Weekend essay

Art

Culture

20 January 2024

9 min read

Wonder walls: will Manchester’s creativity save the city?

Manchester newcomer, and new bishop, Matthew Porter is bowled over by the city’s enrichening creativity.

Matthew Porter

Matthew Porter is Bishop of Bolton, in the diocese of Manchester.

Looking down on a man walking across a grid of large black and white portrait photographs of people's faces

The 'Inside Out: This is Manchester’ installation.

Manchester is the place to be. So thinks fashion house Chanel. It recently hosted its renowned annual Métiers d’Art show in the British city, billing it as ‘one of the most effervescent cities of pop culture and an avant-garde one, whose bands, spanning all genres, have changed the history of music.’ So thinks the English National Opera, who have just announced that Manchester is to be its new home. And so, think the investors who have pumped £242mn into Aviva Studios, a stunning new arts centre, billed as the most important arts venue in the UK since London’s Tate Modern gallery.

Cultural mix

Having recently started as new bishop in the Diocese of Manchester, I feel like I’ve arrived at a time of exploding artistic vibrancy, with the city and region rising to new cultural heights. The mix is rich and potent, edgy and interesting, young and confident, strong and loud. And yet not far from the coolness and affluence it brings there are still many areas of urban dreariness and scruffy social housing, often linked with deprivation and deep poverty, telling a different story of those who feel they’re being left behind, deficient in ambition and lacking in hope. Manchester is a real cultural mix.

Despite these contrasts, you can’t ignore the fact that much of Manchester is humming. The symbol of the city, the ‘Manchester Bee,’ feels apt and has rightly been revived, for it represents hard-work and industry, something the area is becoming known for again. But it’s a new kind of industry. It’s not the hard factories of the cotton mills but the softer artistic endeavours that are reclaiming the spaces and setting the tone. Astute and celebrated, the Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham recognises and champions this, declaring recently that it’s the creative industries that are now the fastest growing sector in the city.

As a newcomer to the region, I’ve been wondering what I should make of all this artistic entrepreneurship. Is it good? Is it important? Is it helpful? To help answer these questions I decided I needed to see what all the fuss was about and so I visited the newly opened Aviva Studios.

Nestling in the heart of the city, on a riverbank, the venue is located in the renovated Granada TV studios building and provides a vast space for creativity. It’s already the home of the Factory International music label and the Manchester International Festival. I was keen to understand the vision and understand why so much time and energy and money has been invested in such a space. I wanted to know if it really is a landmark space for contemporary arts in the UK, especially in the North of England, and whether I’d be back.

So, I visited on the first day of the venue’s official ‘Welcome’ to the general public. There’d been a series of soft launch events which included Free Your Mind, a large-scale, interactive hip-hop dance reimagining of The Matrix, directed by Oscar-winning film-maker Danny Boyle. But this was now ‘open to the world’ time. I turned up with grown-up members of my family who work in various creative sectors and who were keen to explore, aware that the warm-up events had already garnered great acclaim from The Times to Aesthetica magazine. We entered and took in the aroma of fresh coffee and the bustle of noise, as a small crowd of diverse ages gathered round a pop-up stage enjoying the creative reading of a children’s story. The foyer stage was transformed every hour into something new: first a space for musicians, then actors, then artists and dancers, all entertaining and encouraging participation. It was fun and vibrant, with an intriguing and inviting family-feel, drawing people in.

Connective art

Good art does that. It attracts. It reels you in, not just to observe, but to get involved. I experienced something of that as we stepped outside and enjoyed an installation called ‘Inside Out: This is Manchester’. It was a simple black and white portrait-display of two hundred Mancunians. The large photos were set out in a group on a concrete floor, creating what looked rather like a giant board game. The idea was you walked over them, standing on them, in and among them. So, into the photos I walked, and to my surprise I soon discovered the experience to be visually arresting and intriguingly immersive. After a few minutes of wandering among the faces I stood to one side for a breather. I asked my family which face they found most interesting, and I pointed out the one that had stood out for me. At that very moment, I noticed that a woman walking among the pictures had stopped at the one I’d chosen and was crouching down. As I looked again, she appeared rather like the woman in the photo. ‘Hi. Is this your photo?’ I asked. ‘Yes, it is’ she replied. ‘I’m Carmen. I’m just here for a short time today and wanted to see it.’ ‘It’s my favourite’ I said, ‘It’s a really great photo. I love the way it’s captured you pulling such a strong face!’ ‘Thanks’ she smiled, going on to explain how the shoot had been taken, but that this was the first time she’d actually seen it. I was thrilled: the person behind one face out of two hundred that had caught my attention, happened to turn up at the exact moment I was there! It made me feel strangely connected to the installation and with the people of Manchester they represented. Such is the connective power of art!

