Hotels in Bradford

Hotels in Bradford

Hotels in Bradford, England are often required for accommodation in the city. Some may need to stay in the city for tourism to see the city to explore the culture, entertainment, sports and scenery of the city. Some tourists may want a large hotel or a small hotel. Some may prefer a luxury hotel or a cheaper hotel. Some may want a hotel that has good parking.

Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Bradford rose to prominence during the 19th century as an international centre of textile manufacture, particularly wool. It was a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution, and amongst the earliest industrialised settlements, rapidly becoming the "wool capital of the world" The area's access to a supply of coal, iron ore and soft water facilitated the growth of Bradford's manufacturing base, which, as textile manufacture grew, led to an explosion in population and was a stimulus to civic investment; Bradford has fine Victorian architecture including the grand Italianate City Hall.

The name Bradford is derived from the "broad ford" at Church Bank (below the site of Bradford Cathedral) around which a settlement had begun to appear before the time of the Norman Conquest ("Bradeford" in the Domesday book of 1086). The ford crossed the stream called Bradford Beck.

Bradford, for long a centre of the West Riding wool industry, was one of the many English towns which became prosperous during the Industrial Revolution. Bradford's textile industry dates back as far as the 13th century, but it was not until the 19th century that it became world-famous. Wool was imported in vast quantities for the manufacture of worsted cloth in which Bradford specialised. Other fibres were also processed, including alpaca. Yorkshire had plentiful supplies of soft water, which was needed in the cleaning of raw wool, and locally mined coal provided the power that the industry needed. Sandstone, Bradford's local stone, was an excellent resource for the building of the mills, and the large population of West Yorkshire provided a readily available workforce.

Unusually for a major city, Bradford is not built on any substantial body of water. The ford from which it takes its name (Broad-Ford) was a crossing of the stream called Bradford Beck. The beck rises in the Pennine hills to the west of the city, and is swelled by tributaries such as Horton Beck, Westbrook, Bowling Beck and Eastbrook. At the site of the original ford, just below the present Bradford Cathedral, it turns north, and flows more or less straight towards the River Aire at Shipley.

The beck's course through the city centre is entirely underground, and was mostly so by the middle of the 19th century. On the 1852 Ordnance Survey map of Bradford it is visible as far as Sun Bridge, at the end of Tyrrell Street, and then again from beside the railway station at the bottom of Kirkgate. On the 1906 Ordnance Survey, it disappears at Tumbling Hill Street, off Thornton Road, and first appears again north of Cape Street, off Valley Road, though there are further culverts as far as Queens Road. This is substantially the position today Bradford Beck is now a central element of the Alsop plan to regenerate the city centre. 'The Bowl' is an ambitious project to open up the beck and create a huge pool to act as the pivotal point of the new city centre.

The Bradford Canal, built in 1774, took its water from Bradford Beck and its tributaries. This supply was often inadequate to feed the locks, and the polluted state of the canal led to its temporary closure in 1866: the canal was closed in the early 20th century.

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