The Bradford Railway Heritage Project: An Opportunity to Relive Memories and Stories
Published: 9th February 2026
Jonathan Crewdson, director of The Neighbourhood Project CIC, explains how a community-led heritage project is capturing first-hand memories to tell the story of Bradford’s lost railways.
Our organisation has been serving the people of Bradford in West Yorkshire since 2018 when we were incorporated as a community interest company. Our mission from the start has been to promote neighbourhood identity and activity: encouraging residents to identify with the villages, suburbs and housing estates they live on, and to become active as volunteers or running their own community projects to benefit those neighbourhoods. In recent years, our focus has been on the history of these places, supporting residents to carry out their own research or engage with us through ‘memory banks’ where they would meet and share their stories of how life used to be.
We applied to BALH to run a project looking at the lost railways of Bradford, and there are many. No less than sixteen local stations, two large goods depots and four lines have disappeared from the city, the bulk being dismantled during the post-war period. Whilst there are books which discuss the histories of these lost stations and lines, these are practically all written by people who had not lived in Bradford, did not visit these sites and used secondary sources.
With all our historical research activities, we have strived to use primary sources to paint more accurate picture of what life was like, and we were determined to do no less with this initiative. Our BALH grant enabled us to run two ‘memory banks’ in the city, one focusing on the lost stations and lines to the north of Bradford and the second looking at the south. Both were successful in attracting current and former residents who could remember the stations, and more importantly they were able to explain to us why they were important to their lives and what positive impact they had on them and their communities. We found the groups that met at each event interacted with one another, generating far more conversation and stimulating more memories than if we had simply interviewed people on a one-to-one basis.
Our plan is now to take this material and produce a set of short videos about each lost station. We hope at least the first of these will be ready by spring and they will be free to watch on our Facebook page and YouTube channel. We will share more information about these in due course.
Jonathan Crewdson: Director
The Neighbourhood Project CIC
