Lister Park
As well as being a Grade II Listed Historic Park, Lister Park is a key constituent of North Park Road conservation area, Manningham and Bradford as a whole. The variety, beauty and high quality of the natural features, open spaces, buildings and structures within its confines underpin the historical Park’s value.
In the 1820s, fields owned by the Lister family were consolidated to create a large park-like estate around the family seat, Manningham Hall. In 1870 Samuel Cunliffe Lister, owner of Manningham Mills, sold the estate cheaply to the Bradford Corporation on condition that it would be used as a public park. It quickly became the city’s premier park.
Manningham Hall was the residence of the Cunliffe Listers and upon the death of Ellis Cunliffe Lister in 1853 was passed to and occupied by his youngest son, Samuel Cunliffe Lister, partner at Lister and Co of Manningham Mills. By the late 1860s Samuel Cunliffe Lister was considering moving out of Manningham Hall and developing the deer and low parks as a park-like estate of houses for wealthy members of the middle classes. Lister went as far as commissioning Gay and Swallow, architects and surveyors to produce a plan dated 1869 which shows a layout of 100 detached, semi-detached and terraced villas, each set in large gardens and access by broad avenues with gated entrances to the surrounding neighbourhood. Lister fortunately had a change of heart and in 1870 moved to Farfield Hall in Addingham, the ancient seat of the Cunliffe family, and offered Manningham Hall and its estate to the Bradford Corporation for £40,000, a price well below market value, on condition that the land was used as a public park. The Corporation accepted and named the park Lister Park after its benefactor and in 1875 erected a statue in the Park in his honour.
In 1900 Lister funded the demolition of his former home Manningham Hall and its replacement with a new building which would serve as the city’s art gallery and museum, namely Cartwright Hall, which was competed in 1903. The Park was then the site of the 1904 Bradford Industrial Exhibition, which was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales (King George V and Queen Mary). A number of buildings, amusement rides, pavilions and other structures were temporarily placed in Lister Park, including a bridge across the boating lake. Other attractions included a living Somali village, complete with a Somali tribe.
Lister Park Cartwright Hall is the centrepiece of Lister Park and played the same role at the 1904 Bradford Industrial Exhibition which was held in the Park.
Between 1998 and 2002 £4.2million provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Bradford Council were used to refurbish and improve Lister Park and give it a new lease of life. This included co-ordinated and appropriate furniture, the improvement of maintenance regimes, new playgrounds, the revamping of the boating lake and botanical garden and the construction of the North of England’s first Mughal garden.
Lister Park is quite grassy and open in character with trees limited to the perimeter (forming a buffer) and lining the promenades and pathways which retain setted gutters.
There are three impressive gateways to the Park which are all Grade II Listed. The Oak Lane entrance has ornate gatepiers and ironwork, while the Keighley Road gateway takes the form of a giant castellated arch with turrets in a mock historic style. The gates to North Park Road are in an elaborate Baroque style which complements the architecture of Cartwright Hall which is behind them.
At the end of the eastern promenade and the north-eastern corner of the Park is the tall stone mass of the Keighley Road Memorial Gatehouse which forcefully announces the entrance to Lister Park and the beginning of Manningham’s conservation areas to anyone travelling along Keighley Road. This unique Grade II Listed structure was erected in 1882 to commemorate the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales (Edward VI and Queen Alexandra) to Bradford that year. Also called the Norman Arch, this building is more gothic in its detailing. This is perhaps explained by the fact that some elements of the arch were taken from the demolished Christ Church which stood on the southern side of Eldon Place.
The gatehouse is made of snecked masonry with ashlar dressings and stands on an ashlar plinth. At the centre of the gateway is a giant richly moulded pointed arch which to the roadside contains open timber frame gates with more open timber framing above. At the roadside this arch is flanked by two tall castellated octagonal turrets with moulded ashlar bases and irregular quoins to the angles. The tall upper storey of each turret is made of ashlar stone and into the front and rear faces there are tall narrow chamfered rectangular openings with recessed traceried heads. The castellated tops of the turrets have steeply chamfered copings. To either side of the head of the arch facing Keighley Road are shield shaped ashlar tablets which are carved with emblems representing the four nations of the British Isles and England respectively. The tablet is carved with the Bradford coat-of-arms with the legend labor omnia vincit in a gothic script. The plaque is dated 1882 and is also incised John Hill Mayor. Below the plaque is a moulded cill and richly carved floral capping. To either side of the turrets a lower pedestrian gateways which are topped by a parapet. These openings consist of richly moulded hooded pointed arches recessed underneath a larger segmental arch with moulded voussoirs. Both arches contain open timber frame gates. Like the Oak Lane gateway, the surface of the central gate of the Norman Arch has a setted surface.
