Richard Dunn Sports Centre
Written by Oli Marshall of The C20 Society
The Richard Dunn Sports Centre has been a modernist landmark on the city skyline for 50 years. Beneath it’s tented ‘big-top’, everything from childhood swimming lessons and japes with your mates (no bombing or heavy petting in the pool!) to tense general election counts have been played out.
Built in 1974–78 by Bradford City Architects Department and designed by Trevor Skempton, then a newly qualified twenty-something architect, the centre was famously named in honour of the local boxer and scaffolder, Richard Dunn. He downed tools while working on construction of the sports centre, to fight Muhammad Ali for the Heavyweight Championship of the World in 1976. Dunn lost the fight (Ali’s last KO), but returned to Bradford a hometown hero.
Britain’s leisure centre boom of the 1960s and 70s came at a time of profound economic and social change in the country. These were generous, municipally funded buildings, that cut across traditional barriers of class and privilege, prioritising fun and family. They ultimately became places of community identity and an intensely evocative part of our shared social heritage: flumes, verrucas, palm trees, the smell of chlorine, the sound of laughter.
Yet they are also some of the most architecturally innovative structures of the late twentieth century, combining environmentally controlled environments with soaring engineering and playful pop imagery. The pioneering design of the Richard Dunn Sports Centre was inspired by the gymnasium at the Tokyo 1964 Olympic Games and was one of the first projects in the UK to make use of Computer Aided Design. It is now one of only a handful of examples to have been recognised with Grade II listing for its architectural and historic significance, which should be a source of enormous local pride.
While the Centre has been closed since 2019 after new leisure facilities were built at Sedbergh and is currently empty, there have been moves to find a new purpose for the Odsall icon. An ambitious recent proposal by C20 Society and Ian Chalk Architects outlined how it could be transformed into ‘The Dunn’ – a new national centre for skateboarding. The building is also set to play a starring role in forthcoming zombie apocalypse movie ‘28 Years Later’. But whatever the future holds, the Richard Dunn will remain woven into the social and sporting heritage of Bradford.
