Where the wool is

The sight of a giant, three-metre-high ball of yarn being rolled through the streets would be an incongruous sight in many places. But not in Bradford. Wool is to people there what steel is to Sheffield and ceramics are to folk in Stoke-on-Trent. It’s woven into the city’s story. 

The ball in question – A Good Yarn – consists of fabric and clothing donations from across Bradford that were plaited into a rope stretching more than a kilometre. With the help of local community groups this was wound into a huge yarn ball and in July it was rolled down streets on the outskirts of the city, accompanied by local drumming band Katumba. 

It was the brainchild of renowned British artist Luke Jerram alongside local theatre company Bloomin’ Buds to form part of Bradford's celebrations as UK City of Culture. 

“I couldn’t think of a more apt project for Bradford than to have a three-metre-high ball of yarn rolling through the city’s streets,” says Shanaz Gulzar, Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture creative director. “People came out of their homes to see it, and they knew straight away that it was about Bradford.” 

It’s one of numerous projects, exhibitions and events taking place throughout the year tied to Bradford’s textile heritage. So, too, is We Will Sing, an installation by renowned US artist Ann Hamilton that occupies the entire top floor of the cavernous Salts Mill. 

When Salts Mill, a few miles north of Bradford, opened in 1853 it was hailed as the most modern mill in Europe. Today it’s at the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Saltaire and home to one of the largest collections of David Hockney’s art.  

Hamilton’s work is inspired by the history and the regeneration of this former textile mill, now a thriving hub of art and commerce. “It’s incredibly important to be able to celebrate what has created this city,” says Gulzar. “My father came to this country when he was 18 to work in the wool mills, and he worked at Salts Mill. We’re proud of our historic wool past, but we’re also proud of what it means today with wool and fabric still very much part of the city now. I can’t imagine creating a programme that didn’t explore wool.” 

Bradford wears its history on its sleeve, and if you visit the city centre today its textile heritage is everywhere you look – from the majestic Wool Exchange building (now home to Waterstones bookshop) to Little Germany, an area that became home to German merchants who arrived in the 1850s, which has more than 50 Listed buildings. 

Bradford has been producing fabric for hundreds of years, but it was the onset of the Industrial Revolution that transformed its fortunes. At the turn of the 19th Century, it was a small rural market town where wool spinning and cloth weaving was carried out in local cottages and farms. Yet by the middle of the century it was producing around two thirds of the UK’s woollen textiles and dubbed ‘the wool capital of the world’. 

This astonishing transformation was fuelled by the growth of the worsted wool industry and easy access to raw materials like water, coal and sandstone. It earned the nickname Worstedopolis, after the worsted yarn and fabric that was mainly produced in the area. At its height, the Bradford wool industry employed around 70,000 people. 

By the middle of the 20th century, though, the UK textile industry was starting to decline due to increased global competition, particularly from countries with lower production costs, and the rise of synthetic fabrics. All of which hit the West Yorkshire city hard leading to numerous mills closing and the loss of countless jobs.  

It's a period explored in Woven Through Time: Bradford's Textile Industry Past and Present, at Bradford Industrial Museum. The exhibition, which runs until mid-November, revolves around striking images of textile mills during the late 1970s and early 80s by Bradford-born photographer Ian Beesley, alongside objects from the museum’s worsted collection and other items loaned by local textile firms still going strong today. 

His photographs capture the inner workings of the mills at the time, including shots of different textile processes and employees at work.  

Beesley himself worked briefly at a firm of weavers when he was younger. “I worked in a mill when I left school which I hated. It wasn’t for me. But I got an insight into what the lives of those workers were like. I was the third man on a pair of enormous German looms, and you would put raw, dyed fibre in at one end and it would come out as a fabric at the other. It was unbelievably noisy, hot and incredibly boring.” 

It could also be dangerous work. “You used to clean the machines while they were still running and the man that I was working with was cleaning it one day and it caught his hand and chopped his index finger off. He was rushed to Bradford Royal Infirmary while we tried to find his missing finger but unfortunately the mill cat got it. So he didn’t get his finger back and I handed my notice in at the end of the week.” 

Beesley, though, understood the importance of the textile mills to the people who worked in them. “They were proud of what they did. It was very skilled work and it’s one of the few industries at that time where women were paid quite well, and it gave them financial independence. My aunties and some other relatives worked in textiles in Bradford. One of my aunties was a blower and mender at Drummonds Mill and then Salts Mill, and she worked right up into her 80s.” 

In the 1950s, the textile industry still needed workers and thousands of people, predominantly from South Asian countries, arrived in Bradford during this period. “Some of them worked in particular mills. Lister’s Mill was a silk spinning mill and I think a lot of the women there were from Bangladesh because they had experience back home, and Salts Mill had quite a few Italian women who came over after the Second World War,” says Beesley. 

However, by the early 80s, the northern textile industry was struggling. “I thought I should try and photograph as much of this world as possible before it vanished,” he says. 

Along with black and white images from this period, the exhibition also includes new colour photographs Beesley took during recent visits to local textile firms including Pennine Weavers, one of the UK’s largest weavers based in Keighley, just outside Bradford, and Laxtons, a yarn manufacturer based in nearby Shipley.  

Beesley points out that while many of the old mills have long since gone, others are enjoying a renaissance. “There’s the legacy of the architecture that shows these buildings can become something else. Salts Mill is probably the best example of this, but you also have Sunnybank Mills in Leeds and Dean Clough in Halifax that have become these hives of activity and commerce.”

Bradford’s textile heritage is as much about the surrounding countryside as it is about its mills and factories, something that environmental artist Steve Messam explores in his artwork The Tower.

Messam is one of four artists commissioned by Bradford 2025 to produce work for the Wild Uplands sculpture trail in Penistone Hill Country Park near Haworth, in the heart of Brontë country.

From a distance his 10-metre-high artwork looks like it’s made from Yorkshire stone, it’s only when you get closer that you see (and smell) the fleece cladding. “The artwork is about that relationship between landscape and Bradford being the heart of the wool industry and how it got there, and the reason it got there – which is the quality of the fleece,” says Messam.

“I use lots of different textiles in my work and every time I’ve needed to find a new textile I’ve ended up going through a supplier based in West Yorkshire, because that’s where all the knowledge about textiles is,” he says.

“There are still lots of local textile industries and people weaving and scouring. If you want anything scoured, then most of it is still done in Bradford – it’s very much the heart of the wool industry in England.”

It may be on a smaller scale compared to its heyday, but there is still a thriving textile industry in Bradford. British Wool has its HQ in the city and innovative businesses across the district lead the way in sustainability.

Matthew Simpson, brand manager at Bradford-based William Halstead, says demand for luxury British fabrics is on the rise from abroad. “There’s strong demand in Japan, which is a legacy market, but we’re also seeing a lot of growth in South Korea and China where British fabrics are really appreciated.”

William Halstead, which dates back to 1875 and still weaves from the same location as it did then, is renowned for its wool and mohair fabrics and today sells to some of the world’s leading brands in fashion capitals like Milan, Paris, London and New York.

So what, then, does the future hold? “There are still interesting, forward-looking and viable businesses in Bradford which are a legacy of its textile heritage over the past 200 years,” says Simpson. “At the same time, they have adapted to the modern marketplace, moving from mass markets to niche markets. That’s where the future is – the luxury brands and the custom clothing world.”