When people think of Manchester, they probably first picture football, then music and, after he took a stand against the PM, maybe Andy Burnham.
But there is something else that Manchester is becoming increasingly known for. Something that has enabled much of the city to keep moving despite facing some of the longest lockdowns across the country. Something that has enabled all of us, when we’ve been stuck in our homes, to survive a year where fun, fraternising and having the freedom to roam have been curtailed.
Digital broadcasting.
Media and television have been an integral part of Manchester’s culture for many years. It has been home to soap opera Coronation Street since 1960, with the Granada sign an iconic beacon in the city for decades.
Today it is the second-largest centre of the creative and digital industries in Europe, with a £5bn digital ecosystem and is fast earning itself a reputation as a go-to filming location. Not just for its streetscapes but for the studios and post-production facilities it has on offer.
The BBC’s Peaky Blinders, a host of Netflix shows including The Crown, The Stranger and White Lines, and Channel 4’s It’s a Sin are just a few of the hit shows filmed in the city.
“The broadcast industry has always been a really vibrant part of Manchester,” says Lou Cordwell, founder and chief executive of MagneticNorth and chair of the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership. “From the 1960s and Granada, all the way through to its present day – both on the old Granada site and what we now see in Enterprise City, as well as those new locations at Media City and the Sharp Project and Space Studio.
”It’s always been a huge part of our creative fabric, but it’s also exploding to be a huge employer and future part of our economy.”
Key to the city
Enterprise City is a new district of Manchester being brought forward by Allied London that promises to be a media, tech and creative cluster designed to connect people and business. It is home to a number of studios and production suites, including Manchester Studios, the ABC Buildings and the Media Cube. The Sharp Project is a 200,000 sq ft warehouse once occupied by electronics company Sharp now occupied by more than 60 digital entrepreneurs, while Space Studios is a 17-acre TV and film production unit just minutes from Manchester Piccadilly Station.
Manchester, it seem, has more film studios than football players. And its digital and creative industries are just as important to the city region economically.
Cordwell says the creative digital industries form one of the four cornerstones of Greater Manchester’s local industrial strategy. The sector is where the region knows economic growth is going to come from over the next 10 to 20 years.
“Our broadcasting content creation capabilities account for a really important part of that,” says Cordwell. “And the fact those aspects of that sector have been able to continue to work and to continue to move forward has given everybody a little bit of confidence that while those cornerstones might be paused for a little bit, they don’t fundamentally change. That really is still where the future of the city region is going to come from.”
She adds: “We’ve made a conscious decision for many years that the creative industries for us is not a ‘nice to have’ on the fringes, it’s a core fundamental of our future economy.”
But for the digital and creative industries to be core, investment is needed. In connectivity – digital and physical – in skills and in the development of place.
Daniel Monaghan, partner at Shoosmiths, which is advising Allied London at St Johns and Enterprise City, says: “Manchester is creating neighbourhoods that are truly differentiating, offering an attractive alternative to the traditional media heartland of London with the added benefits of lower rents, not to mention a large pool of graduate talent from three internationally recognised universities, all of which boast high retention rates in the city.”
There’s something happening
“Manchester is increasingly being seen as an equal to London and, with a city region population of more than 2.7m people and an economy bigger than that of Wales or Northern Ireland, is now far from the lesser option,” he adds. “Just ask the likes of GCHQ, Booking.com, WPP, Soho House, Moonpig, the BBC and ITV, all of which have chosen to make Manchester their home. Throw some of the most exciting start-up and scale-up businesses from the tech world into the mix and you start to realise that something is happening in the city.”
Manchester’s growing dominance in the creative and digital industries is enabled by public private partnership, says Cordwell. She says the city can only enable the growth of the sector and attract big global players like the BBC, ITV and Netflix to the region if you can flood them with the right talent. And you can be ahead of the game in delivering those customers what they need not just for today, but for tomorrow too.
“One of the challenges for the creative and digital industries is actually what we need today will be markedly different than what we need in five years,” says Cordwell. “The Greater Manchester Combined Authority and LEP work hand-in-hand with the industry to try and forecast what those jobs of the future are going to be. So if you look at the digital skills gap, we’re putting ourselves in a place that makes us a very investable place because we’re getting the large-scale flow through of the skills that are going to be needed in two or three years.”
She says having employers such as the BBC and ITV that the public sector can collaborate with on identifying what the future looks like is what makes Manchester attractive to other employers that then want to come to the area.
Shoosmith’s Monaghan says it well, with the often misquoted “if you build it, they will come” line from Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams. But correctly quoted or not, it is the truth. At least for Manchester’s digital broadcasting scene.
“As much as the last year has forced us to consume digital media more intensively than ever before, workspaces that inspire creativity and a skilled and tech-savvy workforce that drives innovation will always be needed to produce the digital content of tomorrow,” says Monaghan. “This is great news for those who are already a part of the Manchester scene, but as a leading example of the levelling-up agenda, this is also good news for the country as a whole.”
“We’re the largest creative and digital sector outside London. So we’re a significant presence,” adds Cordwell. “And in the pandemic we’ve seen a lot of people really question what matters to them in terms of their quality of life and starting to look at places where they can be part of an industry that they love being part of, but perhaps can also have access to some of those other things that they’ve grown to value, like fresh air and affordable housing and see their family.
“Greater Manchester is in a brilliant position because we’re able to offer that larger quality of life aspect, as well as the opportunity to make content that is broadcast all over the world and be part of some of the biggest shows in the world.”
If you build it, create a community and collaborate, it seems that they will come. And they will film.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews
