Unfiltered, unstoppable, unmissable! Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture brings together a jam-packed programme celebrating the creativity, the people and the culture of Bradford and West Yorkshire. From bassline to the Brontes, immersive theatre to street performance and film and everything in–between. It’s a year of ground-breaking events and it’s all just twenty minutes on the train from Leeds train station.
Programme Highlights
DRAW! A Nationwide Drawing Project supported by David Hockney
Draw! is a nation-wide drawing project inspired and supported by David Hockney. The Bradford-born artist has drawn the world around him for 60 years, using everything from pencils to iPads. Inspired by Hockney, Bradford 2025 is inviting people of all ages across the UK to take part in a drawing project to reflect our everyday lives (throughout 2025).
WILD UPLANDS
The wide skies and expansive moorland that spurred Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is the stage for Wild Uplands, four new contemporary visual artworks created by four national and international artists placed across Penistone Hill Country Park in Haworth. Open until 12 October 2025.
EARTH & SKY BY OPERA NORTH
As part of the Wild Uplands (24 May to 12 Oct), you can experience the landscape of Pensitone Country Park in Haworth with fresh new perspectives whilst listening to a dramatic soundscape created by composers from Opera North. To experience this you can download an app for free and listen through headphones as you wander the expansive moorlands.
ICE AGE ART NOW
This exhibition, presented in partnership with The British Museum, shows work by people living in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age. These astounding works, some of which are over 32,000 years old, reveal the deep roots of drawing, sculpture, realism, abstraction, signs, symbols and more. This exhibition, which runs from 21 June until 14 September 2025, features a wealth of rare items from the British Museum and local treasures from the collections of Bradford District Museums & Galleries.
THE RAILWAY CHILDREN
Mike Kenny’s Olivier Award-winning adaptation of E Nesbit’s The Railway Children will take place on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway line, a place familiar to millions from the film adaptations of the classic novel. The show, which takes place from 16 July to 7 September 2025, includes a ride on the steam train through the filming locations before entering an immersive and site-specific theatre space.
TURNER PRIZE
Turner Prize, which showcases and celebrates the most exciting British artists is coming to Bradford! And in the year when it celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of JMW Turner, after which it was named. It will be hosted at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, from 22 September 2025 to 22 February 2026.