Bradford Book Exchange

If the address of 'Hustlergate' was not interesting enough, Bradford’s Waterstone’s has to be one of the grandest bookshops in the world. Marble statues, gothic windows, beautiful columns: all help to make this a fine and opulent place in which to purchase one’s reading material.

It was built in 1863 in a gothic style, and the influence of the Low Countries and Venice may be detected. John Ruskin, the famous critic and ubiquitous Victorian know-all, complained about gothic revival, for it aped the art but not the spirituality of the Middle Ages. I suspect that Victorian England was just as religious as its medieval predecessor, yet far more familiar with the real gospel. Today, however, Ruskin’s moaning seems to ring truer. We enjoy beautiful buildings but reject God’s beauty, of which ancient buildings, especially cathedrals, were but tokens of salute. People will enter the former Bradford Wool Exchange and admire its grandeur and awesome design, while buying from it books which teach that the universe was a random, though lucky, accident. That we are the happy consequence of an unplanned, gigantic explosion it is now orthodox to believe and spout. 

Despite our many books, our race is often little better informed than the monkeys and baboons from which we think we have evolved.