Sportcity, Bradford, Manchester, Greater Manchester. Final Excavation Report.

Today, the historic township of Bradford in East Manchester is dominated by the City of Manchester Stadium. Often referred to as Eastlands, this state-of-the-art arena
forms the centrepiece for a suite of sporting venues developed to host the Commonwealth Games that were held in Manchester in 2002. These include the Regional Athletics Arena, Manchester Velodrome, the National Squash Centre, and
the Manchester Tennis Centre, creating the largest concentration of world-class sporting facilities in Europe, and known appropriately as Sportcity.
In order to ensure the economic value of the City of Manchester Stadium after the Commonwealth Games had finished, it was leased by the City Council to Manchester
City Football Club (MCFC) for use as their home ground. In 2010, MCFC signed an agreement with the City Council to allow a £1 billion redevelopment of approximately seven hectares of brownfield land immediately to the east of the
stadium (centred on NGR SJ 869 986). As an initial stage, it was proposed that remediation and site-servicing works was carried out to treat soils contaminated by the site’s former industrial use, and to decommission and remove associated buried structures.
The area is of considerable archaeological interest, as it incorporated a moated hall site during the medieval period and, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, emerged as an important centre of industrial activity. In particular, the site was occupied by Bradford Colliery, which became the largest coal mine in the Manchester Coalfield. In the early 1850s, the famous Bradford Ironworks of Richard Johnson &
Nephew was established adjacent to Bradford Colliery, and promptly developed an international reputation for revolutionising the wire-manufacturing industry. By the
end of the nineteenth century, the colliery and the ironworks were surrounded by a range of textile mills, rubber works, chemical factories, and brick works, interspersed with streets of terraced housing.