Above The Noise: Immigrant Identity In Bradford And Beyond

Bradford, like many other cities in the United Kingdom, is a melting pot of different cultures and people. People from far and wide have shaped the city’s identity and contributed to a vibrant mix of colour and culture, while technology and media have helped them to preserve and keep in touch with their own. The National Science and Media Museum’s Above the Noise exhibition addresses the impact of technology to create an insightful display of multi-cultural Britain.

Above the Noise is an experience rich in variety – old photographs sit side-by-side with cassette tape recordings you can listen to, while short films documenting the immigrant experience in Bradford play on loop. Sounds of the city radiate from a booth, while old Bollywood film posters decorate the walls.

At one stage, many stories from history would have remained untold. But Above the Noise tells us how technological advancement has made such stories “more accessible and more relevant to the everyday experiences of different people.” The exhibition highlights examples of early organisations that helped to enable this, such as the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit. The unit recorded “scenes of everyday life on film” after their formation in 1983, and in doing so documented moments that may have otherwise been long-forgotten.

“Changes to Broadcast Laws in the 1990s” also enabled community radio broadcasting to flourish, with Bradford Community Broadcasting allowing a diverse range of groups across the city to tell “our own stories in our own way”. Above the Noise succeeds in informing us of how the freedom we have to tell our stories today on social media platforms, as well as the ease at which we can record and keep every-day moments forever, is something that we may take for granted.

Historical images and stories make Above the Noise not just educational, but also aesthetically pleasing. We see black-and-white photographs of British Pakistani men hard at work in Bradford’s mills, from an era where the world was smaller and the communities close-knit. Similarly, we see 1960s family portraits from Manningham Lane’s Belle Vue studios, largely of migrant families from the Caribbean and South Asia, which are a source of both pride and nostalgia for any visitor from these communities who may even be able to recognise a grandparent or an uncle somewhere. Above the Noise states that it is a collection of fifteen stories from Bradford, but these photographs themselves tell a million more.

Migrant families would often send these pictures back home to show relatives, much like we might still do today via platforms like WhatsApp. A quote from one Pakistani man who these pictures were sent to reads “we would like to know the level of their well-being. We would look at their jackets, how expensive they were, or their shoes”. Upon arriving in the U.K himself later on, however, this individual realised that “there was some exaggeration” in the photographs. In many ways, this concept has not changed – today, people take to social media to flaunt their wealth and show off their appearance, but is this an actual reflection of their real lives? The exhibition helps us to see how simultaneously, things today are so different yet so similar.

Not only does Above the Noise show us the processes in which we have been able to record and tell stories, but also how technology has assisted communication. One section reveals how Polish and Ukrainian communities in Bradford used technology to transmit news to their families back home, who lived behind ‘the iron curtain’ under strict Soviet rule. Such was the power and influence of radio, “Radio Free Europe” not only “helped overcome the physical barrier of their political exile in the west”, but also “helped to liberate Poland from Soviet rule.” A panel which addresses the 1947 partition of India similarly tells us of just how “resourceful families needed to be to keep in contact with each other”, again hitting home how the smartphones and messaging apps we have today are taken for granted. Furthermore, we learn how, due to the high cost of phone calls between Britain and Pakistan until the end of the 20th century, recording cassette tapes became an easier alternative for the UK’s rapidly growing Pakistani diaspora, who would use them to communicate with family from a distant and foreign, yet somehow close and familiar land.

We are also told of technology’s role in preserving and celebrating identities. Continuing with the exhibition’s theme of sound, we are told of how jukeboxes, often housed in Asian restaurants, allowed migrants to listen to music from their homelands. Understandably, 1960s Britain could not exactly accommodate to the cultural interests of these new communities that they still had limited understanding of – as a result, resourceful Pakistani and Indian migrants were quick to host film screenings of the latest Bollywood blockbusters. Their “entrepreneurial spirits” attracted “immigrant mill and foundry workers from as far away as Newcastle and Sheffield” to Bradford, to watch films and listen to their favourite music.

As decades passed, the resourceful nature of migrants and their descendants only remained, leading to the introduction of annual melas – festivals celebrating South Asian culture – and bhangra day-time discos. One quote reads “a number of us got together and we said: we’ve got our own culture. We need to be promoting that and creating our own British Asian identity in West Yorkshire” – years later, it is easy to see how the actions of the previous generations have given so much to the current ones, in an era where British Asian identities have had to stand firm in the face of many harmful narratives. Today, films like East is East, Yasmin as well as the BBC’s 'Man Like Mobeen' address British Pakistani identity and the changing experiences of the community.


Above the Noise propels wholesome and positive stories told by communities in Bradford into a spotlight that often only shines on them for the wrong reasons. The exhibition succeeds in being representative of all groups. Race and identity are discussed by British Muslim girls in a short film created by the very talented Nabeelah Hafeez, which is located opposite polaroid photographs from a British Jamaican home, which themselves sit across from stories of family and poverty in Ireland. Above all, we are told fifteen stories that the mainstream media would probably fail to address.

Above the Noise only encourages this all to continue – “do you see yourself or your community represented in the mainstream media? If you don’t, work with others to make new alternative platforms and distribute your own content”. Regardless of what city you call home, or what background you are from, this exhibition is an inspiring experience not to be missed.

Above the Noise is open at the National Science and Media Museum until 19 June 2019.