When Ellen van Loon first walked the derelict site of Manchester’s former Granada television studios in 2015, she had ten days to sketch a winning proposal for what would become the most expensive cultural building project the United Kingdom had undertaken since Tate Modern. “We had no design for the back of house area,” the OMA partner later told CNN. “We didn’t even have a model, but we had an idea.” That idea – a raw concrete warehouse bolted to a conventional theatre, both capable of merging into a single cavernous space – has now been open for nearly three years, and the verdict is arriving from the public that actually uses it.
Aviva Studios, the permanent home of Factory International and the commissioning engine behind Manchester International Festival, crossed the 700,000-visitor mark within its first twelve months. TIME magazine named it one of the 100 best places to visit in the world in 2024. Eighty-one per cent of audiences travelling from outside Greater Manchester came to the city specifically for the venue. These are not vanity metrics. They are early evidence that a £242 million gamble – more than double its original £110 million budget, four years behind schedule – may actually pay out.
The Arithmetic of Ambition
The financial story is one of relentless escalation. When Manchester City Council approved the project in 2017, the projected cost was £110 million with completion expected by summer 2019. By 2020, Covid-19 and construction inflation had pushed the figure to £186 million. Two final budget increases – £8.7 million in July 2023 and £22.3 million in September – brought the total to £240.99 million. The settled figure, confirmed by the council in July 2024, was £241.7 million.
The funding architecture is layered. Arts Council England and HM Government contributed £106 million: £78.1 million from the Treasury, £21 million via the Cultural Recovery Fund, and £7 million in National Lottery funding. Manchester City Council’s direct contribution came to just under £100 million, largely funded through borrowing expected to be recouped through naming rights over the venue’s 30-year lease. The naming deal with Aviva is worth approximately £35 million – split between the council and Factory International. An additional £39.3 million came from external fundraising.
Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council, called the project “a long-term dream” at the October 2023 opening. The ambition was not merely to build a theatre but to demonstrate that grand cultural infrastructure belongs to cities beyond London. “Manchester is a city that had its place over 100 years ago during the Industrial Revolution,” Craig told international journalists. “Many are hoping projects like Aviva Studios will help the city find its place again.”
OMA’s Unfinished Blueprint
The building itself, designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture under Ellen van Loon’s direction, is OMA’s first major public commission in the United Kingdom. At 13,350 square metres along the banks of the River Irwell, it occupies the site where Granada Television once broadcast Coronation Street to the nation – a deliberate nod to Manchester’s media heritage embedded within the broader narrative of post-industrial reinvention.
The architecture resists polish. Exposed steel connections, raw concrete cladding, and corrugated metal facades sit alongside the refurbished brick warehouses of the St John’s Quarter development. Van Loon was explicit about the intention. “I was really concerned that this type of post-industrial architecture would disappear and the city would become full of glossy new buildings,” she told CNN. “I’m always worried about cities trying to look the same. A city like Manchester might say it wants to look like London and I think that’s a pity.”
The building’s structural logic centres on two primary volumes. The Warehouse – 33 metres wide, 64 metres long, and 21 metres high – is the larger and more radical of the two, a vast open volume with a theatre grid spanning its full ceiling and two movable “Multiwalls” that allow almost limitless reconfiguration. It can hold up to 5,000 people standing. The Hall is a more legible theatre: 1,600 seats in a fixed balcony with removable chairs on the lower level. The two spaces are divided – or united – by a full-height detachable acoustic wall standing nearly 11 metres tall, enabling either two simultaneous events or a single merged space where the stage extends deep into the Warehouse.
“It is a new type of performance space, a unique crossover between a fixed theatre and flexible warehouse,” Van Loon said at the opening. The concept was tested immediately. Danny Boyle’s Free Your Mind, a dance reimagining of The Matrix choreographed by Kenrick “H2O” Sandy with a score by Michael “Mikey J” Asante and set design by Es Devlin, sprawled across both spaces, using the Warehouse’s height for hanging set pieces and the Hall’s auditorium for seated audience sections. Fifty professional dancers performed. The production was deliberately imperfect – a statement of intent rather than a finished product – but it proved the building could do what it was designed to do.
