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Bradford was producing around two-thirds of the United Kingdom's woollen textiles by the mid-19th century, a fact so improbable it requires context. In 1800 it was a small market town. By 1850 it had 70 mills and 100,000 inhabitants, having transformed itself faster than almost any city in Britain through access to local coal, soft water, and the ambitions of the mill owners who built the Wool Exchange on Market Street in 1867. The Wool Exchange, now occupied by a Waterstones bookshop, is one of the finest Victorian commercial buildings in the north of England, with an interior that still reads clearly as a space designed for serious trade.

Little Germany, a neighborhood of streets between Hall Ings and East Parade, takes its name from the German-Jewish merchants who arrived in the 1850s to deal in Bradford's textiles.

They built more than 50 warehouses and commercial buildings in Italianate and Flemish Revival styles that together form one of the most architecturally coherent Victorian commercial quarters in England. The whole area is listed, largely intact, and largely overlooked by visitors who have not been told to look for it.