Manchester doesn't need an opera house to succeed

You want to level up the North then it starts with allowing the sort of investment councils refuse.This, not the location of the English National Opera, is what needs fixing.

Tom Bridges who runs Arup’s Leeds office did a thread on the social media platform formerly called Twitter about reactions from assorted London Sorts to the partial relocation of the English National Opera to Manchester. Tom features a string of comments about what a terrible disaster the whole move will be that get summed up by this comment:

“This is the end of ENO. Are there that many opera lovers in Manchester with the money to afford tickets compared to London?”

All this trauma for London Sorts comes about because the Arts Council of England (or whatever confected concoction of these words it is using this week) decided that the ENO’s funding would depend on them relocating some of their shows ‘up north’. Originally the Arts Council wanted it to simply move to a nice location in Manchester but the fudge that emerges satisfies nobody:

“If ENO is to “focus on the development of new innovations in opera”, admirable in principle, what scope will there be for the tried and tested creative and technical work that must be the bedrock of a national opera company? We are in danger of going back to the Arts Council’s inexcusable naiveties about opera on social media and in pub car parks. These clichés have turned what could have been a fruitful two-way discussion about how to move the art-form forward into a slanging match which has done nothing to enhance the future of opera.”

I know why this sort of thing happens. I understand the political pressures. And I appreciate that Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, will love parading the ENO around like a sort of trophy head won for Manchester in the never-ending war with London Sorts. But Manchester doesn’t need an opera house because opera is a really unimportant cultural activity only sustained by the continuing and persistent injection of taxpayers’ cash into the business. I like opera but, you know something, I can indulge that interest without there being an opera house in Manchester. 

Much more interesting to me is why elite cultural institutions like the ENO are given such iconic status over and above far more important and influential cultural institutions that don’t need eternal subsidy by the state. Especially since Manchester already has two of the latter - City and United. The two football clubs are vastly more important to Manchester than an opera house. Indeed football is what, more than anything else, sustains Manchester’s image and importance. If you travel to the other side of the world and say ‘Manchester’ people know the place for just one reason - the two football clubs. And the success of these clubs also marks out why Manchester is seen in a better light than bigger and richer Birmingham. If inward investment arrives in Manchester, it is more likely to be because the investor is a Manchester United fan than because you can watch La Boheme.

City leaders, not just in the UK, are obsessed with the institutions of elite culture and have a sort of wonderment for the apparently transformative effect of cultural events. There is a fairly widespread view that the presence of high culture institutions has a positive effect on the local economy but even the best research seems quite limited:

“Robustness tests confirm our strategy and strengthen the finding that proximity to a baroque opera house significantly affects the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. Then, a cross-region growth regression shows that these employees induce local knowledge spillovers and shift a location to a higher growth path.”

This is from Germany but we perhaps have to ask about the order of the cart and horse - were the ‘high-human-capital’ workers there before or after the opera house? After all, the argument from London Sorts is essentially that the ENO has to be in London because there is a critical mass of people willing to buy expensive tickets for an opera. The argument isn’t that the ‘high-human-capital’ workers will be attracted to London by the presence of the ENO, it is that such people will be able to travel to London for the pleasure of an opera. And that this is, of course, not true in reverse as London Sorts would never travel to Manchester for an opera other than under duress.

The use of high culture as a regeneration tool is popular because it feels like change-making. Yet Bradford has one of the North’s most successful theatres with people travelling to shows from across the North, but there’s not much evidence that the Alhambra has a massive impact on the City’s economic prospects. We have seen huge Capital of Culture and City of Culture events staged in Liverpool and Hull but, again, it is hard to gauge whether there is any noticeable economic impact from these activities. Leeds is currently coming to an end of its 2023 Year of Culture and, even for those of us on that City’s doorstep, the events have barely been noticed despite over £10m in public funding. The event is supposed to generate 6 to 1 return on investment for Leeds as well as 8 to 1 investment for West Yorkshire and a £49m annual boost to the regional visitor economy. All of this seems ephemeral, especially given the most recent estimates of West Yorkshire’s economy put its size at £65 billion.

Greater Manchester’s visitor economy is valued at around £7.5bn which puts the ENO’s annual income of £33m in some sort of context. Even if restaurants and hotel bills are factored in, the impact of ENO coming to Manchester is barely perceptible at less than 1% of that visitor economy (which itself is less than 10% of the overall city-region economy). And we should remember that £12m of that ENO income is public subsidy. The reality with elite arts institutions and events, given their need for subsidy, is that they exist because places are wealthy enough to afford to subsidise them, not because they are the means by which the local economy grows. This doesn’t make the investment unnwelcome but it does argue that, as a ‘levelling up’ strategy the relocation of elite arts institutions from London is unlikely to be effective.

Local and regional leaders want to be seen as leading a renaissance in their city or region but the reality is that a focus on culture ends up being all fur coat and no knickers - it looks good but its value to the betterment of local people’s lives is rather overstated. The local economy would be better served by planning authorities not refusing permission for new business parks next to the airport than by seeking to capture subsidised London culture. And, moreover, the culture of Manchester - or Leeds for that matter - would be better served by focusing on their existing and famously vibrant cultural life. 

‘Levelling Up’, as with all these national schemes of regeneration, is in danger of being entirely subsumed by a real estate grift made palatable by being hidden behind a veneer of culture, science and city boosterism. Past schemes of regeneration, at least since the 1970s, largely resulted in artificially (and temporarily) raising land values in selected and carefully bounded areas. There’s a myth, and we see it in the supposed economic leverage of cultural investment, that these artificially inflated values (achieved using public subsidy) result in more investment when the truth is that much of the regeneration spending gets extracted in profits by developers or paid in wages to regeneration consultants and managers. Sometimes this can be transformational, Park Hill in Sheffield for example, but too often we get diminishing returns as the regenerating authority chases declining land values desperate to get something, anything, out of the ground.

Tom Bridges (and others) are right to be irritated by the tendency of people in London to consider that the North doing culture is akin to Dr Johnson’s views on women preaching: “it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”. But, once the irritation is out there, we need to settle back and realise that it doesn’t really matter much because having an opera house in Manchester is neither here nor there so far as bettering the economy is concerned. It is galling that London sucks up the lion’s share of subsidy for the arts but compared to the imbalance in other public investment such as transport and R&D this is not really such a big deal. And, in the final analysis, it isn’t and never has been public spending that made places rich. You want to level up the North then it starts with allowing the sort of investment councils refuse -  that business bark in Wythenshawe, the extension of Leeds Bradford Airport, a new warehouse complex at Chain Bar on the M62, and dozens of other petty decisions that make life harder for business from clean air zones and public space protection orders to officious limits on takeaways and licensed premises. This, not the location of the English National Opera, is what needs fixing.