Andy Burnham’s cultural legacy in Greater Manchester is bigger than one landmark building
If Andy Burnham becomes the UK’s next prime minister, his years as mayor of Greater Manchester will be read not only through transport and devolution, but through culture. In the region he led for eight years, the arts became a visible part of civic policy — from flagship infrastructure to neighborhood-level programming that pushed beyond the city center.
The most obvious symbol is Factory International, the organization behind the biennial Manchester International Festival and the operator of Aviva Studios, the £240 million venue that opened in 2023. The building has become the most prominent marker of Burnham’s cultural agenda, a statement of scale and ambition that supporters see as proof Greater Manchester can host work on an international level.
But the deeper story, according to cultural leaders across the region, is the way Burnham folded culture into broader questions of public life. Kirsty Fairclough, professor of screen studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the Greater Manchester Music Commission, said Burnham was “one of the first metro mayors in England to treat culture not simply as an economic sector but as part of a broader civic strategy.” She added that he helped position Manchester’s cultural assets as central to the city-region’s identity rather than peripheral to it.
That approach has also been visible in Burnham’s embrace of the worker bee, a 19th-century Manchester emblem now amplified through the Bee Network bus system. The symbol has come to stand not only for resilience, but for collective identity, collaboration and civic confidence — a useful shorthand for the kind of city-region Burnham has tried to project.
Julia Fawcett, chief executive of The Lowry in Salford, said Burnham consistently treated culture as a driver of economic growth, place-making, wellbeing and civic pride, not merely as a sector to be supported in isolation. She pointed to the way culture has been placed alongside regeneration, skills, health and education, creating conditions for institutions and events to grow across Greater Manchester.
One of the clearest examples is the Greater Manchester Town of Culture scheme, which shifted attention toward boroughs and towns often left out of the dominant Manchester narrative. In policy terms, it reinforced Burnham’s devolution argument: that cultural confidence should not be concentrated in London, or even in the city center.
At Manchester Museum, acting director Georgina Young said Burnham fostered “a real sense of collective pride” in the region’s cultural scene. She highlighted his emphasis on creative health, active aging and wellbeing, and recalled his visit to the museum during the Covid-19 pandemic to meet students at PINC College, a specialist creative college for neurodiverse young people.
Aviva Studios remains the most visible test of that vision. For supporters, it signals a city-region willing to think at scale. For critics, it raises a harder question: whether a major cultural investment can meaningfully benefit artists, freelancers and smaller organizations beyond the flagship institution itself.
