Wondering around the centre of Bradford, I spent some time staring at the huge City Hall (designed as the Town Hall in 1869 and completed in 1873), trying to take it all in. The tall central clock tower, the grand iron-gated entrance, the rows of Gothic arches, the decoration, the heraldic shields, the many of statues of kings and queens, there was so much for eye and brain to take on board. Here was a building that was the equal of other Victorian town halls I’d seen on previous northern forays – Gothic pinnacled Manchester, classically columned Leeds, for example. It may well be that the choice of the Gothic style was in part due to the wish of the town’s authorities and their architects Lockwood and Mawson to do something different from the gigantic town hall at Leeds. The influence of John Ruskin’s eloquent boosting of Gothic would also have been in influence – he had lectured in Bradford a few years earlier. The tower, modelled on Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, and the abundance of carving, certainly feel Ruskinian.
The range of architectural detail made it feel perhaps still more engaging than either Leeds or Manchester town halls, and I was absorbed in examining the statues of monarchs – Elizabeth I and Victoria at either side of the main doorway, a run of others up above, all larger than life-size, when I became aware of a man standing next to me. ‘Can you see who they’ve put up there?’ he said, and there was surprise in his voice. ‘Well, pretty much everyone,’ I answered. ‘Look next to Charles I. There’s Oliver Cromwell. How did they get away with that?’ The man who presided over regicide and became the leader of England’s only republic seemed an odd – even outrageous – choice to my interlocutor.
Thinking about this afterwards, it didn’t seem so strange. From the late-17th to the early-19th century, Cromwell had widely been regarded as a nasty piece of work – a hypocrite who had mouthed Puritan religious views and denounced (and obliterated) the power of the monarchy, only to seize power himself and wield it ruthlessly. In the Victorian period, however, thanks in large part to the advocacy of Thomas Carlyle,* Cromwell had been rehabilitated as a sincere Protestant, whose religious beliefs had underpinned his actions, who had thwarted tyranny, and who fought, in a way Victorians could understand, on God’s side.
Whether we agree or not with Carlyle’s view of Cromwell (or the extent to which we admire the monarchs whose statues surround his) matters little. The extraordinary array of 7 foot tall statues is not just impressive. It’s an attempt to put the building and the place it represents, I think, on a footing of national importance. Let other town or city halls have statues of local bigwigs or rulers who had a specific local connection. Bradford proclaims its connection with the entire country, and through monarchs such as the prominently displayed Elizabeth and Victoria, with British imperialism and the world. So rich was Bradford’s cloth trade, and so wide-reaching, that this was a connection that was to the Victorians entirely credible.
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* Thomas Carlyle’s influential Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches came out in 1845.
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