Year One: The Numbers Behind the Hype
The first full year provided the data that defenders of the project needed. Between October 2023 and October 2024, Aviva Studios attracted 703,735 visitors. Nearly two thirds came from Greater Manchester itself, suggesting genuine local adoption rather than tourist novelty. Of the remaining audience, 81 per cent had travelled to the city specifically for the venue – a critical figure for an economic case built on visitor spending.
The venue’s economic projections forecast up to £1.1 billion added to the regional economy over the first decade, through employment (estimated at more than 1,500 jobs) and visitor expenditure. Factory Academy graduated over 1,000 people from its creative industries programme, winning “Training Initiative of the Year” at the 2024 British Training Awards. Over 25,000 children and young people participated in events and workshops. More than 21,000 Aviva £10 tickets – the affordable access scheme – were issued.
The critical reception has been cautiously enthusiastic. The Art Newspaper observed that the Yayoi Kusama exhibition, which drew enormous crowds during the soft launch in summer 2023, “hinted at the Studios’ interest in wow-factor, albeit one that many hope will be taken to more nuanced places in the months ahead.”
The Programming Question
That nuance has arrived. The 2025 season marked a step-change in artistic ambition. Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a co-production with the Royal Shakespeare Company, fused Shakespeare’s text with Radiohead’s album of the same name, reworked by Thom Yorke and performed live by a cast of 20 musicians and actors. Directed by Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, it premiered at Aviva Studios in April before transferring to the RSC’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford – a significant vote of confidence from the UK’s most established theatrical institution.
Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic, which ran for ten days in October 2025, was the venue’s most commercially and critically significant booking to date. A four-hour immersive ritual involving over 70 performers, dancers, musicians, and singers, it explored eroticism and spirituality in Balkan mythology through 13 visceral scenes that audiences moved through freely. John McGrath, Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Factory International, described it as “the next chapter of her creative life – bold, immersive, and on a scale that’s truly unprecedented.”
In February 2025, Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité presented the complete triptych of Figures in Extinction, choreographer Crystal Pite and director Simon McBurney’s four-year meditation on species loss. Sherlock Holmes, a new play directed by Rob Ashford with choreography by Akram Khan, is slated for a Manchester premiere ahead of West End and Broadway runs.
Looking ahead, the 2026 programme is headlined by Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! (2 July to 6 September), described as the artist’s most expansive presentation in the North to date. The exhibition explores two centuries of Chinese and British relations, taking Manchester’s Industrial Revolution history as its starting point. New commissions include Eight-Nation Alliance Flags made from millions of buttons and a new version of History of Bombs from toy bricks. The show occupies the full Warehouse, alongside the 47-metre inflatable migrant boat Law of the Journey (2017) and the Ming dynasty ancestral temple Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), both exhibited in the UK for the first time.
The Regional Rebalancing Act
Aviva Studios exists within a broader argument about cultural infrastructure outside London. The £106 million in national funding was, as the council emphasised, the largest such investment in a cultural project since Tate Modern opened in 2000. The venue was conceived as a direct challenge to the assumption that world-class performing arts spaces require a London postcode.
That challenge has echoes in other major northern projects. The Co-op Live arena, which opened in Manchester in 2024 after its own troubled construction history, represents the commercial entertainment end of the spectrum. Aviva Studios occupies the publicly subsidised, artistically experimental end. Together, they form part of a Manchester cultural ecosystem that the council estimates contributes approximately £1.4 billion annually to the city’s economy through the creative industries.
What distinguishes Aviva Studios from almost every other major cultural building in the UK is its deliberate refusal to resolve into a single identity. Van Loon’s design is not a theatre, not a gallery, not a concert hall, and not a warehouse – it is all of these simultaneously, capable of becoming whatever the next artist needs it to be. “Any space can be a performance space, even the toilets,” Van Loon told CNN during the opening tour, pointing to a unisex water closet where a DJ had once played. The remark was playful but precise: the building’s value lies not in what it is but in what it permits.
Whether that permissiveness translates into a sustainable artistic identity – rather than a succession of spectacular one-offs – is the question that will define Aviva Studios over the next decade. The architecture provides the flexibility. The funding provides the runway. The audience, at 700,000 and growing, provides the validation. What remains is the harder work of building a programme that earns its £242 million not through spectacle alone but through the quieter labour of developing artists, nurturing local talent, and producing work that could not exist anywhere else. Manchester’s industrial revolution was built on cotton and steam. Its cultural revolution, if it comes, will be built on concrete and ambition.
