Multi-million pound Factory venue approved

PLANS for Factory, the new flagship culture venue at the heart of Manchester’s St John’s neighbourhood have been approved by Manchester City Council’s planning committtee.

Architects Office for Metropolitan Architecture received the go ahead for the project in the creative-led St John’s, currently being developed by Allied London in partnership with the council on the site of the former Granada TV Studios.

According to Allied London, Factory will accelerate economic growth in the region, creating or supporting almost 1,500 full-time jobs and adding £1.1bn to the city’s economy over a decade.

It will make a direct contribution to the growth of creative industries in the North, and reduce the dependency on London as the provider of creative industries training and employment. It will also develop partnerships with the city’s leading higher education institutions and will further support the city’s drive for high calibre graduate talent retention through job creation.

HM Treasury has this week approved the full business case for the £78m government capital investment in the project.

The new venue will offer audiences the opportunity to enjoy year round, in a new world-class facility, the broadest range of art forms and cultural experiences – including dance, theatre, music, opera, visual arts, spoken word, popular culture and innovative contemporary work incorporating multiple media and technologies.

Artists from across the world will be invited to create new work in the building’s extraordinary spaces.

The ultra-flexible space will bring a world-class arts programme to audiences of up to 7,000 at a time.  It will welcome around 900,000 visitors a year and is expected to attract around 200,000 visitors a year from outside Greater Manchester.

It has been confirmed that Manchester International Festival (MIF) will operate Factory as well as continuing to deliver the festival every two years.

Mark Ball, currently Artistic Director of LIFT, will join MIF’s senior leadership team as Associate Artistic Director, focusing on creation and delivery of the Factory programme. He will start full time at MIF in June, working closely with Artistic Director/CEO John McGrath to create a unified artistic vision for the venue and the festival.

Construction on the new venue is due to begin in Spring 2017.  The project is OMA’s first major public building in the UK and is led by project partners Ellen van Loon and Rem Koolhaas, founder of OMA.

OMA led a multi-disciplinary design team including Buro Happold Structures and MEP, Arup Acoustics, Gardiner and Theobald as cost consultants and Deloitte as planning consultants.