The Grade II Listed Cartwright Memorial Hall is one of Bradford’s key civic buildings and occupies a commanding position near the centre of Lister Park with complimentary landscaping and structures. The construction of the building came about when Lord Masham (as Samuel Cunliffe Lister was known after being made a peer in 1891) offered the Bradford Corporation £50,000 (around £1million in today’s money) to demolish his old family seat, Manningham Hall, and replace it with new art gallery and museum. Lord Masham insisted that the new building would be named in honour of Rev Dr Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823), an obscure historical figure who invented the first power loom for weaving wool, but never gained from his invention. The principle and basic mechanism of Cartwright’s power loom formed the basis of all later looms, including those invented or improved by Lord Masham. As was the case with many civic buildings, the commission was decided by an open competition and from around 100 submissions, that of JW Simpson and EJM Allen, who had previously designed Glasgow’s city art gallery and museum, was chosen. The architects deigned not only the building, but every fitting in it was well as the terraces in front of the Hall, the gates to North Park Road and the gates and entrance lodge to Oak Lane. The neo-Baroque design of Cartwright Hall is unique in Manningham’s conservation areas and the design is a scaled down and simplified version of the Palais de Justice in Brussels, which was Europe’s largest building when it was completed in 1883.
The Mughal garden is built in the tradition of a type of garden found in Pakistan and northern India. It is a large rectangular enclosed space with a central geometric arrangement of cascading water, canals and fountains surrounded by walkways and lines of trees and hedges. It is a calm and tranquil space whose formality complements the nearby Cartwright Hall.
The formally laid out botanical garden of 1903 has been replaced by a new garden which is themed on botany and geology. It contains a substantial number of specimen trees, shrubs, flowers and creeping plants arranged in an attractive layout. The garden is bisected by a beck in a manmade channel and includes a scaled down version of the Thornton Force waterfall in North Yorkshire.
When entering Lister Park through the Norman Arch gateway, attention is immediately captured by the a fine statue of Sir Titus Salt, founder of Salts Mill and Saltaire and mayor and MP for Bradford. This Grade II Listed Building was sculpted and erected around 1880 and moved to its present location in 1896, having previously stood outside Bradford City Hall. Like the monument to Lister at the main gateway, the Sir Titus Salt Memorial occupies an elevated position in the fork between two of the Park’s principal promenades.
The boating lake covers three acres of land and is surrounded by a wide promenade. A modern style new café/boathouse made out of natural materials stands at one end of the lake. Other new developments, such as the playgrounds and bowling pavilion are also modern yet are of such high quality that they do not look incongruous.
The lake is a long manmade pond which appears to have been made when Lister Park was originally laid out. The lake is watered by a stream recorded on the 1852 Ordnance Survey Map as Carr Beck which formed the boundary between Manningham and Heaton. The Beck is a feature of the botanical garden and is culverted to the northeast of the boating lake and enters the lake as a waterfall. The lake has an irregular oblong shape, presumably to make is appear more natural and to allow for a variety of open and secluded spaces along the winding promenade which forms the lakeside. The are four islands in the lake with walled edges and well-tended trees and shrubbery. Along the western side of the lakeside promenade the grassy wooded slope is edged by a neat stone retaining wall, but nearer the northern end of the lake, this is replaced by a more rugged and natural looking wall of boulders which lead to the waterfall. At this end of the promenade, the steeper topography of the land, the lack of other paths nearby and the density of the tree cover across the lake make this a secluded, peaceful spot. There are many benches looking onto the lake along this promenade and wildlife in the form of ducks, geese and swans.
