The City of Bradford is located in West Yorkshire where it has the status of a city and metropolitan borough. Its name comes from Old English where the word "brad" meant "broad, as it is situated in a valley where.a broad ford crosses a tributary of the River Aire. Named after its largest settlement, it includes the villages and towns of Bingley, Denholme, Haworth, Ilkley, Keighley, Queensbury, Shipley, Silsden, and Thornton.

When the Domesday Book, or the Great Survey of England was finished in 1086, the village had around 350 people living in it. It became. market town in 1251, and in 1294, the Bradford Faire debuted after being granted the right to hold two of them a year. A mill was established in the early 14th century and textile and woolen cloth was manufactured in the homes of many of the citizens. Growth was steady for Bradford, and even an outbreak of the plague in 1557 did not slow the growth a bit.

In 1642, at the beginning of the English Civil War, the people of Bradford supported the parliament against the king. Royalist troops tried to take the town in October of 1642 and again a few months later in December. Both times, they were repelled. In the summer of 1643, the royalist army was successful and occupied Bradford. The occupying army remained until 1644 when they left the town. The plague swept through the area, but the people of Bradford regained the town's prosperity with the accession of William and Mary in 1689. People in the town began to replace their jobs making woolen cloth with the manufacture of worsted cloth.

The Industrial Revolution did not ignore Bradford. The textile industry exploded with locals spinning wool and weaving cloth in their homes, and after 1800, hand loomers who has long woven cloth in their cottages were replaced by steam-engine powered mills and shifts lasted twelve hours ore more. A canal was built and the roads were laid out. In the early 1800s, the population of the town was around 16,000.

In 1841, Bradford boasted 38 worsted mills in the town and 70 of them in the borough. It is estimated that approximately 65% of all of England's wool production took place in Bradford.

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849), were born in Haworth as was their brother Branwell (1817-1848). Charlotte, Emily, and Branwell were buried in Haworth with most of their family.

The town was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1847, and it became a county borough when the Local Government Act was passed in 1888. In 1897, it became a city.

The first council houses in Bradford were built in 1907, and more followed in the 1920s and the 1930s as slums were razed.

The Low Moor Chemical Company, which manufactured chemicals used for dying thread and textiles had opened in Bradford had been established in the middle of the 19th century. With the advent of World War I, the company, like so many other factories during the war, switched over to producing munitions for the English military. The Ministry of Munitions took over the company and renamed it "Factory No. 182 Yorkshire."

At around 2:25 in the afternoon of August 21, 1916, one of the employees was moving open drums from a railway car to a magazine when a fire broke out in one of the magazines. Seconds later, there was a huge explosion followed by several smaller ones. At 3:16, an explosion larger than the first one rocked the factory and killed six firemen and tore their fire engine apart. Pieces of the fire engine were found miles away. Flying pieces of shrapnel punctured a gas holder, causing 270,000 cubic metres (9,500,000 cubic feet) of gas to catch fire. The heat was reportedly felt more than 1.6 km (1 mile) away. Witnesses reported employees with discolored skin and hair due to being covered in picric acid (Trinitrophenol), fleeing the area, The fire burned for more than three days. By that time, twenty bodies had been found. Six of the firefighters had to be identified by the numbers on their axes. In the end, 40 people died and more than 100 suffered injuries which did not kill them. More than 200 homes were damaged and every house within a 3.2 km radius had its windows broken.

The Church of St. Peter was promoted to Bradford Cathedral in 1919. the Royal Infirmary was erected in 1936.

In recent years, the textile industry declined, but the economy boomed in the middle of the 20th century due to tourism.

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