Such art does what cathedrals of old have done, enabling us to look out and look up and see beyond ourselves into a greater vista. They are deeply valuable and enchanting spaces.

Quality design

From there we went on an architectural tour. The stairwells, the corridors, the foyers, and the meeting spaces were cleanly and elegantly designed, using strong but simple materials, emphasising curves and city views, encouraging you to walk on and see more. We were told how many spaces, especially the foyers, worked really hard, being multi-functional and could be transformed for different uses. The two main venues were impressive and huge: the Hall is a 1600-seat concert venue, and the Warehouse space could host 5,000, thanks to vast walls that can be opened to create one massive space. The quality, the design, the versatility and the technology was hugely impressive, all set up and ready to be a northern centre of artistic excellence.

Enchanting spaces

So what did I make of it? And should such creativity be funded in Manchester? In short, I liked it. In fact, I absolutely loved it. It made me realise how much we need good art, good artists and good artistic spaces. They enrich us and our environment. They touch us deeply not just in our minds but in our souls and cause us to ponder and wonder. Such art does what cathedrals of old have done, enabling us to look out and look up and see beyond ourselves into a greater vista. They are deeply valuable and enchanting spaces.

The experience was significant for me, and extremely positive. Not only do I want to go back but since visiting I’ve mentioned it to quite a lot of people and am finding myself to be a bit of an evangelist for the place! I didn’t expect that. It reminds me that good spaces produce good conversations. The fact that it cost so much might be controversial to some, but it’s hard to put a price on stunning. If it inspires people to great visionary endeavours and lifts people, especially those lacking in hope, to see beyond their horizons, then it’s money well spent. If it causes children and women and men to dream dreams and imagine new futures, then I’m behind it. If it helps people see beyond their present dilemmas and laugh heartily and cry deeply and love compassionately, then I’m a supporter.

I believe passionately in encouraging artistry and innovation whenever and wherever I can. For the God I serve is the great Creator and the inspiration behind all true creativity.

Deeper understanding

My visit to Aviva Studios must have been good, as it’s made me want to support and encourage the team working there. I found myself thanking everyone, and even took a leaflet about becoming a member. As a bishop, I feel on behalf of the church and city that I want to cheer on Aviva Studios, commending it and its boldness to the Greater Manchester area, for I believe passionately in encouraging artistry and innovation whenever and wherever I can. For the God I serve is the great Creator and the inspiration behind all true creativity. Not only has he made the universe and planet Earth on which we reside, but throughout history he has given artistic gifts for human beings to foster and share.

I agree with Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura, that ‘Art is fundamental to the human search for deeper understanding. Art, by extension of this reasoning, is fundamental to understanding the Bible,’ which itself is a beautifully and uniquely-crafted literary work combining human artistry and divine inspiration. Creativity then, is at the heart of God, and of his human creation. We need to express this creativity in all sorts of places, including our workplaces. Artist and crafts pioneer William Morris rightly says that ‘without dignified, creative human occupation people become disconnected from life.' But surely this is true not just of our jobs but of our homes, and especially of designated creative spaces. Without such creative places, like gothic cathedrals, beautiful parks, art galleries and now Aviva Studios, we can easily become disassociated from the wonder and joy of life. We need good spaces to stir us and send us.

Innovative leadership

As a bishop who wants to see our churches growing and communities thriving, I welcome the new Aviva Studios as part of the cultural landscape of Greater Manchester. I want to enjoy it, visit it and share it. I also want the church to learn from it, for churches are meant to be places of Christ-centred worship and mission that are indigenous, reflecting the good things of their cultural environment. Manchester’s burgeoning creative culture is a good challenge to the church to be similarly creative, and not just in a reactive, but proactive way.

