 looms produced over 30,000 yards of cloth a day, and the mill was surrounded by schools, hospitals, a train station, parks, baths and wash-houses, plus 45 almshouses and around 850 houses. Salt's Mill remains the fulcrum of the village, its several floors now housing art, craft and furniture shops, and a craft centre, but its enterprising centrepiece is the
1853 Gallery
(daily 10am-6pm; free; tel 01274/531163), an entire floor of the old spinning shed given over to the world's largest retrospective collection of the works of Bradford-born
David Hockney
.
Salt's Diner
(tel 01274/530533) on the same floor has a Hockney-designed logo, menu and crockery. Trains run to Saltaire from Bradford Forster Square, as do buses #662-6 and #679 from the Interchange. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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United Kingdom,
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