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GREEN SPACE Images by Gerard Liston Words by David Dobson

After receiving an ‘Excellence in Place Regeneration’ award, Bradford Council stated that its ‘greener spaces included the expansion of Norfolk Gardens with its beautiful and climate resilient landscaping and planting, increasing bio-diversity and making the area a much safer, greener and more inviting place for people to spend time.’1 On the other hand, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation advises that ‘the success of a particular public space is not solely in the hands of the architect, urban designer or town planner; it relies also on people adopting, using and managing the space’.2 It is recognised that urban green spaces can benefit people of all ages and that targeted action to reduce inequalities in access to high-quality green space can maximise the health and wellbeing benefits of nature in cities.3 There is also growing evidence that access to green spaces could provide a remedy for increasing levels of loneliness in our society.4 The redevelopment of Norfolk Gardens is set in the context of what has been described as one of the biggest regeneration sites in the UK.5 The garden was opened in April 2025, at the start of a year when Bradford celebrated being UK City of Culture. This project aims to look beyond the politics and economics of regeneration and provide glimpses of ordinary people who, through the course of one year, used this new green space in their city centre.

The architect, the planner, the sociologist, the economist, the philosopher or the politician cannot out of nothingness create new forms and relations. Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Right to the City’

1 https://news.bradford.gov.uk/press-releases/8f714a53-ac17-447e-978e-8cacc423bb86/bradford-council-scity-centretransformation-project-wins-another-award 2 https://www.jrf.org.uk/neighbourhoods-and-communities/the-social-value-of-public-spaces 3 https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/who-benefits-from-nature-in-cities-socialinequalities-in-access-to-urban-green-and-blue-spaces-across-europe 4 https://www.bps.org.uk/blog/psychology-matters-role-nature-tackling-loneliness 5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czr8y6zzlp4o

i. A contract for a city’s geology, new layers of Earth bounded by Jacob’s Well, Goitside, Little Germany, and resting upon the tale of a tongueless boar and vanished worsteds, ask: are we as a nation to have any flower garden at all?

Pause a while, take the head of a poppy between your fingers, lend the hem of your coat to seed and burr as you pass on your way to St. George’s Hall or hurrying, perhaps, to the station,

and wonder, did the developers mean for you to bear thistles to the train, or leave a mote of pollen in the town hall, turn to garden all that was ruin? A wall of daisies and cow parsley under Gothic loom of Britannia House, where once, years ago, cracked mosaic tiles caught the shadows of the housing office,

silhouettes of passing buses from the Interchange cast by a rugged stone sundial now a flowerbed to the new. No archaic humanisms to skewer and chew on in this heterotopia of ex-mills and wildflowers, the fog of rhetoric ours to clear and dissonant landscaping not for its own ends but what we do within it, conditions of possibility sown like seeds. 11

ii. To ask how we live in these spaces, how we make them ours, is imperative; for who is not, in one way

or another, a utopian? Cabbage whites and tortoiseshells unfurl tubular mouths for cowslips, and sandals slip from weary feet by the benches, a space for quiet in this chaotic agglomeration where once only cacophony seemed possible. I read of yearning urbanisms in the sun, how the city figures as archipelago and space a brooding sea between its islands. Lounge just long enough against new birches for bark to scale your shoulders in silver, and this sea might calm until we are no more its engulfed lonely isles but some reclaimed and convivial Doggerland, dredged and hauled from the abyss to bask under northern sky. 18

iii. Processes of commoning, of opening, of thinking the city into being and counting bees on thyme and spurge. Spring, reflections in rain-slick pavement: docks for electric bicycles chrome ramparts for lavender, blurs of feet in ceaseless motion from markets, from Wool Exchange, the pub at Jacob’s Well where they’ve perfected pie and peas for a pittance, and this meadow theirs not to be bought or sold, nor represented in glossy plans but in ever more song.

iv. Wooded, once, and beset by bristle and tusk, no thynge so wylde now to be slain but the refusal of an After, where common pasture rattles the stabilisers adorning a boy’s bike like those Romantic images of Iceni chariots, and skaters luxuriate in teasing boards to the perfect leap by the Tower of Now. The Tower, baking in July sun, embedded in Norfolk Gardens like a dart, stands rigid in dedication to a certain temporality. This new intrusion of developers to the city’s archaeology is dissonant:

is Now the only space we have?

The poppies, cow parsley, birds foot trefoil, will wither, revive, wither again,

Channing Way and Bridge Street will bear the rush of autumn in sludge of fallen leaves and we will go on being

here:

Why this insistence upon the immediate? These Gardens strata, we who walk, rest, play within them likewise: leaving objects of devotion in always-forming crust studded with picnic glassware, knitting needles to be excavated in trenches yet undug or tangled in roots of vetch and meadowsweet below some future punnet square. 39

v. Remember: Development, like philosophy, can achieve nothing more than itself. Midsummer and the Gardens ours to inhabit, (that old practice), to dwell, to breathe in the thick honey-scent of escallonia before

the heatwave

to lie back on municipal long-barrows sprouting clover, cranesbill, red and white campion, to pause by the cherry trees Shedding blossom into your hair and know, with Priestley, that this was always a city of travellers.

Gerard Liston is a freelance social documentary photographer living in Haworth, near Bradford. His work often focuses on local subjects to explore global issues, including climate change, migration and the natural environment. Community venues from Halifax to Dunbar have exhibited his work, which is usually shared as free-to-view and free-to-share online photobooks

David Dobson is a writer from Bradford, where he is a co-organiser of the poetry reading series More Song. His debut poetry pamphlet, Lea, is forthcoming from Seedlings in 2026, and his work can be found in magazines and journals including 14, Shearsman, Mnemotope and others, as well as the short fiction anthology Carnival at the End of the World. Quotations from the following books are sprinkled throughout the poem: Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, (Duke University Press, 2006) Octavia Hill, Our Common Land & The Future of Our Commons, (Renard Press, 2024) [1877] Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (trans. ed. Eleonore Kofman & Elizabeth Lebas), (Blackwell, 1996) J.B. Priestley, English Journey, (Penguin, 1977) [1934] Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, (Zed Books, 2016)

Gerard Liston David Dobson