Churches have often been centres of creative excellence in the past, which is often when they have been most vibrant. They tried new things and become breeding grounds for creative people and innovative leaders. Interestingly, despite many churches struggling in the UK today, I see more signs of vitality and pioneering cultural leadership now than I did ten years ago. Most days I come across entrepreneurial church leaders who are brimming with fresh thoughts and renewed vision for their communities. Some even have bold and brash ideas that are being turned into reality, like purchasing, at considerable cost, an old army barracks in the centre of Manchester. Once renovated it will be a stunningly creative space for young adults, to serve the city and from which many new churches will be planted in the future. I’m all for it. Let creativity arise!

Creative people

Aviva Studios is an impressive building, designed to be a modern cathedral of contemporary cultural creativity in Manchester. It confidently declares a positive future for the arts, shouting loudly and proudly that Manchester is the cutting-edge city for creativity in the region and, should anyone be unsure, it really is the premier metropolis of the North. But perhaps more importantly I hope its impact will not just be the vast and impressive multi-million pound building, but the greater creative legacy it leaves in people, in those who are shaped by its art.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who was Chief Rabbi from 1991 to 2013 expressed something of this when he said:

'We are shaped by our environment, but we can also shape our environment as well. We are created, but also creative.’

My prayer is that Aviva Studios and the other new artistic ventures will release more creativity across the city and region, across all ages, social sectors, and ethnic groups. Not only will this lift our sights, but it will stir our souls, and cause us to wonder at the Most Creative One, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Review

Culture

Economics

Politics

5 July 2024

10 min read

The book Keir Starmer says you must read

Will Hutton’s This Time No Mistakes surveys the thinking that could solve Britain’s ills.

John Milbank

John Milbank is a theologian, philosopher and poet. A co-founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, he is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham.

Kier Starmer sits on a sofa, leaning forward and holding papers he is reading. Rachel Reaves sits and looks on.

Starmer and Reeves.

Labour Party

In the aftermath of a historic election, one could do worse than read Will Hutton’s second big ‘state of the nation book’, recently published. This Time No Mistakes is worth reading just for the succinctness and clarity of its politic-economic history of the United Kingdom since the industrial revolution, which it provides in its central chapters. Indeed, Keir Starmer says it is a ‘brilliant book... read it if you haven't already ’ It may well take a sophisticated journalist to be able to do this so well: too often, even the best of academics cannot see the public wood for their private-obsessional trees.

But it is doubly and mainly worth reading for Hutton’s prognosis of our ills and his recommendations for solving them. The new Labour government could do far worse than try to carry through Hutton’s proposals, which almost anyone of common sense and goodwill (including all Tories) ought readily to endorse. Indeed, if the next government managed to initiate even a half of what he suggests, this country could be placed back upon the right tracks.

As to the history, which is crucial to the ultimate diagnosis: Hutton contends quite simply that Britain has been self-deceived by the peculiar nature of its industrial revolution, which was the first in history. It was largely a matter of private enterprise, partly enabled and later cushioned by empire, whose possession encouraged us to support an unqualified doctrine of free trade.

However, all other nations, including the United States, both when they sought to catch up with the steam and rail revolution, and when they later co-pioneered the ones based on gas and electricity, and ultimately on nuclear and digital, from the outset depended much more upon state intervention to promote needed expertise, education and investment. The United Kingdom, by contrast, remained captivated by the mythical glory of its initial take-off.

As a result, not just Conservative governments, but also Labour ones, right up to the New Labour one, and including the catastrophically misguided work of Margaret Thatcher (Hutton is admirably unqualified here) remained far too captivated by the norms of economic laissez-faire, ‘balancing the books’, a primacy of finance over production and obsessive Treasury concern with money, rather than productive wealth.

The exceptions to this were the pre-World War one Liberal government and the post World War Two Labour one. Yet all the strong ideas implemented by the latter came from ‘New Liberal’ thinkers and not Labour ones: notably from Keynes and Beveridge. Labour on its own, by comparison, has tragically and disastrously oscillated between a desire to replace capitalism with some sort of command economy on the one hand, and simply leaving capitalism as it is, with a bit of welfare tinkering, on the other. More recently this has been seen in the contrast between Corbyn and Blair.

