Things aren’t always going to be this way. What is taken for granted today may be half-forgotten tomorrow.

Victor Wedderburn’s Frontline 1984/85, his resonant and empathetic exhibition at Bradford’s Loading Bay, serves as both celebration and memorial to a community that has been displaced and lost. Wedderburn himself had joined his parents in Bradford at the age of 16, following them to the UK from Jamaica. Buying his first camera with redundancy money from a driving job at Crofts Engineers, Wedderburn went on to be self-developed in more ways than one; practising the dark room alchemy of manifesting prints from negatives while honing his own compositional eye.

His muse was Manningham’s Lumb Lane, and the meeting places which drew people to it at back then – the Perseverance Hotel, the Young Lions Cafe, and Roots Record Shop. The last is evoked by a playlist of contemporary tracks of the kind that might have been played out by a contemporary sound system, put together by Jerry ‘Red Dred’ Crawford.

The photographs themselves burst with life, reaching outside the frame in much the same way that the community spills out from its meeting places, onto the pavements and streets outside.

In the process, they capture actual street style as opposed to the stylist’s approximation overly-familiar from London-based high fashion magazines. His subjects carry themselves with an everyday flamboyance, the young men in particular sporting an impressive range of headwear as they pose proprietorially on the bonnets of cars that gleam like box-fresh trainers.

Beyond Lumb Lane, a set of photographs document a somewhat bedraggled Anti-Apartheid march through a rain-smeared Huddersfield high street, populated by chain stores that have passed out of profit and into nostalgia. Likewise, his study of a sunnier Leeds Carnival is witness to the melancholy backdrop of the obsolescent unmourned in the form of video shops whose presence somehow accentuates the mayfly brevity of the carnival itself. A young woman beams out from a customised outfit, bringing the hours of craft that shaped it to life for that one glorious day.

If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s a sense that, in the curation, some details of Manningham’s subsequent history have been elided. The captions themselves are coy on the matter, noting without analysis or elaboration that ‘the African-Caribbean community is (now) residentially more dispersed’. Certainly, the venues that were at its heart have been lost to history; the Young Lions Cafe, for instance, finally closing its doors in 2000 following the fatal shooting of Dexter Coleman.

Nonetheless, Wedderburn’s vivid snapshot of the early 1980s emphasises that, rather than something which is ossified, set in and behind stone by bodies bearing the imprimatur ‘Royal’ or ‘National’, culture is something which is continually renewed through being lived. In capturing the light of his subjects across the years, he brings them back into the present tense.

As Frontline itself comes to a close, Wedderburn has spoken of his hope that the exhibition will be afforded an afterlife, perhaps in the collection of his city’s Science and Media Museum. If so, the gesture might go some way towards redressing the legacy of the displacement of Manningham’s residents by affording their scattered legacies the more permanent home that Wedderburn’s vision so richly deserves.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Lions Café © Victor Wedderburn, Frontline 1984-1985. Courtesy: Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.

 

Frontline 1984/1985 by Victor Wedderburn is at Loading Bay, Bradford until May 11, 2025. For more information, click here.