The Factory: Audiences get first glimpse in £186m Manchester arts venue

A £186m arts venue that is being built in Manchester has given the public the first chance to look inside.

The Factory is £76m over budget and is not due to open properly until 2022, three years behind schedule.

Although it is still a building site, audiences were allowed in for one weekend to see a special installation featuring dozens of glowing tents.

The Manchester International Festival will run The Factory and promises that it will "redraw the UK's cultural map".

The 7,000-capacity Factory will provide a permanent home for the festival, whose bosses promise that it will attract 850,000 people a year to the city and bring in £1.1bn to the economy over a decade.

The festival also claims it will "transform Manchester's cultural output and standing" and "spearhead the recovery of the nation's cultural sector, devastated by Covid".

The Factory was conceived in 2014 when then-Chancellor George Osborne pledged £78m as a cultural contribution to the Northern Powerhouse.

But the building has been beset by delays and rising budgets, with a number of changes to its design, and will have to prove its worth.

When it does fully open late next year, The Factory will host theatre, music, opera and exhibitions from major national and international names.

The first public event at the weekend saw dozens of illuminated tents placed on the bare concrete floor of the venue's "warehouse" area, a giant hangar-like space that will host up to 5,000 people for concerts, plays, exhibitions and fashion shows.

The first attraction, called Arcadia and created by director Deborah Warner, featured a soundtrack combining ambient music with recorded poetic readings by actors including Simon Russell Beale, Fiona Shaw and Sir Jonathan Pryce.

The other half of the new venue will be home to a more conventional theatre that will accommodate up to 2,000 people.

This weekend, a tree appeared to have been uprooted, complete with the surrounding patch of ground, and placed roughly where the stage will be.

The small chunk of nature that appeared in the middle of the building site was inspired by an 1852 William Wyld painting of the outskirts of Manchester.

It came complete with two actors who portrayed the two country figures from the original picture.

Created by architects OMA and originally due to open in 2019, The Factory is being built on the site of the old Granada TV studios, once the home to shows like Coronation Street, University Challenge and World In Action.

Its name is a nod to Factory Records, known for bands like Joy Division and New Order, which was run by Granada presenter Tony Wilson.

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