Bradford UK City of Culture 2025
The key to Bradford’s UK City of Culture 2025 bid is to celebrate the place people actually live in.
A group portrait of the seven people who formed the first team for the Bradford 2025 bid. They are standing and sitting amongst huge oversized three dimensional letters that spell out the word Bradford.
Image ©Tim Smith
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When I moved back home to write my dissertation while doing a master’s degree at the University of Manchester, I felt so uninspired by the job prospects available to me in a recession-hit world.
Portrait photo of a young woman starting confidently at the camera. Image ©Tim Smith
How would I fulfil my potential and thrive here? Then I happened to see that Bradford Literature Festival was being set up that year. I wrote them a really desperate email asking for a job. They said they could offer me an internship, so I quit my full-time job at a bank and did the internship. That was my first experience in the culture sector.
Before that, the culture sector wasn’t something I thought was a viable career path. Having done that internship opened my eyes to a sector which had been invisible to me.
I still felt like I had to leave Bradford to get better opportunities, so I got a job at Manchester International Festival. Since then, I’ve come home and worked with Ilkley Literature Festival, the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford Literature Festival again, before joining the Bradford 2025 team.
Let’s face it. Bradford gets totally written off. There is a lot of insecurity about being from Bradford as well as being from an immigrant background and being told you need to ‘assimilate, assimilate, assimilate’. That insecurity is something I’ve rebelled against in my work.
Part of what we’re doing with Bradford 2025 is to speak to people across the District so we can understand what Bradford is for them, how they experience it, and to make sure that when we ‘speak Bradford’ to the wider world, it feels like the Bradford people actually live in.
Stories have a real-world impact, they can define who we are, what we believe about ourselves, and what we think is possible. That’s how people will get behind this bid: if we write our own story in a way that feels true.
Pakeezah Zahoor
Programme and Community Coordinator