Before

After

Reading the Guardian’s recent report on the regeneration of Manningham and English Heritage’s new book on the town prompted me to think back.

I first visited Lister Mills in the late 1990s and was instantly struck by the grandeur of the buildings. Samuel Lister still has more patents than any other Englishman - perhaps the Bill Gates of his day. Yet moving around the derelict, empty, forgotten, mills (which had long since gone bankrupt) was a depressing experience.

To cheer me up I went a couple of miles down the road to Saltaire and saw Jonathan Silver’s Salts Mill which he had turned into a thriving shopping emporium with restaurants, bookshops, jewelers, the Hockney Gallery and lots of other businesses.

This made me determined to do something with Lister Mills. Many people had looked at redeveloping the Mill; ideas such as a Victoria and Albert North Museum and a factory outlet village had been talked about, but no one had been able to deliver. Delivery became harder with the unrest and riots in 2001 but through persistence and determination we were able to come up with funding packages and partnerships with Yorkshire Forward and Bradford Council, both of which helped us start work on the restoration of the first corner of the first building Silk Warehouse in 2003.

Seven years later the work is by no means finished and there’s still buildings to restore but we have created a lot. 255 apartments, the Manningham Mills Community Centre, Mind the Gap – a theatre for actors with learning disabilities – and a department of Bowling College Bradford which will open in September.

All this has helped with the beginnings of a real community. Much else has gone on in Manningham and it has gone through a lot, transforming from a prosperous town in Victorian times to somewhere that declined in the 1990s and is again fast becoming a diverse, successful place.

Urban Splash is proud to have played its part and we’re keen to do more.

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