Bradford is a city in West Yorkshire , England. It became a municipal borough in , received a city charter in and, since the reform , the city status has belonged to the larger City of Bradford metropolitan borough. It had a population of , at the census , making it the second-largest subdivision of the West Yorkshire Built-up Area after Leeds , which is approximately 9 miles 14 km to the east.
The borough had a population of ,, making it the 9th most populous district in England. Historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire , the city grew in 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"; this in turn gave rise to the nicknames "Woolopolis" and "Wool City".
There is a large amount of listed Victorian architecture in the city including the grand Italianate city hall.
From the midth century, deindustrialisation caused the city's textile sector and industrial base to decline and, since then, it has faced similar economic and social challenges to the rest of post-industrial Northern England , including poverty, unemployment and social unrest. The name Bradford derives from the Old English brad and ford the broad ford , which referred to a crossing of the Bradford Beck at Church Bank below the site of Bradford Cathedral , around which a settlement grew in Anglo-Saxon times.
After an uprising in , during William the Conqueror 's Harrying of the North , the manor of Bradford was laid waste, [ 6 ] and is described as such in the Domesday Book of It then became part of the Honour of Pontefract given to Ilbert de Lacy for service to the Conqueror, in whose family the manor remained until During the Wars of the Roses the inhabitants sided with House of Lancaster.
