THE life of city engineer and planner Stanley Gordon Wardley (pictured) is included in the latest update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Released this month, the update features the biographies of a selection of the most influential individuals ‘at the heart of the transformation of urban Britain’ in the years after 1945.

In 1946 Wardley became city engineer and surveyor of Bradford. In 1953, his Bradford Development Plan set out his vision for a reconstructed city centre, with ring roads, expressways, and pedestrian subways.

Wardley also planned the Buttershaw housing estate, work on which started in 1947 and was completed in the 1960s. He died suddenly in 1965.

By the end of the twentieth century, much of Wardley’s Bradford was being dismantled, though Wardley House, Little Horton Lane, survives.