Bradford Dale (or Bradfordale), is a side valley of Airedale that feeds water from Bradford Beck across the City of Bradford into the River Aire at Shipley in West Yorkshire, England. Whilst it is in Yorkshire and a dale, it is not part of the Yorkshire Dales and has more in common with Lower Nidderdale and Lower Airedale for its industrialisation.
Before the expansion of Bradford, the dale was a collection of settlements surrounded by woods. When the wool and worsted industries in the dale were mechanized in the Industrial Revolution, the increasing population resulted in an urban sprawl that meant these individual communities largely disappeared as Bradford grew, and in 1897, the town of Bradford became a city. Since most settlements became suburbs of the City of Bradford, the term Bradford Dale has become archaic and has fallen into disuse, though it is sometimes used to refer to the flat section of land northwards from Bradford City Centre towards Shipley.
The woollen and worsted industries had a profound effect on the dale, the later City of Bradford and the wider region. The geological conditions in the valley also allowed some coal mining to take place, but a greater emphasis was upon the noted stone found on the valley floor (Elland Flags and Gaisby Rock), which as a hard sandstone, was found to be good for buildings and in use as a harbour stone due to its natural resistance to water.
The dale is notable for the lack of a main river (Bradford Beck being only a small watercourse in comparison to the rivers Wharfe, Aire, Calder and Don) and necessitated the importation of clean water into the dale from as afar afield as Nidderdale. Most of the becks in the city centre have now been culverted and have suffered with pollution from the heavy woollen industry in the dale.
History Bradford Dale was described as being The valley that the Bradford Beck flows through was known variously as Bradforddale, Bradford-dale, Bradfordale, Bradford Dale, Bradeffordale and Broadfordesdale.Literally all meaning The valley in which Bradford stands.Most maps and references list it as Bradford Dale; maps drawn by Jeffreys in 1775 list the valley of the Pinch and Clayton Becks (Thornton and Clayton) as being Bradford Dale. The City of Bradford, which takes its name through the derivation of Broad Ford (across the Bradford Beck) was not formalised as a city until 1897.Bradford achieved borough status in 1847. Previous to the industrial Revolution, the dale was the name that united the various communities that were situated within it, and also of some on the outer edges. Places such as Allerton, Bolton and Manningham were settlements in their own right; the Parish of Manningham stretched from Chellow Dean Beck in the west to the Bradford Beck in the east. Only since the institution of Bradford as a city at the end of the 19th century did these settlements become suburbs of Bradford, and so were referred to as being in Bradford rather than Bradford Dale.In much the same way as the small town of Grassington in North Yorkshire is sometimes described as being in Wharfedale. Bradford Dale is not one of the Yorkshire Dales, though it was surrounded by high ground on three sides with water flowing down the valley. Its industrialisation has led to it being compared with Nidderdale and Airedale as a "partly industrialised Yorkshire Valley". The term Bradford Dale is sometimes still used to describe the section of valley between Bradford and Shipley, but this is also more commonly known as the Bradford to Shipley Corridor.
The valley of the River Aire was covered in a huge lake named Lake Bradford towards the end of the last ice age. This lake was fed by the meltwaters running through Cottingley, Harden, Keighley and Bradford (which was combined of several becks). Backfilling of water also created lakes further up in Bradford Dale; one at Fairweather Green was estimated by Kendall to be at least deep. Additionally, water would sometimes reach such heights as to escape naturally away from its traditional route northwards through Bradford Dale. When the Leeds, Bradford and Halifax Junction Railway pushed their railway through Laisterdyke in the east of Bradford, some commented on the cutting that the route took. Kendall claims that this was a natural cutting carved by water spilling over to the south east from the glacial lakes across the area.
When the waters receded, the valley of Bradford Dale was settled first by Palaeolithic then Mesolithic man, who became hunter-gatherers in the wooded valley. When the Romans arrived in Great Britain, the valley was populated with first the Brigantes who eventually gave way to the Anglo-Saxons. This pushed the Celtic peoples to the edges of Bradford Dale (Eccleshill and Wilsden), but also brought Christianity to the area, and when the Church of St Peter was built in what is now Bradford city centre, it was sometimes referred to as St Peters in Bradfordale. The church was only elevated to cathedral status in 1919 by an order signed by King George V, when the Diocese of Bradford was created. St Peters was built as an ordinary 15th century parish church to serve a local community in, what was until the 18th century, the small town of Bradford.The church was built in the 15th century, though it stands on the site of a previous Anglo-Saxon place of worship. As it was just east of the town centre and surrounded by woodland, the church was also known as chapel i' th' wood (chapel in the wood).
