Any sensible UK city chosen to be City of Culture starts its celebrations in the early summer! Bradford was no exception and, in May 2025, music and voices were the focus of two major art projects. The phrase 'song of summer' rang in my head as I visited the city. Song of Summer was a film by Ken Russell, broadcast on the BBC in 1968, which told the story of the last years of the Bradford-born composer Frederick Delius, and I have never forgotten it.

Frederick Delius at the Queen's Hall, London

Bradford was chosen to be City of Culture for many reasons, one of which is that it became the world's first UNESCO City of Film in 2009.

Perhaps the most important reason for Bradford being chosen is that nearly a quarter of the population of Bradford is under 20, and it is one of the most diverse communities in the UK. Bradford's music, film, textiles, architecture and food are joyfully reinterpreted throughout the year.

The celebrations bring the city's history close to its present creativity. In the nineteenth century, Bradford was the wool capital of the world, and many of its buildings reflect that wealth, including Little Germany, which has the highest density of listed buildings in the country.

Lubna Chowdhary has created ceramic models of several of Bradford's buildings from its wealthy past, including the city's grand city art gallery, Cartwright Hall, where the Turner Prize exhibition will be staged later in 2025.

A new public sculpture by Saad Qureshi, Tower of Now, commissioned for Bradford 2025, brings together a rich mix of international architectural styles and is sited amongst new planting opposite Bradford's Town Hall. Until 2025, a dual carriageway cut through this area but now a new city square has been created in the city where Qureshi grew up.

Bradford's most famous artist is David Hockney, whose work is celebrated in The Hockney Gallery at Cartwright Hall. One of his works in the collection is on loan from his old school, Bradford Grammar.

Rural land makes up 65% of Bradford District, and many of the celebrations in 2025 will be spread across the area. Haworth, the village home to the world's three most famous sister-writers – Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontё – is central to Bradford 2025.

Emily's portrait by her brother Patrick will return to the Parsonage on loan from the National Portrait Gallery during the year.

Haworth is the starting and finishing point for a visit to a quartet of new sculptures called Wild Uplands on the moors above the town. One work looks very movingly at the problem of site-specific work being imposed upon a natural landscape.

Maherunnisa Asad has flown in dozens of butterflies, made of pietra dura – inlaid marble and gemstones – made in Peshawar by local and displaced Afghan artisans. Pakistan and Bradford are deeply linked and here the butterflies merge fragility and robustness, visits and permanence, and the local and universal.

The four works in Wild Upland are also linked by an immersive sound walk, 'Earth & Sky', commissioned in partnership with Opera North. Using geolocation technology via a phone app, the work develops as visitors walk through Penistone Park, with sounds triggered by their journey. The sounds include field recordings from the local area, poetry and excerpts from the work of Frederick Delius.

The summer season was launched by Jeremy Deller, Charles Hazlewood and the Paraorchestra, who created The Bradford Progress, bringing music from the South Asian tradition to punk to primary school choirs, klezmer and more. The event started at dawn with Handel being played at the ancient Cow and Calf rocks above Ilkley.

Throughout the day, the music progressed through Bradford, resounding in a shopping centre, the canal, a cemetery and parks. One of these parks was created at Saltaire, a model village created by Titus Salt to enable his mill workers to live and work in better conditions than the slums of mid-nineteenth-century Bradford. The climax was 400 musicians playing in dissonance and harmony in the centre of the city.

Salts Mill brings together so many elements of Bradford's culture. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, bought in 1987, the year after cloth production ceased, by the late Jonathan Silver. There, Silver, a friend of Hockney, housed one of the largest permanent collections of the Bradford artist's work. Commerce and culture sit side by side, and the Peace Museum has moved here.

The American artist Ann Hamilton was commissioned to produce a work for the vast top floor of the mill. Working with curators June Hill and Jennifer Hallam, her installation draws on the origins of the textile processes that once filled the huge space. A smell of raw wool lingers.

The artist uses song, printed word, cloth, raw and woven wool in 'a work of memory and imagining'. Visitors are invited to write letters to the future, which are then read out during the exhibition. One room, the 'Spinning Room', holds a vast sky-blue curtain weighted by stones, and sounds come from the old horn speakers previously used to make announcements to hundreds of workers.

Another room is hung with giant 'portraits' of tiny hand-painted figures that Hamilton found in an antique shop within the mill. These are called fèves, from the French for dried beans, and were originally baked in cakes made for the Feast of Kings on 6th January – whoever found a bean in their slice of cake became king or queen for the day.

In the final room, old turntables play the songs and whistled tunes composed during sessions with local groups, including the Titus Salt School. One high window stands open, allowing a glimpse over to the hills where the sheep grazed, starting the cycle of wool production like a traditional song that repeats, and never disappears from collective memory. We Will Sing is a title that evokes all the workers of the past and the community today, in a song for summer and beyond.

Gill Hedley, writer and curator

See the events programme for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture