Filmed in 1961, Shipley 1961 constitutes a part of the C.H. Wood collection, filmed by either C.H. or David Wood, both of whom were involved in the film and photography company after which the collection is named. This collection consists of a variety of different types of film, made for a variety of different reasons: industrial documentaries, documentation of local events, educational titles, and movies of the Wood family at home, amongst others. The collection is vast, and the timeframe...

Filmed in 1961, Shipley 1961 constitutes a part of the C.H. Wood collection, filmed by either C.H. or David Wood, both of whom were involved in the film and photography company after which the collection is named. This collection consists of a variety of different types of film, made for a variety of different reasons: industrial documentaries, documentation of local events, educational titles, and movies of the Wood family at home, amongst others. The collection is vast, and the timeframe over which it was originally filmed makes it an invaluable resource for understanding Yorkshire over several decades. Other examples of the C.H. Wood collection include Crikey!, a road safety information film made in 1947 and Semi-Final Seven Aside/Tennis, a film documenting a 1939 Rugby League semi-final between Halifax and Leeds.

Formed in the 1920s by Charles Harold Wood, the son of noted gas engineer Charles Wood Sr., who worked on Moscow’s gas system following the 1917 Leninist revolution, C.H. Wood specialised in aerial photography. Employed by Pathé and Gaumont as a cameraman, Wood also worked on the infra-red lenses used by Dambusters during the Second World War. The company was later taken over by C.H. Wood’s sons David and Malcolm Wood, before closing in 2002, and the collection consists of approximately 2500 film and video elemetns.

Shipley 1961 documents the changing faces of high streets in the Bradford area –the construction and opening of Shipley’s Arndale Centre is shown, as well as a number of other building sites.  The shadows of demolished industrial sites and half-standing chimneys hang heavy over the sepia optimism of the film, however, and thus we see an area shift its focus away from industry and the then-flailing British textile industry, to large-scale shopping projects and consumer goods.  With that in mind, Shipley 1961 seems to serve as a documentation of life within the greater Bradford municipality and the ways in which its high streets are changing, but particularly the Shipley Arndale Centre. C.H. Wood would revisit this topic in the later Arndale in Partnership, a promotional film for the Arndale developments made in 1966, and ‘Arndale Developments – Drumchapel Opening’, a similar film from 1964.

The Shipley Arndale Centre features prominently in the film. While the name has lost some of the notoriety it may have once had, as old Arndale Centres across the country rush to change their name and hide the trademark Arndale brutalist architecture behind more acceptable modernist facades, the name is central to the changing face of British high streets and the increasing influence of American culture on everyday British life.  Conceived by baking magnate Arnold Hagenbach and estate agent Sam Chippendale, who combined their names to form the portmanteau ‘Arndale’, the two men saw an opportunity to introduce American-style shopping malls and capitalise on the fact that the British had, allegedly, ‘never had it so good’.

The Arndales had their share of controversy however; criticism often surrounded the fact that older, often Victorian buildings, were demolished to make way for the shopping centres, mostly built in the style of then-vogue brutalism; the Bradford Arndale, for example, replaced the Swan Arcade, a building in the Italianate style, in which a young J. B. Priestly had worked as a clerk. While contemporary criticism focused on the actual act of demolishing buildings, brutalism has since become synonymous to many with the large number of unfashionable urban residential tower blocks that were built in the style, and thus with the poverty and crime that the national media often associates them with.

Since 1961, The Shipley Arndale has changed name, becoming The Shipley Shopping Centre. The Bradford Arndale has also since been rebranded, and is now known as the Kirkgate Centre. This is one of the Arndales to undergo the least refurbishment; the indoor lighting was altered to shift the focus away from highlighting the shop fronts within to providing a consistent overall light level. Elsewhere, the Manchester Arndale underwent almost complete redevelopment after the 1996 Manchester bombing by the IRA, and the Wandsworth Arndale received refurbishment after being branded "one of London’s great architectural disasters".

Large-scale, American-style shopping centres have since become the norm however, with examples such as Bluewater in Kent and Lakeside in Essex following the Arndale example.  As more and more Arndales rebrand, it is likely there will come a time when the only aspect of the once-mighty chain still standing will be references to it in culture: ‘The Royle Family’ and ‘A Bit Of Fry And Laurie’ both refer to it as a familiar beacon of naff suburbanism, and the Scarborough-based musical ‘Little Voice’ contains the assurance that ‘Arndale wasn’t built in a day’.  Meanwhile, brutalism has fallen almost entirely out of favour, and while many noteworthy examples of it are granted listed status as to protect them, as in the case of London’s Trellick Tower, other examples singled out for architectural or historical worth, such as Birmingham’s Central Library, are faced with either the threat or reality of demolition.

Particularly jarring throughout the film is the apparent absence of any regard to health and safety. Children wander through jagged wreckage undisturbed, bricklayers lay bricks and push wheelbarrows around building sites in shirts and blazers without any form of head protection, and builders casually toss bricks above their heads to waiting colleagues on scaffolding. Shipley 1961 was filmed 13 years before the introduction of the ‘Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974’ which first introduced a legal obligation for employers to provide and enforce a higher standard of safety for its workers in and about the workplace.  Similar legislation, influenced by the United States’ Occupational Health and Safety Act, had hung in limbo for a number of years while attempts were made to pass it through Parliament. In 21st Century Britain, one would obviously be unable to stumble about a building site without first being adorned in Day-Glo high-visibility green and crowned with a hard hat, and it’s generally accepted that children are best kept away from apocalyptic landscapes of vicious rubble and smouldering fires.

Further Reading:

A "sentimental journey"? Priestley's Lost City

The changing face of Britain's Arndale centres