New Bradford arts venue Loading Bay opens this week
Loading Bay – the former storage building for Marks & Spencer – will officially open with a comedy night and portrait exhibition.
A BUILDING that for decades was used to store clothing for a city centre department store has been transformed into a new arts venue for Bradford’s City of Culture year.
Loading Bay – the former storage building for Marks & Spencer – will officially open this week with a comedy night and portrait exhibition.
And over the coming months the venue will host theatre productions, photography showcases and immersive history experiences.
At a tour of the building today one of the team behind Bradford 2025 said Loading Bay “shows what you can do with an empty building.”
Based on Piccadilly and Duke Street, the large building used to be storage for M&S when the store was based on Darley Street.
After M&S moved to Broadway, the storage building was purchased by Bradford Council along with the former department store. It was used as a base by the team that demolished the store and built Darley Street Market in its place.
It has now become the main venue for city centre events during 2025, and opens its doors to the public for its first shows and exhibitions on Thursday.
The huge building includes a 200-seat theatre, gallery, basement events space that will be used for live performances and artist workshops.
The first exhibition to be held at the gallery in Loading Bay will be an exhibit of works from the TV series Extraordinary Portraits with Bill Bailey.
It will be followed by Loaded Laughs on Friday – the first in a series of comedy nights in the theatre space.
A play looking at the Bradford City Fire, an exhibition looking at Bradford’s Ukranian and Polish Communities and an immersive multimedia exhibition looking at Bradford’s textile mill history are among the events that will be held in the venue over 2025.
Dan Bates, Executive Director of Bradford 2025, said the space would offer far more opportunities for local artists.
He said the new arts space was created in just five months, adding: “It is important we can show what you can do with an empty building.”
Jenny Harris, Programme Director for Bradford 2025, said: “Bradford is often missed out on the touring map. The Alhambra is great for large scale events, but Bradford needed a small or medium scale venue, otherwise it gets left off tours.”
She said as well as hosting touring acts, the venue will provide space for artists and performers from Bradford and the wider West Yorkshire area. She added: “We’ve had an amazing response and great ticket sales already.”
She said some highlights of the programme include The 56 – a theatre piece set to stories of the Bradford City Fire and Unspun Stories that she said: “Looks at the heritage of Bradford’s mills and stories of the people who are still alive who worked there, possibly the last generation who will be able to tell this story.”
The Local Democracy Reporting Service asked Shanaz Gulzar, Creative Director of Bradford 2025, whether the new venue was always part of the City of Culture plans.
She said: “As the programme developed it became more and more clear as we looked at locations for events that we needed somewhere to host a number of different events and exhibitions.
“A small and mid-scale venue like this was missing from Bradford.
“It is important to have somewhere like this in the heart of the city centre. It brings people into the city centre to see what we have to offer.”
She pointed out that the venue has been able to attract national start like drag king Wet Mess, who will come to Loading Bay after selling out shows in Battersea Arts Centre. Bradford will be the only other venue they visit as part of their tour apart from Cardiff.
But it will also provide a new space for local acts to play to bigger crowds.
When asked if the venue will remain open after 2025, Ms Gulzar said: “We’d like to see it stay, it is an amazing space. It is a proper arts venue that has been created in five months. Every modern city should have a cultural office like Loading Bay.”
For the line up of events being hosted at the venue visit https://bradford2025.co.uk/programme/loading-bay/