Cultural identity and the municipal gallery: the re-imagining of Bradford’s collection as a transcultural
representation of identity at Cartwright Hall 1904-2014
Museums have historically played an important role in the formation of cultural identities; they evolved in their
current form in the late nineteenth century concurrent with the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere
(Bennett, 1995). As cities have been spatially transformed through time by the layering of new and existing expressions of cultural identity, galleries and museums have struggled to retain their meaning as representational spaces. The municipal gallery at Cartwright Hall in Bradford presents a timely case study demonstrating how it ensured that its collection evolved to reflect the changing communities in the city and how, by re-imagining the idea of heritage, it has created a transcultural representation of identity
