It seems that Manchester is the most creative city in the UK. According to the Greater Manchester Business Board, “Manchester is trading on its creative prowess to become an international powerhouse for the arts, creating new opportunities for residents in all sectors to forge lasting careers in this sector.” It is the UK’s “most inspiring city”, taking top spot and beating London into fourth place, behind Brighton and Bristol. Another win for Manchester!
Lists like this have been around for a couple of decades. Most notable was Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” data-set, where he went around the world “rating your city”, and, for a fee, would advise on how to rise up the table. Manchester won his “most Bohemian City” award in 2003, this time London being knocked into third place by well-known boho capital Leicester.
Florida’s metrics involved “gay-friendliness, ethnic diversity, and the number of patent applications per head of population”. As anyone who knew the city could see, the co-location of three large universities, the Gay Village and Rusholme and Mosside, in that thin slice of Greater Manchester officially known as “Manchester”, was skewing the stats. Why such a combination – a curry mile, a technology patent, a cluster of Gay bars – should be dubbed “bohemian” was a bigger mystery. But then, linking any contemporary economic success to the wild years of Manchester’s early music scene is the city’s own version of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates meeting in a North Californian garage.
Florida is an academic at least. This latest research was done by “Adobe” according to one report, but most credit “Auraprint”. I’m sure they can do you a great A1 spreadsheet but they are not best known for economic geography surveys. Their metrics are all related to creative arts infrastructure (numbers of theatres, art galleries, comedy clubs, art and design universities), social media hashtags (Insta, TikTok), and number of available creative arts jobs. A whole barrel full of mixed-up apples and oranges, clicks and bricks. How does one weigh numbers of theatres against a hashtag count? London has 90 billion Tik Tok hashtags. Manchester only 13 billion. Liverpool has 65 billion. What on earth do these figures mean? Dare one suggest that football might be involved?
And the thin slice of Manchester again works in its favour. I have no idea if they were methodologically rigorous enough to distinguish between a job in Media City (Salford) or in a creative cluster in Stockport, or just looked through the latest local arts job listing. For “Manchester” there were 148 jobs. Divide that by the population (550,000) and you get a score of 31.46 per hundred thousand. Easy. London has 873 jobs but that comes out as 9.95 per hundred thousand. So what exactly is “London” statistically – most likely Greater London (almost 9 million). Greater Manchester has a population of 2.8 million, and so has a jobs per 100,000 count of something like 6. Which would put it well below Bournemouth, Southampton and Nottingham, amongst others. The same could be said of numbers of theatres and galleries, where “Manchester” regularly – and unfeasibly – trounces London, but would rapidly drop down the table if measured as Greater Manchester.
This might not be entirely fair. Real statistical work has shown how deeply concentrated creative jobs are in Manchester, Salford and parts of Cheshire. How places like Bolton are almost entirely denuded of such jobs. But then, the same could be said of a sprawling London. Are we talking Islington and Whitechapel or Romford and Croydon? In reality, the number of creative jobs in the capital outstrips Greater Manchester by a factor of 8. Just as it outstrips Manchester on whatever socio-economic metric you want to name, other than social deprivation.
In short, best not to look at the stats too closely. But that’s never really a problem. Auraprint have got a bit of publicity. I clicked on the link to their table and was offered some really good printjob specials. Manchester’s booster machine can go into overdrive.
Manchester is already recognised as one of Europe’s largest creative, digital and technology clusters and is home to a fast-growing £5 billion digital ecosystem. The city’s thriving creative, digital and technology community includes over 10,000 businesses including the BBC, Brown Bag Films, Mediacom and Dentsu Aegis.
Well, again, best not look too closely. Or rather, set aside an afternoon to get under the bonnet of claims about “one of Europe’s largest”. And what exactly is a “£5 billion digital ecosystem”? Those highlighted firms are interesting too. The BBC is based in Salford. Brown Bag Films is a Canadian owned Irish CGI company that left the city in 2021. Mediacom is a US cable company that has its “northern headquarters” in the city. Dentsu is a “multinational media and digital marketing communications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese advertising and public relations firm Dentsu”, according to Wikipedia.
