The Guardian view of cultural cities: Manchester shows the way
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Version 0 of 1. There was a sense of joy in Manchester as the Whitworth art gallery reopened at the weekend. On Friday, the art worlds of Manchester, Glasgow and London converged to celebrate its £15m renewal with a memorably explosive fireworks display (or meteor shower, as it was poetically described). On Saturday and Sunday about 18,000 members of the public came to see the art and hear music from Manchester Camerata and the Hallé Youth Choir. Such was the feeling of newly minted municipal pride one could have been forgiven for thinking one had fallen through a chink in time to the days before the banking crisis. But then the refurbishment of the Whitworth (a gallery that CP Scott, owner and editor of the Manchester Guardian, was instrumental in establishing in 1889) is merely one in a series of major events in the city’s artistic life [see footnote]. The Central Library reopened last spring after a £50m revamp; the Royal Northern College of Music completed a £7.1m refurbishment of its concert hall in the autumn; Manchester School of Art has opened a new £34m building. The £25m Home – a theatre, five-screen cinema and gallery – opens this April. And in July, the Manchester international festival will take over the city with its programme of eye-catching artistic collaborations. The council is the driving force behind all this, with cash also coming from the city’s universities, the Heritage Lottery Fund and other bodies. Its longstanding leader, Sir Richard Leese, and chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, have an unwavering vision for the city, and its cultural development is entirely of a piece with Sir Howard’s canny deal with chancellor George Osborne for increased spending power (known as Devo-Manc locally) and, as announced in last year’s autumn statement, more cash (including for yet another cultural building, the £78m Factory). Manchester wants to run its own affairs, and it wants to stand out. It is reasonable to ask why Manchester should be so fervently supporting the arts, regarded by many austerity-pressed British cities as a nice-to-have rather than a necessity. The reason is that Manchester sees culture as part of its growth strategy. A flourishing arts scene promotes the city as a destination for tourism and attracts businesses. Cultural regeneration does not work for every post-industrial town, but it does in Manchester because of a strong artistic history that includes the Hallé, the Royal Exchange theatre and its outpouring of pop music from the late 1970s. Perhaps most important of all, there is an understanding in Manchester that investing in culture makes it a better place for all its inhabitants. When Home opens its doors, it will do so not with a funding grant from the council but with a service contract stating that it will provide social benefit to the community, especially the most disadvantaged. Places such as the Whitworth work with children, and with sufferers from dementia. The view in Manchester is not that cultural organisations divert cash from society’s most pressing problems but that they are the bodies best placed to help. Many other communities – and the government – could learn from that. • This footnote was appended on 20 February 2015. The editorial says in parenthesis “a gallery that CP Scott, owner and editor of the Manchester Guardian, was instrumental in establishing in 1889”. To clarify: while it is true that Scott was the proprietor he did not become so until 1907. John Edward Taylor, his predecessor, was the proprietor at the time of the Whitworth’s founding. |