A new £78m theatre and arts venue is to be built on the site of the former Granada TV studios in Manchester.
The venue is to be called The Factory, in homage to the city’s legendary Factory Records label.
It will hold up to 5,000 people and provide a permanent home for the Manchester International Festival.
The plans were announced by Chancellor George Osborne in his Autumn Statement. Manchester City Council said the venue should open by 2019.
The council said it would “play an integral part in helping Manchester and the north of England provide a genuine cultural counterbalance to London”.
‘Ultra-flexible’
The council said it would be a “large scale, ultra-flexible arts space” that would hold 2,200 people when seated, or 5,000 standing.
It has risen out of the success of the biennial Manchester International Festival, which has to date staged major shows and innovative cultural events in existing venues or empty buildings.
MIF chairman Tom Bloxham said The Factory would be “a new kind of large-scale venue comparable in scale to London’s Coliseum connected to one side of a Tate Modern Turbine Hall-type structure”.
He continued: “As well as providing a new home base for MIF, it will commission and welcome innovative works from companies and artists around the world.
“Like MIF, it will attract groundbreaking and pioneering works which might not otherwise come to the north of England, or even the UK, and the concept is in many ways born from MIF.”
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Source:: BBC Entertainment
