The Bradford fire
On May 11 1985, Bradford City Football Club was celebrating promotion as Third Division champions, in front of a sell-out crowd at Valley Parade for the final home game of the season against Lincoln City. Peter Jackson, the team captain, was presented with the championship trophy before the match and the players paraded around the pitch, holding up placards that spelled out ‘Thank You Fans’ for their support throughout the season.
The game has since gone down in history for other reasons, as the scene of an iconic fire in its main stand, ferocious in its spread and devastating in its destruction. In total, 56 supporters lost their lives that day, and more than 250 others were treated for burns injuries.
A number of permanent memorials – located at the club’s ground, on city park and at several schools and other public buildings within the city – serve as a permanent reminder of the tragedy as well as of the great resilience and fortitude that Bradfordians exhibited that day and in the weeks, months, years and decades since. The 56 victims are remembered annually in a series of events.
The Bradford fire is an iconic event for many reasons. It saw surgeons and other health professionals, led by Dr David Sharpe, develop pioneering world-leading treatment for burns injuries, including the patenting of the famous ‘Bradford Sling’ and the creation of the Plastic Surgery and Burns Research Unit at the University of Bradford.
It was also significant for the wider game of football, which was beset with a number of problems in the 1980s. The fire, it was discovered, was caused by a discarded light that fell through a large gap in the wooden floor of the timber-framed stand where it ignited combustible waste material lying underneath, before spreading quickly up the slope, igniting the wooden asphalt-covered roof and causing a flashover.
In the aftermath of the public inquiry, headed by the High Court Judge, Oliver Popplewell, the government extended existing safety requirements over sporting stadia – originally introduced in 1975 following Glasgow’s Ibrox disaster a few years earlier – to apply to lower league grounds. This included prohibiting the building of wooden stands at grounds across the country and providing improved fire warning and extinguishing equipment as well as training in evacuation.
Crowd safety everywhere would be given a priority and funds were made available for other clubs to carry out remediation work on unsafe grounds.
Forged by Fire: Burns Injury and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000
The Bradford fire was one of the iconic fire disasters investigated as part of a major project, ‘Forged by Fire: Burns Injury and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2016-21).
The team, which comprised researchers at Leeds Beckett University and the University of Birmingham, set out to produce the first social and cultural history of burns in Britain, researching the personal and collective tragedies involving burning events.
In particular, we paid attention to how they shaped individual, group and place identity, drawing together themes of professionalism, class, gender, age and race.
A significant feature of the project involved working with local schools in the Bradford area to develop pupils’ knowledge of the fire as a major historical event, but also to develop their creative skills.
The team partnered with Rachel Wood, a freelance educationalist, who was working on the Saltaire (Collection) Stories heritage learning project at the time and had created a learning box based on football and sports in Bradford from the 19th century to the present day. Working collaboratively, we delivered school workshops with the aim of raising awareness about the importance of historical inquiry but also how a human tragedy can make us all think about our past, present and future (for a report on these, see https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/heroes-tragedy-and-top-trumps/).
Eventually, we worked with Year 9 pupils at Beckfoot Thornton Academy – which had been directly affected by the fire through the loss of two sibling pupils – to produce graphic novel stories about the experiences of three people whose lives were transformed by the fire – a young supporter, a neighbour, and a surgeon – and which were based on real stories found in the archive.
Following on from this, the team has grown, bringing in dramatist Irene Lofthouse and film director Marcus Lee to produce a unique set of interactive resources for use by children in learning about the fire.
We mapped the significant places, events and stories from the fire onto a digital story map, with embedded video and audio content and learning activities for children to work through in their own time with teachers and other responsible adults.
Given the significance of the Beckfoot Thornton students’ interpretations of the past to the project, we decided to embed these stories in the map and these are voiced by some of the same students who created the characters.
The story map has a resource to go with each place or event mentioned so that children’s knowledge and understanding of the fire and its impact on society, health and safety, law and medicine increases with each activity. It also explores local and international history as well as individual and collective identity.
We are very grateful to Saltaire Collection and, in particular, Maggie Smith for facilitating the initial contact between Rachel and the Forged by Fire team.
If you have any feedback on the story map, would like a copy of our graphic novel or want to know more about the project, please get in touch with Professor Shane Ewen (email: s.ewen@leedsbeckett.ac.uk).
Shane Ewen, Aaron Andrews and Rachel Wood, March 2022