Stanley Gordon Wardley (13 January 1901 – 15 February 1965) was a British civil engineer and urban planner. He was City Engineer for

Bradford Bradford is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in West Yorkshire, England. It became a municipal borough in 1847, received a city charter in 1897 and, since the Local Government Act 1972, 1974 reform, the city status in the United Kingdo ...

during the major redevelopment of Bradford city centre in the 1950s and 1960s. Although generally favourably received during his lifetime, his reshaping of Bradford has since been extensively criticised and undone in large part.

Biography

Wardley was born on 13 January 1901 in

Hendon Hendon is an urban area in the London Borough of Barnet, northwest London northwest of Charing Cross. Hendon was an ancient Manorialism, manor and parish in the county of Middlesex and a former borough, the Municipal Borough of Hendon; it has ...

. He was appointed City Engineer and Surveyor for

in January 1946. Wardley House, the building that houses the National Media Museum among other things, was named after him.

Redevelopment

Wardley's vision was for a new city 'with provision for a continuous self-regulating flow of traffic', and the buildings that were erected were

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

. The local sandstone was rejected as a building material. Many much-loved buildings were demolished to make way for the 'city of the future', and there was eventually considerable opposition. J. B. Priestley and

David Hockney David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English Painting, painter, Drawing, draughtsman, Printmaking, printmaker, Scenic design, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considere ...

were among those who protested in vain against the demolition of the Swan Arcade in 1962. In 2005 one of the icons of Wardley's redevelopment, Forster House, was demolished as part of the 'Broadway development' (see

Forster Square, Bradford Forster Square was a prominent and famous landmark in central Bradford, until being "redeveloped", i.e. effectively demolished, in the (2006) Broadway, Bradford, Broadway development. Its name is remembered in Bradford Forster Square railway sta ...

). Other recent changes have seen reversals of 1960s planning in Bradford, e.g. filling in of pedestrian under-passes and promotion of traffic-calming measures, and attempts to promote residential use of the city centre, as opposed to 1960s zoning.

Biography

Redevelopment

References

See also