It is at this juncture that Hutton proceeds to complement his political-economic diagnosis with a more purely political one. The split on the ‘progressive left’ is a catastrophe that has kept the Tories unfairly in power for much of a century. This split is both caused by and has prevented any reform of the first past the post voting system, which urgently needs to go.

For this reason then, political economy and constitutional reform go together.

As to the latter, we need proportional representation which would allow more reasoned debate instead of the inter-party squabble, alongside legally guaranteed local government and a different kind of informed, rather than overweening executive.

As to the former, we need flexible planning, public-private partnership in investment, a national wealth fund, sectional trade union bargaining, the breaking up of cartels and monopolies and required social purpose and stakeholding, for every business and financial enterprise.

One is tempted just to say hurray! But there are some historical and theoretical questions to be posed that may have hidden practical consequences.

Better than trying to ‘balance’ the private and the collective, as if the self and society were in rivalry, is to take the more Continental (and early Blairite!) course of stressing that we are always ‘persons in relation’.

Hutton now backs Tawney besides Keynes. But do they say the same thing? For the latter, capitalism is a wild, amoral and dynamic beast that can nonetheless be politically tamed. In certain phases of the capitalist cycle only (as Hutton rightly sees) this will be about boosting demand, but in others it can mean lessening it and temporarily hurting workers.

But Tawney, and Hutton clearly agrees with him, wanted a market economy permitting only useful and not merely acquisitive wealth. Given this ethical purpose it was for him possible for the market, aa a socialist market, to reach equilibrium, beyond extrinsic and always precarious state ‘management’.

Just how precarious was seen in the 1970s. For Hutton, the lapse of Keynesianism in this decade was simply a matter of the triumph of the wrong ideas. To a large degree this is surely right, and yet it is not the whole story. Were it the latter, then neoliberalism might not have spread beyond Anglo-Saxon lands to Europe and South America.

The other aspect is surely the reality that capitalism of its nature, as driven by the amoral search for profit, resists any prospect of a stable, social market. Achieving that and extending the corporatist order of negotiation between state, business and unions would have been the alternative way, instead of Hayekianism, to deal with ‘stagflation’. Rather than a competition between capital, labour and consumer for money that wasn’t there at the time, a fair division of spoils could have been consistently instituted by legally and culturally re-framing the firm and the market, something that would have immediately favoured a renewed degree of growth.

Really, almost everything that Hutton writes indicates agreement with this sort of thing, including the recognition that of itself, capitalism is not actually dynamic (that comes from technology and culture) but tends to build up sterile finance in the interests of the few, rather than productive growth in the interests of the many. But in that case ‘ethical socialism’ is not just a set of ideals, as he tends to imply, but a mode of achievable practice.

Similarly, a general mutualist national insurance approach to welfare, which he rightly favours, was not just a New Liberal advocacy as he claims, but deeply rooted in co-operative socialism and in Christian (especially Anglican) social thinking whose influence -- except silently in the case of Tawney -- goes unmentioned. Yet the very phrase ‘welfare state’ is Archbishop William Temple’s and Tawney’s social analysis, intended for the general public, concluded with an unabashed High Church ecclesiology!

It is relevant here that Hutton speaks of the need to combine the ‘I’ with the ‘We’ and yet he clearly does not endorse just any old exercise of ‘individual agency’, even if he sometimes appears to do so, when defining the operation of the price mechanism as necessarily ‘wild’, after Adam Smith’s exclusion of commercial transactions from the immediate operation of social sympathy. Better than trying to ‘balance’ the private and the collective, as if the self and society were in rivalry, is to take the more Continental (and early Blairite!) course of stressing that we are always ‘persons in relation’ – at once within and outside each other, in a constant creative weave.

Nothing could be further from Keynes’ despising of the proletariat and favouring of learned leisure, that John Ruskin’s revolutionary mystique of the artisanal.

There are two deeper questions about Hutton’s approach. First, his excessive ‘idealism’, as with his analysis of the Seventies switch, may still underrate the difficulty of overcoming the power of entrenched interests – the need indeed not so much for class, as for popular warfare against plutocracy.

