Bradford Square emerges from my interests in found reading and in public space. In 2006 I produced Light Transports – giving away 30,000 books of short stories on railway stations. This is more modest, 2,000 22x22cm envelopes containing seven 21x21cm double sided inserts by six writers, distributed in Bradford, mostly in the city centre during Stir.

Light Transports reaffirmed my belief that people love reading. Passionate habitual readers like something a little different from what they can get from high street book shops and the national broadsheets. Occasional or lapsed readers are delighted to be handed an alternative to reading street hoardings and sauce bottles. I produce found reading to delight both sets of readers, and to point them towards the writing ecology of my region.

As the son of an urban architect, and through being involved with regeneration in some of the northern cities, I am fascinated by how people occupy, move through and animate public space. Although that wasn’t a given theme of Bradford Square, I did mention this when speaking to the writers when I commissioned them.

Why these writers?