The dale was referred to as vallis dé Bradford in the 13th century written Testa de Nevill. In the 14th century, the dale was dotted with cloth-fulling enterprises but the arrival of the Black Death deprived the dale of a third of its inhabitants through the disease. In the same century, further outbreaks of various plagues in 1362 and 1369 and the marauding of the valley by Scots raiders, caused mass migration from the dale, which until that point had seen immigration. In 1642, during the English Civil War, wool bales were hung from the church to protect it from cannon fire and the parish was besieged a year later. The civil wars in the 17th century played little part in the development of the dale, but Bradford suffered afterwards in what was seen as punishment by the monarchy for supporting the Parliamentarian cause. Some actually stated that a period of 50 years of "impeded trade" elapsed which had allowed nearby Leeds to prosper at the expense of Bradford. By the end of that century, wool farming was becoming popular with agriculture being undertaken in the warmer months and wool processing in the colder parts of the year.
By the end of the 18th century, the population of Bradford town numbered less than 3,000 inhabitants and the focus in the area was on agriculture with traditional wool working. At the turn of the 19th century, a map shows Bradford to still be a small market town with all of its becks and streams in the open air. Most of the town is clustered on the north side of Bradford Beck with just two bridges across the beck and the church to the east with no development around it. By the middle of the 19th century, the population of the town had risen to 4,000. In the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, the lower reaches of the dale, especially its eastern edge and central section were worked intensively. Coal mining, quarrying and the installation of a canal, turnpike roads and the railway into Forster Square railway station, stripped this part of the dale of its many woodlands. The rise of the woollen trade, especially in the many new mills in the dale, had increased the population to over 100,000 by 1861, making Bradford the ninth largest town in England. By the 1860s, the area around Manningham was still quite scenic and had "pleasant surroundings". The opening of a railway station at in 1868, precipitated a huge shift in industry and population; in 1871 the census stated that the population of Manningham was just under 20,000, by 1881 that was at 37,000.
The Borough of Bradford was created in 1847, adopting the motto of Labor Omnia Vincit () (known locally as Where there's muck, there's money). This motto was kept when Bradford became a city in 1897.
Transport and water
The City of Bradford developed over some time and sits in a natural bowl with hills to the west, south and east that rise to above sea level. Lewis describes the town of Bradford in 1848 as being "pleasantly situated at the junction of three fertile valleys". The immediate east and south east was moorland until comparatively recently, with names such as Bradford Moor indicating the true nature of the land. Several streams feed into the city (Pitty Beck, Pinch Beck, Hole Bottom Beck, Clayton Beck, Horton Beck, Chellow Dean Beck and two smaller ones near to the city centre) and merge in the city centre leaving Bradford flowing northwards as Bradford Beck. These waters that feed Bradford Beck, along with the geological conditions, formed Bradford Dale. The catchment area for the dale covers over .
As the industrialisation of Bradford was some time off from the Middle Ages, many locations and settlements were not listed as being in Bradford itself, which was quite small, but in Bradford Dale. Bradford Dale has been described as starting above the moors at Thornton, heading east and then curving northwards towards Shipley following the course of the Bradford Beck, with Shipley being described as the head of the dale where the waters from Bradford Beck meet the River Aire. It was along this low land from Shipley to Bradford that a canal (the Bradford Canal) and the first railway to reach Bradford were sited as it was almost level and the low lying land made it ideal for engineering purposes. The same journey in the late 20th century was described as;
Bradford has no major source of water unlike other cities and towns its size in the area, and clean, fresh water was required to wash the wool before spinning and for human consumption. Additionally, water was required to power steam engines in the dale; in 1848 there were 38 mills in the town of Bradford (112 across the parish) and 88 steam engines to power the mills themselves. As far back as 1790, various individuals with money and certain enterprises had joined together to establish a company which could bring fresh water into the town of Bradford from outside its immediate environs. A spring was dammed and had a pipeline installed at Wibsey, which in turn fed a reservoir along Westgate which was capable of holding . Bradford Dale only had the Bradford Beck running through it which was seriously polluted. The Bradford Canal was also badly afflicted with pollutants; at one point, the sulphuretted hydrogen bubbling up through the canal's surface allowed it to be set on fire. This prompted the Bradford Corporation to purchase the Bradford Water Company and import water into the dale by the use of the Nidd Aqueduct. Other water schemes are in place with several reservoirs on the moors to the west feeding water into the system. The reservoirs at Chellow Dean receive water from the Nidd Aqueduct, but also took water from Manywells Spring in Cullingworth. The corporation also installed a sewage plant at Frizinghall, but this proved not to be capable enough to deal with the wastewater needs of the woollen industry and so a pipe was installed from the Frizinghall works to a new plant at Esholt in Airedale.