The cathedral occupies an awkward perch. The medieval town grew up on the lower ground across Bradford Beck, leaving the church always slightly off to the side. For five hundred years that mattered less than the building's continuous use. In 1281 the parish of Bradford was first recorded as separate from Dewsbury; not long after, Alice de Lacy, widow of Edmund de Lacy, made a grant to the church recorded in the Archbishop of York's register. Proprietary chapels were founded by local families: the Leventhorpes on the north side of the chancel, the owners of Bolling Hall on the south. By the Reformation the church had its tower, its clerestory, and a place in the heart of a small wool town that no one yet imagined would explode into the largest worsted producer in the world.

Bradford in the nineteenth century was a city of mills and migrants: Yorkshire wool workers, German-Jewish wool merchants, Irish flax workers from County Mayo. By the time the textile boom peaked, the city had a population of a quarter of a million but no cathedral. Originally part of the Diocese of York and then the Diocese of Ripon, Bradford's parish church was elevated in 1919 when the Diocese of Bradford was created. The Bishop of Bradford got Bishopcroft as a residence, three miles out in the leafy district of Heaton. The church got a new title and a long list of repairs to undertake. In 2014 the Diocese of Bradford was merged into the new Diocese of Leeds, and Bradford Cathedral became one of three co-equal cathedrals alongside Ripon and Wakefield, each keeping its own identity and chapter.

Most of the cathedral is fifteenth-century stone, but the east end is Edward Maufe's work, added in the 1950s and 1960s. Maufe, the architect of Guildford Cathedral, extended the building and added two western wings for the Song Room and offices. In the new east end he reused the Morris & Co. stained glass that had filled the old east window. Robert Mawer's Victorian reredos of Caen stone, installed in 1854, did not survive Maufe's rebuild. The rest of the Victorian glass still glows along the nave: a west window showing women of the Bible, a 1921 First World War memorial window. Among the wall monuments is a sculpture by John Flaxman, a memorial to Abraham Sharp by Peter Scheemakers, and a plaque to the 1985 Bradford City football stadium fire.

Bradford Cathedral has long centred on its music. Choral Evensong is sung four times a week in term: girls on Monday, boys on Tuesday, adults on Sunday afternoon. The boys and girls sing as separate top lines and are drawn from up to twenty local schools. New entrants train as probationers for a couple of terms before becoming full choristers; full choristers get free weekly tuition in singing, theory or piano. The William Hill pipe organ of 1904, modified by Hill, Norman and Beard in 1961 and J.W. Walker in 1977, anchors the music. The choir has sung for BBC Radio 2's Sunday Half Hour, Radio 4's Sunday Worship, and Songs of Praise. Across the road from the cathedral, the former main post office is now home to Kala Sangam, a South Asian arts centre. The mix is the modern city: a medieval foundation, a Victorian reordering, and a neighbourhood that the seventh-century missionaries from Dewsbury would not recognise.