Secondly, he tends to underplay a theoretical tension between secular and materialist thinkers, including New Liberals, on the one hand, and religious and Idealist thinkers like the first ‘New Liberal’, T.H Green on the other.

The latter was much more like Alasdair Macintyre or Michael Sandel than like John Rawls, as Hutton claims: for by human ‘self-realisation’ he meant the ‘positive liberty’ of pursuing the objectively true ends of human flourishing: religious contemplation, artistic creation of genuine beauty, active citizen participation.

By contrast, the secular New Liberals, including Keynes, tended to reduce the ethical good to the negative liberty of rights, private friendship and utility – often leading them to favour eugenics and to indulge in racism. Nothing could be further from Keynes’ despising of the proletariat and favouring of learned leisure, that John Ruskin’s revolutionary mystique of the artisanal.

Hutton tends to express surprise that a Tory like Ruskin, or a reactionary like Carlyle, should have favoured the cause of the worker – and indeed in Ruskin’s case also espoused ‘communism’, as Hutton elides from the picture. But this is to fail to see how Tory Radicalism and even paternalism is actually a third strand in the kind of transformative thinking that we continue to need, was always a crucial influence on Labour and was a crucial element of the postwar settlement.

If these thinkers indeed favoured ‘hierarchy’, then that was in part because they wanted more interpersonal and mediated chains of command, rather than brutally centralised and mechanical ones. Surely Hutton wants that also, as his excellent reservations about the use of Artificial Intelligence would indicate?

There is a recognition that economic individualism usually ‘on the right’ is actually matched and encouraged by a cultural individualism usually ‘on the left’.

This is perhaps the limit of talking in terms of ‘progressive’ versus ‘conservative’. Hutton harks back to the norms of the Enlightenment. Yet, as Richard Whatmore has shown, all the great British enlightenment thinkers came to think that pure enlightenment was failing.

They saw its anti-religious fanaticism stance as challenged by the rise of new secular, nationalist and direct democratic fanaticisms, as supremely with the French Revolution. By ‘populism’, as we might now say!

But they also already recognised that the breakdown of a rational peace had been encouraged by excessive consumer greed and by the over-implication of commerce in state borrowing (whose pre-enabling of industry in Britain, Hutton does not mention) and so also in war and empire.

It was exactly in this context that the enlightenment thinker Edmund Burke began to consider the virtues of the longer-term embedding of enlightenment in Christianity and the importance of the medieval ‘gothic’ legacy of a corporate order binding social body to social body, rather than individual to individual via contract, mediated by the market and backed up by the state.

In Burke’s wake, for example with the radical William Cobbett, much of the Nineteenth Century critique of economism, to which Hutton is the heir, was of a ‘Romantic’ and often ‘neo-medieval’ rather than purely enlightenment cast. (Hutton at times wrongly reads medieval ‘feudalism’ as ‘absolutist’ – a specifically early modern phenomenon.) This matters, because this tradition contains a stronger recognition that the centralising state (which the Enlightenment favoured as a substitute for the Church) can be just as alienating and anti-social as the uprooting market – even if, as Karl Polanyi later saw, one needs the power of the state today in order to restore the primacy of the social and of inter-human fellowship.

Within the same current, there is a recognition that economic individualism usually ‘on the right’ is actually matched and encouraged by a cultural individualism usually ‘on the left’. And here Hutton is perhaps inconsistent – he definitely sees this, mentioning the dubious overriding of the universal by identitarian concerns, and yet also recognises it somewhat uneasily, as it challenges certain ‘progressivist’ assumptions.

As a result, he rather disallows the validity of some populist concerns – ironically rather like the incomprehension of the older enlightenment in the face of the new revolutionary era. For example, concerns with the normative primacy of the heterosexual family and the enabling of family and children, with regional and national identity, with the academic ‘woke’ trashing of the entire Western legacy, with the exploitation and cultural disruption of excessive immigration, with ecological policies that simply override current human needs while doing little to assist the future of nature.

The danger of these partial blind spots could be a continued failure of the roughly ‘communitarian’ Left, or the sensible Right, to win over the mass of the people to their cause. For they must be won over if not just the United Kingdom, but humanity as a whole, is to have a decent future.

Towards building that future, no one has contributed more, or more valiantly, than Will Hutton.