Student days

After I'd walked round Lister Park, I suddenly took it into my head to walk down Manningham Lane towards Bradford city centre. It was, in many ways, a nostalgia trip, as I passed two places I once used to live, as a student and then when I returned to Bradford in my late twenties. Even in those days (1970s) it was a bit of a run-down area, full of student bedsits. These days it is even more sad, with many empty properties, a lot of litter and decay. The once-grand Victorian villas, former homes of wealthy Victorian industrialists like Titus Salt, now need a good deal of work to bring them up to a decent standard again, though it could be a lovely area if it had enough money spent on it.

One street with particular potential is Apsley Crescent (above). (I believe it was the birthplace of an old school friend of mine, who reads this blog. She may be interested!) It is supposedly a conservation area, having some large and at one time beautiful properties, built in the 1850s in the Classical and Italianate styles that were popular in Victorian Bradford.

Most of them are now either empty, used as commercial premises or broken up into flats and bedsits. The Manningham area is one of the most culturally diverse in Bradford, with many residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, Afro-Caribbeans, Eastern Europeans, and still some students living there (though many now live in rather stylish modern blocks in the city centre, of a luxurious standard that would have been unthinkable in my student days!)