Theatre and comedy performances planned in new 'pop up' venue in Bradford for City of Culture
Loading Bay will be based in the former Marks & Spencer storage building on Piccadilly
THEATRE performances, comedy nights and an art exhibition looking at Bradford’s textile heritage will be held in a new city centre venue after the latest Cirty of Culture events were announced.
Loading Bay will be based in the former Marks & Spencer storage building on Piccadilly, and will act as one of the main city centre venues for cultural events during 2025.
On Monday the line up of events being held at the venue between now and the end of the year was revealed.
A planning application to convert the building into an arts hub featuring theatres and space for exhibitions, events and gatherings was submitted to Bradford Council last year.
A decision has yet to be made on the application, but a line up of events has now been revealed.
The space will open in March with an exhibition of artwork from BBC TV series Extraordinary Portraits with Bill Bailey (13 Mar – 6 Apr).
The show pairs national artists with sitters to create 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 the venue’s first week.
The building – which has most recently been used by contactors working on Darley Street Market, will also host immersive and site-specific performances including Public Interest (21 – 31 May) by Bradford-based political theatre pioneers Common/Wealth and commissioned by Bradford 2025.
The show takes audiences on a journey from club night to courtroom, with true-life stories from young people – and a sound-score featuring drill, bassline, grime, afrobeat and house.
Commissioned by Bradford 2025, The Javaad Alipoor Company will bring contemporary theatre to Loading Bay with the world premiere of Elmet (October 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 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 acclaimed new show from Dibby Theatre and Nathaniel J Hall (9 Apr); and asses.masses, an epic video game for live audience created by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim (5 Apr).
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 (17 Apr- 11 May).
An exhibition exploring Polish and Ukrainian communities in Bradford and beyond, Tu i Tam / Tyt i Tam (respectively, Polish and Ukrainian for ‘Here and There’), including many photographs by Bradford’s Tim Smith, takes over the gallery floor from 3 – 27 July.
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.
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. Produced by Modus Arts, it 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.
Daniel Bates, Executive Director, Bradford 2025, comments: “UK City of Culture offers a once in a lifetime opportunity to create lasting change in Bradford, through significant investment in the district’s cultural infrastructure. Bradford has many excellent performance venues and galleries, and we’re excited to add to the creative landscape by repurposing a derelict warehouse in the city as a pop-up arts space.”