Mills to the Hills, created by London-born artist (Roids), is a vast and hypnotic piece of street art created especially for a can’t-miss location in the centre of Bradford. Taking inspiration both from the city’s rich industrial history and from the soaring countryside around it, the work can be seen day and night on the walls outside The Broadway.

Mills to the Hills is part of BD: Walls, a collection of new street art commissioned by Bradford 2025 for walls across Bradford District – paying vibrant tribute to our heritage while celebrating our dynamic street art culture.

‘Drawing on the rich history of the textile industries in Bradford, I decided to create an almost diagrammatic model of a weave created by a loom, with the warp and weft transitioning and creating repetition and patterning across the wall. It leads from abstracted representations of the mills of the Industrial Revolution to the hills of the Pennines.’

(Roids) – aka Will Gates – is a British visual artist who engages in a range of creative practices informed by his graffiti background, including painting, analogue typographic design, mural painting and sculpture.

Gates combines a deeply studied approach to form and dimensionality with an aesthetic charge emanating from the environmental exploration of his graffiti practice, drawing on urban history, personal experience and the nuances of arts-connected crafts. Gates’s work is constantly evolving, a measure of graffiti’s inherent competitiveness and his own unique investigation into the stylisation and abstraction of lettering.