BRADFORD 2025: Loading Bay delivers amazing pop-up arts space - FIRST LOOK

This amazing new pop-up art space, an artistic cargo hub, providing much needed performance, rehearsal and exhibition space, has been launched as part of Bradford 2025 UK City Of Culture.

And ahead of it opening this week we got a sneak peek look inside, writes Graham Walker.

WHAT’S ON: For Loading Bay’s full 2025 line-up of events and tickets visit bradford2025.co.uk/programme/loading-bay.

Loading Bay has taken over an empty Marks and Spencer storage depot on Duke Street to bring a Bradford 2025 buzz to the heart of the city, to boosting the cultural offering in Yorkshire and beyond.

Featuring two performance areas and a gallery spread across three atmospheric floors, it will host music concerts and exhibitions to immersive theatre and even live video games.

Loading Bay plans to live up to its name as an arts warehouse, loading up the city’s cultural momentum with creativity by the pallet-load to deliver an unforgettable year.

The temporary venue is being programmed and operated by Bradford 2025 until December - but there is already a desire for the new space to become a permanent legacy.

Shanaz Gulzar, Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture Creative Director, explained the venue is running through to the end of this year. But she said: We'd love to see it have a life beyond 2025.

"For us, it's about responding to our need this year, we also recognise the need that this responds to for Bradford's creative and cultural sector, also nationally, for shows to come to tour to Bradford who couldn't come if this venue didn't exist."

Shanaz added: "We realised, when we were developing our programme that we needed a space that could answer our needs, but also become something that would grow the culture sector here in Bradford and become an offer for national theatre gigs and shows to come to Bradford, that haven't had an opportunity to come here before."

She says Bradford 2025 is already looking like a huge success, just three months in.

"It feels very much like it's living up to expectations. It's doing so much more than we could have hoped for. Even at this stage, our shows are selling out, which is absolutely fantastic. We have developed a real fan base and people are interested and want to be a part of the program. We've just done a call out for Railway Children, to have a young people's cast of 15 people. We had over 500 people apply. That in itself just shows from being audiences, participants, engaging with the work - people are actually wanting to be a part of it.

"What this year is doing for Bradford already is raising our aspirations, helping us as Bradfordians to fall back in love with ourselves. Nationally, it's reframing our story, demonstrating who we are - the contemporary, modern, young, diverse city of the UK."

Loading Bay opens with an exhibition of artwork from Extraordinary Portraits with Bill Bailey (13 Mar – 6 Apr) in partnership with the BBC and Chatterbox Media, following the new series airing on BBC One. Extraordinary Portraits with Bill Bailey pairs national artists with extraordinary sitters to create breathtaking portraits that highlight their personal and powerful stories.

Opening Loading Bay’s performance space, Loaded Laughs (14 Mar) is the first in a comedy series which will run throughout the year. The first event will be headlined by Harriet Dyer and Don Biswas, alongside rising comedians from Bradford presented by BFD Comedy. Cabaret from RuPaul’s Drag Race series 5 winner in Ginger Johnson’s Fun House (15 Mar), and a double-bill concert by folk luminaries Lady Maisery with O’Hooley and Tidow (16 Mar) complete Loading Bay’s first week.

Pushing artistic boundaries, Loading Bay will present immersive and site-specific performances, including the world-premiere of Public Interest (21–31 May), by Bradford’s own political theatre pioneers Common/Wealth, commissioned by Bradford 2025. This theatrical experience aims to capture what it means to be young and criminalised in the UK today and will take audiences on a journey from club night to courtroom and beyond, with true-life stories from young people, underscored by drill, bassline, grime, afrobeat and house music.

Director Evie Manning, who is also Co-Artistic Director of Common/Wealth, is not only preparing to celebrate the birth of the new venue - she's expecting her second child just two days before Public Interest makes it's debut.

She said: "It's a bit of a challenge, but actually, in some ways, it's exciting.

