When the first audiences stepped through the undercroft entrance of Aviva Studios on Water Street in October 2023, they walked past a Victorian viaduct that punches through one side of the building, its arches repurposed as loos, and into a lobby alive with exposed ducts and overhead wiring. This was not the arrival sequence of a conventional arts venue. It was a statement. The UK’s most expensive cultural gamble since Tate Modern had opened, and the building was making sure you knew exactly where you stood – in Manchester, not London, and in a structure that refuses to behave like a theatre.
Aviva Studios, the permanent home of Factory International, cost £241.7m to build – more than double the original £110m budget set in 2015. It arrived four years late. It has been called everything from “the most important cultural development in Europe” by Manchester City Council’s leader to “a £240 million vanity project” by its critics. Both claims carry a degree of truth. What is beyond dispute is that this 13,350-square-metre venue on the old Granada Studios site represents the single largest investment in a national cultural project since the Millennium. Whether it earns that investment is the story still unfolding.
From Competition Win to Cost Crisis
The project’s origins trace to November 2015, when Manchester City Council launched an international architecture competition for “a new kind of art venue” capable of hosting both performances and exhibitions, separately or simultaneously. The winner was OMA – the Office for Metropolitan Architecture – with Ellen van Loon as lead partner. It was the Dutch practice’s first major public building in the UK, a distinction that would prove both prestigious and problematic.
OMA’s competition-winning sketch, produced in ten days, depicted a sinuous, tent-like structure encasing a glass-walled hangar, with full-height sliding doors that would allow theatrical wonders to spill out onto a great cascade of steps down to the River Irwell. “It was just a sketch,” van Loon later admitted to The Guardian. “We did it in 10 days and made the presentation in 24 hours.”
What was built bears little resemblance to that vision. The sinuous white carapace never materialised. Instead, the venue is a hulking faceted volume bolted to the side of a massive concrete shed, wrapped in a 2.5-metre-wide double concrete wall – an acoustic necessity imposed by the residential towers of the St John’s regeneration that now flank it on both sides. “We realised we had to be much stronger,” van Loon told The Guardian‘s Oliver Wainwright. “The architecture of this building had to be quite brutal to withstand whatever was built around it.”
The cost escalation was driven by what a Manchester City Council report called “the volatile economic climate and the complexity and uniqueness of the building.” Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the sheer ambition of the design all played their parts. The original £110m budget, set before any detailed site investigation, was overtaken by reality. By September 2023, the final figure stood at £241.7m – £106.7m of it from HM Government and Arts Council England, with Manchester City Council funding the remainder largely through borrowing. The council expects to recoup approximately £80m of its outlay through the naming rights deal with Aviva, the insurance giant that stumped up £35m in June 2023 for the privilege, plus other sponsorship income projected to exceed £80m over the life of the agreement.
The Haçienda’s Ghost in the Machine
Step inside and the building tells a different story – one that reaches back to Manchester’s post-punk cultural DNA. The interior was designed by Ben Kelly, the man who converted a former yachting showroom into the Haçienda nightclub for Factory Records in 1982. Kelly’s signature black-and-yellow hazard stripes, colourful furniture, and an elevated orange DJ booth crashing into a red-painted girder all appear in Aviva Studios’ lobby, a deliberate nod to the label from which Factory International takes its name.
The connection is not merely decorative. Factory Records, as the Aviva press materials note, was “defined as much by its image and its Peter Saville graphics as by its music.” Kelly’s industrial, minimalist approach to the Haçienda – incorporating bollards, cats-eyes, and directional warning markings into a space painted in cool blue and grey tones – revolutionised nightclub design. At Aviva Studios, that legacy surfaces in the raw concrete, exposed steel connections, and corrugated metal facades that greet the surrounding refurbished brick buildings of St John’s.
The building’s centrepiece is its radical flexibility. The Warehouse – 21 metres high, 64 metres long, 33 metres wide, capable of supporting 200 tonnes from its technical ceiling grid – can host up to 5,000 people standing. The Hall seats 1,600 or accommodates 2,000 standing. A 11-metre-high detachable acoustic wall allows the two spaces to function independently or be combined, with the stage stretching back to a depth of 45 metres. “Any space can be a performance space, even the toilets,” van Loon declared at the opening.
