How culture can transform a city: looking back on Bradford 2025 with Dan Bates, Jenny Harris & Rhiannon Hannon – Interview

One evening, a mile away from Bradford city centre in Manningham, a woman sells handmade crafts at a stall inside the Turner Prize exhibition. She hadn’t managed to spend as much time as she wanted at City of Culture events in 2025, life and work getting in the way, but through setting up her stall as part of the Turner Prize’s surrounding programme of workshops, DJs and local stalls, she found herself part of one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world. 

Her experience captures something central to Bradford 2025. ”Participation was not a sidelined or diminished activity in any way”, Programme Director Jenny Harris explains, “It was front and centre.”

Jenny and others in the team that delivered Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture spoke with The State of the Arts to dissect the achievements of this event. The year-long creative placemaking project and festival started following the success of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year. Every five years a new city is selected to host the event, form a temporary delivery organisation and attempt to transform a city’s cultural landscape. 

Looking back on the year, the Bradford 2025 team are unanimous about one thing: This was a year that aimed not just to bring culture to the city, but to weave it into everyday life. Into the parks, shopping centres, schools, care homes, cafés, and community halls across one of the largest districts in the country.

Island of Foam. Image Credit: Andrew Benge.

Bradford 2025’s Director of Creative Engagement, Rhiannon Hannon, led the team responsible for ensuring this socially engaged programme. One of its key elements was ‘Our Patch’, which, Rhiannon explains, brought producers into every part of the district to work alongside creative practitioners with a wide range of skills. Together, they worked with local communities to develop new creative projects shaped by existing work or local needs. The programme has been “wild,” Hannon laughs, but hugely successful: 150 projects have taken place across all 30 wards in Bradford, engaging more than 30,000 people. 

One of these took place in Holmewood, a predominantly white working-class area of Bradford, where creative practitioner Natasha Joseph discovered a local cooking-on-a-budget group and developed it into a series of sessions for sharing skills and ideas around cooking & living in Bradford. The group went on to host a public sharing event, produce a community cookbook, and gain food hygiene qualifications. The participants are now continuing the project independently.

Projects like this sat alongside larger-scale interventions like ‘The Beacon’, a travelling performance space placed in four parks across the district, creating pop-up cultural venues in areas without traditional arts infrastructure. Together, these initiatives helped lower barriers to participation, allowing people to encounter culture casually, locally, and on their own terms. Executive Director Daniel Bates noted that while these events might not have the ‘wow’ factor of large-scale productions, “it’s these unusual and quieter activities, rooted in the heart of districts, the things you bump into coincidentally, that really celebrate the wonderful, everyday creativity of our communities.”

The Beacon at Wibsey Park. Image Credit: Andrew Benge.

“I think the local sector is really positive about the City of Culture programme because they feel seen, valued, and represented,” Jenny says. This has certainly been the case for Tricia Arthur-Stubbs, a local artist involved throughout Bradford 2025, who says she has “worked more than I’ve ever worked before” as a result of paid opportunities across the programme. 

Arthur-Stubbs is the producer of the bi-annual ‘BRAVE festival’, which, with funding from Bradford 2025, Arts Council England and Bradford Council, was bigger and more ambitious than ever this year. The two-day programme at Bradford Arts Centre involved 80 artists, 70 of whom were Black, showcasing art forms rooted in Black culture and heritage, With a give-what-you-can model, the festival welcomed around 1,500 people.

For Tricia, the opportunities offered by Bradford 2025 were about more than volume of work. They represented a sense of recognition and visibility, with Black-led projects positioned not at the margins of the programme, but at its centre. It has nevertheless been an “intense” year: alongside ‘BRAVE’, she was also a dancer in ‘Brighter Still’, worked on  ‘Intergenerational Play’, and took on roles in the Cultural Voice Forum, and the Black Led Arts Network. “It’s just been amazing that there’s so many things going on,” she says. “I’d love to do the whole year again and just watch everything without working, but obviously I love the work.”

BRAVE Festival. Image Credit: Tricia Arthur-Stubbs.

Not everyone has felt equally seen or represented. Kirk and Anika McRae, founders of ‘City of Counterculture’, argue that while Bradford 2025 placed a strong emphasis on race and multicultural identity, less attention was given to subcultures. ‘City of Counterculture’ was created in response, celebrating alternative heritage and creating a space for Goths, Rockers, Metalheads, Punks, Emos and others who do not see themselves reflected in the official programme.

