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Industrial Growth

Claremont

Birthplace

Bradford in the 1860s

Schooldays

Childhood

Built on Wool

Delius and Co.

Business In Decline

Chronology

Homage To Delius

This view of Bradford from Cliffe Quarry looks across the town, over the canal, Midland Mills and the railway to the recently completed Town Hall and the Wool Exchange. Illustration from the Illustrated London News, 20 September 1873.

The 1860s and 1870s, when Frederick Delius was growing up in Bradford, were times of great change in the town. It was a period of enormous prosperity and vast economic growth brought about largely by the expansion of the textile trade and the success of the German and other European merchants who had moved into the town from Manchester and Leeds.

Emerging from the uncontrolled growth of ugly factories, mean overcrowded houses and dirty unpaved streets of previous decades, Bradford struggled to develop into a proud modern town with wide new streets and magnificent new buildings that were designed to reflect its importance as the world centre of the woollen and worsted trade.