The Story of Bradford

This new history traces the development of Bradford from its first settlement in Anglo-Saxon times on the banks of the Bradford beck to the present day. For hundreds of years it was a small Pennine village associated with the making of cloth. Despite the disruption of the Civil War in the seventeenth century, which saw Bradford at the centre of major battles, it continued to grow steadily in the eighteenth century. It was the nineteenth century, which saw Bradford transformed from a small town to a major city and centre of cloth production during the Industrial Revolution. This growth continued into the twentieth century but Bradford is now faced with the challenges of finding its place in the new service based economy and the multicultural social mix of the twenty-first century.