For the launch production, Danny Boyle’s Free Your Mind – a Matrix-themed dance spectacular featuring the company Boy Blue, stage designer Es Devlin, and writer Sabrina Mahfouz – the Warehouse became a futuristic runway with hanging set designs and movable structures. The show was a critical and public success, with sold-out performances to a diverse Manchester audience. But even here, the building’s awkwardness showed: the two spaces were not joined for the performance, and the interval required a considerable pause while the action and audience relocated as various elements were reconfigured.
A Challenging First Year
The first twelve months revealed both the venue’s potential and its vulnerabilities. A Manchester City Council report from October 2024 described a “challenging” opening year, citing “lack of music and commercial income” that necessitated an additional £2m from the council – effectively frontloading Factory International’s 2030 and 2031 allowances. The venue had received “just under £100m” from Manchester town hall to date.
Construction work continued after the official opening, resulting in “considerable periods where the venue has not been able to operate at full capacity, and sometimes has needed to close for weeks at a time.” This, the report noted, “scared off the music industry, which often took a ‘safety first’ approach of going to venues where promoters have a long previous history.” Footfall was further hampered by the slower-than-expected opening of the surrounding St John’s development, with Grape Street – envisaged as the main thoroughfare from the city centre – still not open. Council scrutiny also zeroed in on the use of zero-hours contracts, with Councillor Sam Wheeler telling bosses: “This isn’t a fly-by-night organisation. You’re not some local theatre company with half-a-dozen people – you’ve had £200m of public money.”
Yet the numbers were not negligible. Some 700,000 visitors came through the doors in year one. TIME magazine listed Aviva Studios among the world’s 100 best places to visit. And the programme was ambitious from the start: Yayoi Kusama’s You, Me and the Balloons, a three-day residency from Janelle Monáe, Radiohead’s reworking of Hamlet (Hamlet Hail to the Thief), and a host of emerging and mid-career artists through Factory International’s year-round commissioning.
The Programme Finds Its Feet
By late 2025, the venue had welcomed over 1.5 million visitors. The programme has grown bolder and more international. Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic – which she described as “the most ambitious work in my career” – received its world premiere at Aviva Studios in October 2025, a four-hour immersive ritual involving over 70 performers exploring the eroticism and spirituality of Balkan folklore. The piece is now touring internationally, a testament to the venue’s growing reputation as a place where major artists want to make new work.
In summer 2026, Ai Weiwei presents Button Up!, the largest site-specific exhibition by the Chinese artist and activist, running from 2 July to 6 September. Accompanied by Sewing a Button – a 24-hour durational performance in which Ai re-enacts his 81-day secret detention by Chinese authorities, the first time Aviva Studios has stayed open overnight – the exhibition confronts 200 years of Sino-British relations through history, power and empire. Tickets are priced from £15, with Aviva £10 tickets for those who might otherwise be unable to attend.
The economic case rests on projections of £1.1bn added to Manchester’s economy over a decade and the creation or support of up to 1,500 direct and indirect jobs. Factory International’s artistic director and chief executive John McGrath has described the ideal as a venue where “a performance is happening in one space while artists make new work in the other.” The building’s rule, he says, is simple: “The building is a playground. So why not?”
Can the Colossus Deliver?
The question hanging over Aviva Studios is not whether it is an impressive building – it is – nor whether it can attract world-class artists, which it demonstrably has. The question is whether a venue of this scale and cost can sustain itself commercially and culturally in a city that, for all its creative energy, is not London. The original vision of a sinuous white membrane hovering over the Irwell has been replaced by concrete brutalism born of acoustic necessity. The promise of infinite flexibility is tempered by the absence of a conventional backstage and fly tower, both fairly crucial to most theatrical productions. And the surrounding St John’s development, which was supposed to generate the footfall the venue needs for its food and beverage revenues, remains incomplete.
Manchester City Council’s leader called Aviva Studios “the most important cultural development in Europe.” Peter Hook, co-founder of New Order and the Haçienda, offered a different verdict on opening day: “That white elephant down the bottom end of Deansgate? It isn’t called Factory for nothing. They’ll be bankrupt before we were. That’s just what Manchester needs – another bloody venue.”
Two and a half years in, neither prophecy has been fulfilled. The venue is neither a white elephant nor a self-sustaining success. It is something more honest and more interesting: a building still discovering what it can be, in a city still deciding what it wants from it. The concrete is set. The script is not.
Aviva Studios is at Water Street, Manchester M3 4JQ. Current and forthcoming programme at factoryinternational.org.
Read more on Manchester’s cultural landscape in our architecture coverage.