And although Bradford 2025 has been responsible for increasing visitor spending in the city – a key performance metric for every City of Culture – for some local businesses, the impact has been minimal. The owner of Smorgasbord, a popular café close to the city centre, describes feeling largely unaffected by the year. While events at the nearby Loading Bay venue occasionally brought an increase in customers, overall footfall has declined over the past year. The café’s owner cited a lack of parking, limited bus routes and the introduction of a new road system as barriers that have made the area harder to access, dampening any potential benefit from the increased cultural activity taking place nearby. The deeper economic transformation of Bradford as a result of this year can still be offset by the city’s other challenges, reminding us that culture alone can’t change everything – it needs to be part of a holistic set of council policies designed to make life easier for its residents.

Bradford 2025 City of Culture has now drawn to a close, which means the inevitable questions about legacy will now begin. For Dan, the most visible legacy lies in the programme’s £9 million capital refurbishment plan, designed to strengthen Bradford’s cultural infrastructure and prepare the district for increased visitors, ranging  from progress on Bradford Live and Bradford Arts Centre, to support for Oxenhope Station on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. Alongside this, several projects are set to continue. Dan notes that funders are “keen to carry on supporting in any shape or form they can.” According to Rhiannon, partnerships established during the year have already begun to embed themselves into longer-term plans. A large-scale singing and movement project developed with Northern Ballet and Opera North will continue, with Northern Ballet incorporating elements of their talent development workshops into Bradford primary schools. Professional development for teachers will also continue through the Royal Ballet and Opera Schools Programme. 

Oxenhope Station. Image Credit: Craig Szlatoszlavek KWVR.

Beyond buildings and programmes, however, lies a more intangible legacy. One group for whom Bradford 2025 has had a clear and far-reaching impact is young people, who have been placed at the heart of the programme from its outset. Opportunities have ranged from apprenticeships and skills development for emerging creatives to the establishment of a youth panel at board level.  

One of those apprentices is Kieran Jones, who joined the operations team, prompted to apply after noticing activity in a building that had previously stood vacant. “I was working at Wetherspoons and wanted something with more progression,” he explains. “I saw something going on in the building, got curious, and applied. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it worked out great.”

Over the course of the year, Jones found himself immersed in what he describes as a fast-paced environment, with constant opportunities to learn. At the end of his apprenticeship, he was offered a continued role within the operations team, supporting the transition from Bradford 2025 into its longer-term legacy. “That’ll involve moving office spaces, handling equipment and props, and getting ready for whatever comes next,” he says.

Bradford Young Curators. Image Credit: Arooj Din.

This focus on young people extends well beyond early-career pathways. Bradford 2025 has delivered an extensive schools programme, working with more than 160 schools across the district to engage as many young people as possible. As Rhiannon explains, initiatives such as ‘Digital Creatives’ have reached over 1,800 pupils, introducing them to a wide range of digital technologies, while daily workshops at the Turner Prize have created direct encounters with contemporary art. “We’re creating new pathways into the creative industries,” she says.

Jenny recalls asking schoolchildren to name their favourite artist from the Turner Prize exhibition. “A huge number of them loved Mohammad Sami’s work,” she says. “They could see the narrative, the stories, and really immerse themselves in those big canvases. But they were also seeing a painter called Mohammad. That reflects what we’ve tried to do this year: foreground artists who are representative of the people who live in our city.”

Mohammed Sami. Turner Prize 2025. Cartwright Hall Art Gallery. Bradford. Photograph by David Levene 19/9/25.

 “If you show that culture is not just something you do if you want to work in the industry, it opens it up to a much bigger group of people,” she says. “I hope it helps young people see that creativity belongs to them here in Bradford, while also recognising there are routes into the industry if they want them.”

The question remains of how the cultural energy generated over the year – the relationships formed, the confidence built, and the young people inspired to step into creative spaces – will carry forward. For participants like Kieran, Bradford 2025’s legacy is rooted in skills, experience and opportunity; for local communities and organisations, many of whom worked with professional artists and creative practitioners for the first time, the year demonstrated the tangible impact that creativity can have at a local level. It seems the legacy of Bradford 2025 will not be carried forward solely by institutions, but by the communities themselves, through the relationships, knowledge and confidence built over the year.

Ultimately, the most significant legacy of Bradford 2025 is a broader shift in confidence. As Dan notes, the “vibe” of the city feels different: more assured, more willing to claim what it has to offer. In a place too often defined by negative national narratives, Bradford 2025 became a moment of collective self-recognition, in which an inclusive city saw its creativity reflected back at itself on a huge scale. 

For those who delivered it, there is a clear sense of pride, both personal and shared. “I hope everybody in Bradford feels we’ve done them proud,” says Jenny. “It’s been the honour and the privilege of my life to do this job.” If the year succeeds in changing the dial in how Bradford sees itself, that confidence may prove to be its most enduring cultural achievement.

***

A huge thanks to the team at Bradford 2025 for chatting with TSOTA!