Bradford 2025’s new producer Jenny Harris aims to champion her home city

The city will play host to a range of cultural spectacles in 2025 and plans for the programme are gearing up as community groups and professionals alike prepare to bid to be a part of the celebrations.

More than 1000 new performances and events are set to take place across the city and wider region including Keighley, Ilkley and Haworth.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Jenny Harris, a Bradford born music producer, will take on the role of executive producer, working with Shanaz Gulzar, who pioneered the city’s successful bid last year.

Ms Harris has previously worked as executive producer of the New Music Biennial, a festival of new music presented as part of Hull City of Culture and on the Southbank in 2017, and as executive producer of Yorkshire’s Cultural Olympiad programme in 2012.

Her senior role at Bradford 2025 will see her commission and support artists from across the region as well as using her creative expertise to create a programme in line with four themes: City of the World, Coming of Age, Welcome Home Sexy and Everything is Connected.

For Ms Harris, the appointment marks something of a homecoming.

She told the Yorkshire Post: “I’ve pretty much always been in Bradford, I grew up here and wended my way back.

“If you are of Bradford, you know the joys of living here and it’s quite hard to imagine living anywhere else. The city and countryside offer it has is really unique.

“I’ve worked on a lot of big events and festivals - and I’ve always enjoyed working on events which connect with communities. The thing about this job is that - it’s my hometown. I just knew I wanted to do it.”

Reminiscing on the moment that then Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries announced that Bradford had beaten the likes of County Durham and Wrexham to win the bid, Ms Harris said: “I was so excited - in fact, there’s some really embarrassing footage of me screaming, crying and jumping up and down.

“I was on Centenary Square. I did have tickets for a gig, but I just thought ‘I can’t miss this’.

“I’m so glad I was there. The thing about the bid was it genuinely was a huge city effort, it was a real galvanising process. We all know what it means for Bradford to win.”

A key part of Ms Harris’s role will be in changing the nation’s perception of Bradford over the course of the year.

She said: “Bradford is grossly misrepresented in national media. We’ve got a very out-dated picture of what it’s like. It’s a city with big challenges, there’s no doubt about that, around deprivation and poverty.

“But it’s also a brilliant place. There’s a really interesting story to tell about contemporary Bradford that isn’t the binary impression we get in the media: a diversity of landscape and people. That feels really important.”

The next year-and-a-half will be spent shaping the programme, and Ms Harris is determined that as many young people as possible will have the chance to be involved.

“Someone in the office has an inner calendar and keeps saying things like ‘97 weeks to go’,” said.

“It’s a really fast-paced process we’re in now. We’ve got a huge amount of work to do in a short space of time. It’s an exciting challenge.”