JowettBradford

01

Origins

The Bradford of 1946 was Jowett's bread-and-butter: a light van, estate and pickup powered by the company's flat-twin engine, a design whose ancestry reached back to 1910 and whose virtues — low centre of gravity, simplicity, torque at walking pace — suited austerity Britain perfectly. It was slow beyond argument and nearly indestructible, and export markets from Australia to South America took it gratefully; the Bradford earned much of the foreign currency that funded its glamorous sibling, the Javelin. Around 38,000 were built at Idle, near the city that named it, until 1953. When Jowett collapsed the following year the Bradford's replacement died with it. Survivors potter on in preservation, twin cylinders thudding — the sound of a vanished idea that a van should outlive its maker, twice over.