When Aviva Studios threw open its doors in October 2023, the sceptics had a ready-made narrative: another flagship cultural building that would struggle to justify its price tag, siphon audiences from established venues, and ultimately gather dust between blockbuster shows. Three years into operation, those doubts look embarrassingly misplaced. Manchester’s £240 million performing arts complex – designed by Ellen van Loon of the Dutch firm OMA and operated by Factory International – has not merely survived its first full seasons. It has become the defining argument for why the UK’s cultural infrastructure must stop at London’s border.
The Scale of the Ambition
The numbers alone demand attention. Aviva Studios occupies 13,300 square metres along the River Irwell, on the former site of Granada Studios where Coronation Street was once filmed. Its Warehouse space rises 21 metres high and accommodates up to 5,000 standing audience members. The Hall seats 1,600. A movable acoustic wall – 21 metres tall, 2.5 metres wide – can split or unite these spaces at will. When combined, the stage can stretch 45 metres deep into the building. There is nothing else quite like it in the country.
The venue was first announced in December 2014 by then-Chancellor George Osborne as part of the Northern Powerhouse programme, with an initial government pledge of £78 million. Manchester City Council committed £50.6 million, with further backing from Arts Council England and the Cultural Capital Kickstart Fund. The final cost reached £240.99 million, as confirmed by a July 2024 council report, but the council insists the venue will add up to £1.1 billion to Manchester’s economy over its first decade of operation. That projection rests on direct employment – estimated at more than 1,500 jobs – visitor spending, and the clustering effect that major cultural infrastructure invariably produces.
Deputy Council Leader Garry Bridges put it plainly: “Aviva Studios is an incredible asset for Manchester – culturally, economically, and as part of the rich mix of what makes this such a dynamic city.”
OMA’s Industrial Cathedral
The building itself is a provocation. Ellen van Loon, who led the design through OMA – the practice co-founded by Rem Koolhaas – deliberately rejected the polished glass-and-steel vocabulary that dominates new UK cultural buildings. The exterior is raw concrete and corrugated metal, set against the restored brick arches of a Grade II-listed railway viaduct. It is OMA’s first major permanent public building in the United Kingdom, and it looks like one.
Van Loon described her vision with characteristic directness: “Any space can be a performance space, even the toilets.” That principle runs through every decision. The Warehouse has no fixed seating, no permanent staging. Technical grids on the ceiling permit any configuration – concert, exhibition, immersive installation, rave. The Hall, more conventional in layout, nonetheless features removable seats on its lower level and a proscenium that opens fully into the Warehouse.
This is architecture designed not around a single art form but around the absence of boundaries. As OMA noted in their project description, the spaces were conceived because “spaces with the qualities needed by the art pieces commissioned by the Festival are fewer and fewer, disappearing amid Manchester’s fast-paced redevelopment into England’s new economic hub.”
From Free Your Mind to Ai Weiwei
The opening programme announced the venue’s ambitions with force. Danny Boyle directed Free Your Mind, an immersive dance-theatre work inspired by The Matrix, with choreography by Kenrick ‘H2O’ Sandy and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante of Boy Blue, and a set designed by Es Devlin. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with critics repeatedly using the word “triumph.” Alongside it, Yayoi Kusama’s You, Me and the Balloons – the largest show by the Japanese artist ever staged – filled the Warehouse with inflatable installations and psychedelic colour.
Since then, Factory International has maintained a programme that consistently punches above what most regional venues attempt. In 2024, Maxine Peake starred in Robin/Red/Breast, an immersive folk-horror production. Brian Eno and Es Devlin curated The Fête of Britain, featuring Jeremy Deller and Cornelia Parker. Laurie Anderson returned with ARK: United States Part 5. David Hockney’s Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) – an immersive retrospective spanning six decades of his work, with an original score by Nico Muhly – opened at the venue in December 2024, returned by popular demand in December 2025, and has since toured internationally. In July 2024, TIME magazine named Aviva Studios one of its World’s Greatest Places.
