Where is culture found in Manchester? In a broken-down garage or Factory International?

Although it has been repeatedly contested by researchers and academics and has been rescinded – to a degree – by its originator, Richard Florida’s “creative cities” concept still holds a powerful sway over national, regional and metropolitan governments, which continue to believe that boosting cultural tourism with an expensive architectural “statement”, one that also serves to attract and agglomerate creative enterprises in its shadow, is a key to local economic regeneration. 

Manchester was praised by Florida himself in 2003 as the UK’s most “creative” and “enterprising” city. The city council was still pushing this line in the progress report on construction of the Factory presented to its Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee on 20 July 2021 by deputy chief executive and city treasurer Carol Culley. “The Factory will accelerate economic growth in the region,” it said, “by playing an integral part in helping Manchester and the north of England enhance and diversify its cultural infrastructure by attracting clusters of related creative industry activities and enhance [sic] the visitor economy.” No precedent is offered to support these claims, which is probably just as well, given the number of cities that have either set out to implement the creative cities principle only to abandon it or have gone ahead only to discover that there is negligible resultant economic uplift.

Spaces for cultural innovation in Manchester come in a wide variety of flavours, but it’s possible, using a bit of oversimplification, to sort them into three broad types: corporate, community and autonomous

The writer Jon Savage, a serial chronicler of the Factory Records era and co-curator of the recently-launched British Pop Archive at the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Research Institute and Library, is sceptical about what he sees as the council’s belated appropriation of the city’s music heritage. 

“There’s been lip service paid to the city’s illustrious musical past,’ he says, “but it’s only in the past five-to-ten years that cultural institutions have started to take this stuff seriously. There’s no guide to the great venues like there is in Liverpool, little grassroots celebration of that legacy. Music is a gloss.” 

Spaces for cultural innovation in Manchester come in a wide variety of flavours, but it’s possible, using a bit of oversimplification, to sort them into three broad types: corporate – commercial operations benefiting from local and/or national government funding or support, like the Factory or the Warehouse Project; community – grass-roots organisations part-supported by hands-off state funding from organisations like the Arts Council, such as “radical arts centre” NIAMOS; and autonomous – collectives or communities operating outside of corporate, commercial or governmental spheres, like the White Hotel. 

Each has its distinct spatial and social place in the complex geography of Greater Manchester, which Manchester-based author, photographer, artist and lecturer Paul Dobraszczyk believes can still produce independent creative spaces. “There’s still optimism in Manchester,” he says, “because the part that’s been gentrified is relatively small. There are still areas where the land is hardly worth anything.” 

Another factor inhibiting the wholesale regeneration of Greater Manchester, according to one locally based, community-focused architect, is that “complex land ownership deters developers”. 

The Factory sets out to bridge the division between corporate and grassroots arts with subsidised tickets, creative-industries training for local people via the Factory Academy, partnerships with local schools and collaborations with local arts organisations, with the goal of creating “a space where local people are actively involved”.

Access to the Factory was eventually granted to selected journalists on 29 September 2022, when we were treated to a press launch in the adjacent Science and Industry Museum, the announcement of a new name for the building, the Factory International (although this might change again, if naming rights are sold to a sponsor), a confirmed opening date of June 2023, and a hard-hat tour of the building – still a work in progress – led by OMA partner Ellen van Loon, the project’s lead architect. 

OMA’s communications about the Factory tend to be peppered with the term “warehouse”; the words factory and warehouse riffing on the city’s heritage of manufacturing and trade buildings, and their post-industrial appropriation as “underground” venues, with the aim, presumably, of implicitly positioning the building as a continuation of that spatial legacy. The design of the building features a number of performance-space innovations, including the combination of a theatre and an adjacent “warehouse” – naturally. These are apparently so thoroughly isolated acoustically that, once a 21-metre-high wall that separates them is closed, a full-on rock concert can be playing in one without being heard in the other. 

“Manchester is synonymous with revolution, and being based next to the Science and Industry Museum reminds us of this every day. It is our inspiration to create our own financial revolution.”

Few buildings, though, are an island; context matters. The Factory International isn’t a stand-alone edifice, it is part of an extensive Allied London development, St Johns, an expressly Florida-esque project combining upmarket residential, a piece of cultural “statement” architecture and a startuppy business zone called Enterprise City. St Johns, in turn, is part of a meandering strip of planned regeneration along the city-side bank of the Irwell, which aims to eventually accommodate 250,000 people. It was described in 2017 by David Ellison, a former chair of Manchester council’s planning committee, as almost “Chinese-style” in scale which, given the hubristic fate of many of that nation’s urban mega-projects, was not necessarily a compliment. 

Like the building’s name, with its nostalgic nod to Factory Records, St Johns trades on Manchester’s association with innovation and iconoclasm. Richard Bartlett, chief executive of fintech credit provider Auden, an early tenant, is quoted on the Enterprise City website saying: “Manchester is synonymous with revolution, and being based next to the Science and Industry Museum reminds us of this every day. It is our inspiration to create our own financial revolution.”

Across the river in Salford, the regeneration revolution has proceeded in fits and starts, producing social impacts as patchy as its geographic distribution throughout the city. If the area around the White Hotel is anything to go by, the team behind the venue doesn’t need to project a dystopian urban vision through the music and arts they promote – although that doesn’t stop them from sometimes doing that – they just need to walk out of the door. 

Blackhaine, the locally based MC, musician, dancer and choreographer who is one of the increasingly successful underground artists associated with the White Hotel, entitled his raw, brutal 2021 EP When Salford Falls Apart. For many residents of the city, it already has. Salford has some of the worst social deprivation in the UK, with over 10,000 people living in “extreme poverty”. They have been bypassed by the hyper-gentrification pursued in Manchester’s city-centre with its high-rise luxury apartment towers, fancy shops and restaurants and upmarket nightlife, drenched from a firehose of foreign investors’ money. 

Regeneration is happening in Salford too, in areas like Salford Quays, Middlewood Locks and Greengate Square, although the latter, facing central Manchester across the river, exemplifies the ambiguous status of the city’s piecemeal gentrification. A Salford bar owner who spent £100,000 upgrading his premises to cater for a young professional clientele, told the Manchester Evening News that “the Spinningfields area of Manchester has crossed the river” – an observation that echoes one local blogger’s description of the Greengate Square development, which he says “turns its back on Salford and faces the Manchester bank”. It’s not the only regeneration project in Salford that cleaves to the riverside and is oriented towards its larger, more affluent neighbour.

Absent any further setbacks, I’ll finally be able to walk into Factory International next June and see its debut original production on 18 October, Free Your Mind, a “large-scale immersive performance” directed by Danny Boyle, which will recreate “iconic” scenes from the Matrix films using visual effects, dancers and hundreds of local participants. 

Pairing up the director of the much-beloved 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony with a popular cult film franchise ought to produce a sure-fire, crowd-pleasing launch for the venue, which needs to get the public on side after years of delay and tens of millions in overspend. Will they come in sufficient numbers after years of ever-deeper austerity, even with the offer of 5,000 discounted £10 tickets? 

“That budget could have funded so many community arts organisations,” says a Manchester architect and long-time music aficionado who laments the use of ever-escalating sums of public money in an elitist stitch-up. “You could make a backing track from all the back-slapping.”

Steve Taylor is a writer and editor who has also worked in innovation with start-ups and accelerators. He recently completed an MRes in Architecture at UEL, led by Anna Minton, where his research involved developing a mapping technique for charting the capital flows through and from Delancey’s redevelopment of Elephant and Castle.