"Loading Bay is quite an extraordinary space. It's really important for Bradford to have a space like it, because we've just never had anything of this scale in the center of town. It can be transformed in lots of different ways. I really hope that the legacy of this building is that we can keep it and keep using it, because it is absolutely extraordinary."

She said of Public Interest: "I think without the support of Bradford 2025 we wouldn't have ever been able to make anything as ambitious. Lots of young people from Bradford are performing in it, with music performed by rappers and DJs. It's looking at how young people tell their own story, part music video, part political theater..

"It's really important that young people who are in the show get to be part of something that's very elevated. They're all getting paid, so it allows them to see themselves as professionals and that the creative sector is a world they can enter into.

A captivating exhibition exploring Polish and Ukrainian communities in Bradford and beyond, Tu i Tam / Tyt i Tam (respectively, Polish and Ukrainian for ‘Here and There’), will feature many photographs by Bradford’s Tim Smith and takes over the gallery floor fromJuly 3 to 27.

Tim said of Loading Bay: "When I came here six months ago, it was a semi-derelict building and it's just wonderful to see it transformed into an arts centre. It's amazing. This is the kind of place that Bradford City centre has been crying out for, for years.

"The exhibition I'm involved in helping to produce help to explain how and why Polish and Ukrainian people have come to settle in this city of ours for the past 80 years. There are so many extraordinary stories."

Other Loading Bay 2025 highlights will see The Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC)bring ambitious and experimental contemporary theatre to Loading Bay with the world premiere of Elmet (October 2025), commissioned by Bradford 2025. Based on the 2017 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel by Fiona Mozley, the production is conceived and directed by TJAC’s founding Artistic Director, Bradford-raised Javaad Alipoor. Elmet is an epic northern noir - an explosive story of family, revenge and the ultimate price of holding on to your dignity – set in the wilds of the West Riding.

Further events for Loading Bay’s 200-capacity seated theatre space include Blackeyed Theatre’s touring production of Dracula (21 – 23 Mar); Toxic, the critically-acclaimed new show from Dibby Theatre and Nathaniel J Hall (First Time, It’s A Sin) (9 Apr); and asses.masses, an epic video game for live audience created by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim (5 Apr). On the 40th anniversary of the fire, LUNG’s award-winning play The 56 pays tribute to the fans who lost their lives at Valley Parade in 1985 (11 May) whilst Language: no broblem (17 June) is a theatrical journey into multilingualism from Marah Haj Hussein - drag icon Wet Mess brings their wild and extraordinary cabaret TESTO (11 - 12 June), and Figs in Wigs present Little Wimmin, a cosmically catastrophic adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel (24 - 25 April).

Exhibitions commissioned by Bradford 2025 for Loading Bay’s gallery include Frontline 1984/1985, the first exhibition of work by local photographer Victor Wedderburn, which brings Black Bradford in the 1980s vividly back to life (18 Apr- 11 May).

Unspun Stories (26 - 30 Mar) is an immersive digital portrayal of Bradford’s late 20th century textile heritage, created by 509 Arts and the Colour Foundry. The installation blends archive film footage, audio recordings, projections and soundscapes with recorded interviews from those who worked in the mills during the ’70s and ’80s, collected by 509 Arts as part of their Lost Mills project. The result is an evocative journey back to a pivotal moment in Bradford’s history – just as it fades from memory.

In Tape Letters (23 May – 15 Jun), artist Wajid Yaseen looks back on life in Bradford for new arrivals in the days before technology connected us all. This free exhibition, produced by Modus Arts, unearths the practice of recording messages on cassette and sending them to friends and family, popular with Pakistani migrants to the UK from the 1960s to the ’80s.

READ MORE:

RISE for magical year, says Bradford UK City of Culture's Shanaz Gulzar - PODCAST

Alhambra Theatre to play leading role with blockbuster year celebrating UK City Of Culture

LISTEN: Check out Shanaz Gulzar’s exclusive Big Interview podcast chat about Bradford City Of Culture with Graham Walker below or - CLICK HERE.

For more information about the events for Bradford 2025 and to buy tickets visit: https://bradford2025.co.uk/whats-on/