The Spring/Summer 2026 season, announced in January, confirms the trajectory. Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! – his most ambitious presentation in the North of England – opens on 2 July and runs through 6 September, examining 200 years of Chinese and British relations through sculpture, installation, photography and new works created specifically for the Warehouse. Tony Award-winning choreographer Sonya Tayeh presents the world premiere of The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor in June, a dance work performed by ten women and set to O’Connor’s recorded vocals and excerpts from her memoir Rememberings. Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Angel’s Bone receives its UK premiere in May, presented by English National Opera with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
“I’m not interested in making very big things just for the sake of it,” Ai Weiwei said of the exhibition. “But in Manchester, that wonderful Warehouse space calls for monumental work.”
Training the Next Workforce
Beyond the headline acts, Factory International has built an infrastructure for talent development that may prove its most lasting legacy. Factory Academy, launched to address local skills shortages in technical, production and creative roles, offers free courses in stage lighting, sound mixing, set design, rigging and creative business management. By September 2024, more than 1,000 people from Greater Manchester had completed courses. Around 60 per cent of graduates have progressed into paid roles in the arts, including positions at Co-op Live and the Science and Industry Museum.
This matters because the creative industries contribute approximately £1.4 billion annually to Manchester’s economy, yet the sector has long complained about a shortage of trained technicians and producers in the North. Factory Academy is designed to ensure that creative talent is retained locally rather than migrating south.
The venue’s community engagement extends further. Its Community Partnerships Programme works with organisations including Manchester Urban Diggers, Salford Lads’ and Girls’ Club, and Rainbow Haven, co-designing creative activities and distributing free and discounted tickets. The Welcome, a series of events in late 2023, was entirely programmed by local Manchester residents – a deliberate signal that Aviva Studios is not an imported cultural monoculture but a venue rooted in its city.
The St John’s Effect
Aviva Studios sits at the heart of the St John’s Quarter, a major redevelopment of the former Granada Studios site led by Allied London. The venue has acted as an anchor for this wider scheme. Enterprise City, the mixed-use development surrounding it, has the potential to accommodate 17,000 jobs. Booking.com chose to open its European headquarters in the area. Cloud Imperium Games, the video game studio, has established operations nearby. The St John’s area generated an extra £1.3 million in business rates in 2022/23, a figure set to rise as further development comes forward.
The economic logic is straightforward: cultural infrastructure attracts footfall, footfall attracts commercial investment, commercial investment generates rates, and rates fund public services. Manchester’s creative industries are not a nice-to-have; they are a core economic sector. Aviva Studios is the most visible expression of that reality.
A Northern Counterweight
The political dimension should not be overlooked. When Osborne announced the project in 2014, Manchester City Council stated that the venue would “play an integral part in helping Manchester and the north of England provide a genuine cultural counterbalance to London.” That aspiration now looks achievable. Factory International’s productions have travelled to more than 30 countries, attracting a total audience of 1.6 million people. The organisation holds an Arts Council England National Portfolio Award worth approximately £9.9 million per year. Aviva’s naming rights deal – reportedly worth £35 million – is one of the UK’s largest cultural corporate sponsorship agreements.
What distinguishes Aviva Studios from other flagship venues is not merely its scale or its architecture but its operational model. Factory International commissions and produces original work rather than simply hosting touring shows. The biennial Manchester International Festival, which the organisation has produced since 2007, continues to programme across Greater Manchester, but Aviva Studios provides a permanent base that amplifies the festival’s year-round ambitions.
Sonya Tayeh, speaking about her upcoming world premiere, captured the spirit of the venue: “I am so grateful to be working with ten women across many genres of the art form – from dance scholars and makers to teachers and seekers – to join me in the howl.”
Manchester built its identity on industrial revolution, on music, on football, on a particular kind of defiant creativity. Aviva Studios does not replicate that identity. It extends it – with concrete, with ambition, and with a programme that refuses to accept that world-class culture is a London monopoly. The building was designed to enable the “next step” in performing arts. Three years in, it is delivering exactly that.
