The 72,000sq ft. building has been transformed with a new exterior look and a complete remodelling taking place inside to ensure it achieves luxury modern living standards.

– Yorkshire Post, 5 May 2019

…the ruling goddess may be best generally described as ‘the Goddess of Getting-On’ or ‘Britannia of the market’…  And all your great architectural works are, of course, built to her.

– John Ruskin, ‘Traffic’

It’s all exchange in Bradford. There is the Xchange, a city centre development repurposing Arndale House, a ’60s modernist office block, as a ‘modern residential hub’. There is City Exchange, the ‘fantastic new development of Studio and one-bedroom apartments’ near the train station.  Then, five minutes away, there’s the Wool Exchange, a Grade-1 listed barnstormer of Venetian Gothicism.

When John Ruskin visited Bradford in 1864, he came to talk to the assembled greyed and good, not about The Exchange, but about exchange. His lecture at the Mechanics’ Institute (in a more considered, written form taking up the second part of The Crown of Wild Olive, called ‘Traffic’) is dense with allusions now lost to readers without a good crib to hand. But the essence of what he says could not be clearer. Taste and morality are bound up with one another.

For Ruskin, architecture is an act of worship, and the wool-mongers were building in praise to their own ‘Agora Goddess’. The great crime that Ruskin accuses the Bradfordians of is not exchange, but ‘gathering’. He points out that they are not hoarding anything as useful as corn, or gold, or even ‘greenbacks’. He notes that their pile of booty is not a pile at all, but is simply made of one long accounting line: ‘ciphers after a capital I’. ‘Cannot you practise writing ciphers,’ he asks, ‘and write as many as you want.’

Despite Ruskin’s booming oratory, the Wool Exchange was built, and was at the centre of Yorkshire industry for more than a century. A statue of laissez-faire godfather Richard Cobden now stares down at patrons of Waterstones bookshop where once were men (almost entirely men) buying and selling for trade. But Ruskin makes the point that change is inevitable, in one direction or another: ‘Think you that men may come and men may go but—mills—go on for ever? Not so; out of these, better or worse shall come and it is for you to choose which.’

Ruskin found the idea of building in worship of ‘getting-on’ repugnant, to put it mildly. His thought found voice in the Independent Labour Party, founded in Bradford a few decades later, and in its leader Keir Hardie’s call for an end to ‘landlordism’. But landlordism definitely didn’t end. A building is now not simply the site of ‘traffic’ – it actually is the traffic. For most people, the exchange now is the bulk of your salary for… what?

Of course, landlordism existed when the mills ruled Bradford, too. Nowadays, for all the talk of powerhouses and the North reborn, the woollen middleman has gone, and the only game left in town is getting work where you can and paying a big chunk of it out for warmth and shelter.

Claudine* has lived in the City Exchange flats for just over a year. She told me the flats ‘look nice on the pictures, but the building is in such a state. When you look around they say “this is going to be fixed…” It’s slum housing through and through. The managers of the building just don’t even care. They don’t want to put the money into it. So we’re just stuck here. With the pandemic and everything, it’s hard to even move out, like.’

Just as John Ruskin was keen to point out to the individual wool barons of Bradford that they could have decent, even noble intentions while still being part of an immoral structure, it’s the system rather than individuals that has left Claudine in poor housing, in her view.

‘My letting agent is pretty good. They fix stuff. But they don’t have jurisdiction over the rest of the building. The management company does, and they are based somewhere else down south. And they don’t fix anything till they absolutely have to. But they’re just like most property developers. There’s a bunch of leaks. There’s been water coming through the roof. There’s rain that gets into the cellar, trips the power sometimes. The doors are shit – you can pull them open. One of them was smashed in December, and still isn’t fixed. I’m kind of used to it, now…’ she trails off.

There is no gentleman genius riding in to save the day with classy burns and classical allusions, but there is some hope, in the hands of the residents themselves and people like them.

‘Things have got a lot better in the last few months,’ Claudine says. ‘We’ve made some demands. They wouldn’t have done anything without [community activist organisation] Acorn.’ She goes on to explain that the ongoing problems with (among other things) fire alarms have been sorted, purely coincidentally, in sync with the campaign from the ‘people’s union’.

Ruskin was an advocate of ‘firm intervention’ by the state to make it possible for people to live decent lives. What he meant by ‘decency’ we might well disagree, but we would find it hard to demur from his pithy way of putting it: ‘While to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting-on, to a thousand families she is the goddess of not Getting-on.’

Claudine and other residents recently protested outside the flats, presenting the mouldy reality of their lives, socially distanced but loud. The demo made reference to the show Line of Duty in calling attention to this housing ‘crime scene’. John Ruskin may well have turned his nose up at the writing of Jed Mercurio. Surely, though, he would have approved of what is happening at this Exchange.