Statistical sleight of hand aside, the claims here relate to Manchester offering a north of England home to some global media-tech companies, only one of which is actually home-grown, even though it is in Salford. What does this have to do with the density of creative arts infrastructure, design universities and arts jobs? This elision is a common trope of the “creative industries” schtick. Images of bright young things with cameras, or sweating in dance studios, taking their stage bows, or thrilling their audiences in an ecstasy of music making: all this somehow leads to one of “Europe’s largest creative, digital and technology clusters”. How exactly? This is variant of the Tony Wilson story, in which a “bunch of bands” Made Manchester Great Again, recently given an airing in Manchester Unspun.
Well, cities need their myths and their saints, why not this updated “original modern” version? In part because, like Liverpool used to be with The Beatles, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” – as a one-time regular visitor to Manchester once said. There was only one thing sadder than naming Manchester’s new iconic venue “Factory” and that was then selling the naming rights to an insurance company. Which makes sense. For the Tony Wilson Manchester story (as retold multiple times by Paul Morley) is one in which the creative arts move into the factories left by the departure of industry, mostly to China. Maybe. In the 1980s. But the new Aviva-Factory is surrounded by massive skyscrapers premised on victory of the classic FIRE establishment – finance, insurance and real estate. Not locally grown either but driven by sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi. Manchester is now a rentier city.
Manchester’s creative arts sector – the bright young things that end up on the front of the glossy magazines, not the back-end coders in the finance company or the hard faced account managers at the marketing firms – the ones who make art in all its guises (and I include comedy), are not thriving. Forming barely 2 percent of the Greater Manchester work force, they are the inspirational pea lying deep beneath the glittering digital-tech cluster that is Manchester. They are living on low incomes with insecure jobs and are the most lumpen part of a professional middle class that is currently falling into the world of precarious wage labour. Their education is getting more expensive, their debts higher and the courses they did are being phased out as useless indulgences. As the Conservative government’s strategy of slowly bleeding out our local authorities reaches its death rattle, councils announce “100 percent cuts in the arts”.
Dave Moutrey, the city’s new Director of Culture talks of the middle class colonisation of the arts, a somewhat bizarre sociological observation by somebody who has been a major player in the arts since the late 1980s. How have he and his colleagues allowed this to happen? Yet the same article celebrates the arrival of the English National Opera, though who knows how it will be financed and just how the middle classes are to be kept out of it. This whole glittering artifice of Manchester Creative City is built on an ongoing extraction by marketing companies and their FIRE clientele from a creative arts aquifer for whose sustainable replenishment – as fossils fuel companies with the environment– they feel no compulsion to concern themselves with. It’s what Nancy Fraser called cannibal capitalism.
The degradation of the state education system, the collapse in public services, the erosion of the social and cultural infrastructures that occurred over the last decade have made their mark on the city. From its homelessness and rental stress, mental health crisis and transport chaos, to its ongoing democratic deficit vis-à-vis London and the FIRE elite which effectively control the city, Creative Manchester has its work cut out. Scapegoating some colonising middle class in the massive, ongoing land grab that is the Manchester real estate market is deeply misplaced, the anti-elitism of fools, to adapt a phrase.
Start investment in social and cultural infrastructure and nurture the small-scale local ecosystems of arts and culture. Treat them not as start-up enterprises requiring entrepreneurial business mentors but as part of our shared cultural foundations, respected for what they deliver to us, not as up-stream digital-tech clusters. Invest in creative arts programs as part of the life of the city not as economic development levers. And if art jobs are to be the objective, make sure they are secure, well-paid, and with clear career paths. Not a bunch of happy-go-lucky, bright-coloured all singing, all dancing, disposable Deliveroo drivers.
Make Manchester a creative capital.
Justin O'Connor 