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

Film & TV

Identity

Masculinity

29 October 2025

10 min read

Wanted, not wasted: the older brother who couldn’t lead

In Peaky Blinders and House of Guinness, Steven Knight shows being needed—not being perfect—transforms

Will Fagan

Will Fagan serves as a minister in the Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dressed in Victorian clothes, two brothers raise their arms together.

Anthony Boyle and Louis Partridge in House of Guinness.

Netflix.

If you’ve watched House of Guinness recently, you’ll find show creator Steven Knight return to familiar territory: masterfully exploring complex dynamics between brothers, family legacy, and ambition – captivating themes he previously explored in his ever-popular Peaky Blinders. In the respective dramas, we find both older brothers struggling to fit into roles and living with the weight that often accompanies that struggle.

In societal terms, we are not unfamiliar with the oldest son’s placement as the first in line of dynastic succession and head of the family. The Prince of Wales will succeed his father as King; Prince George will succeed his father and so on.

This dynamic plays out, of course, in common lives as well. Throughout history, the oldest son, as a rule, inherited the family home, the landholdings, and the family business (even if its legal standing was murky at best): Santino became the Don (The Godfather, 1972), Josh Kroenke and Tony Kahn essentially run their respective fathers’ Premiership football clubs, and at some point in your family line, I bet a great uncle took over his father’s blacksmith shop, leaving his younger brother – your direct line – left to fend for himself. (You’re here, after all, so things must have worked out, anyway.)

What happens, though, when the oldest son is not fit to assume this role in succession? How does he respond if he is passed over? And what happens when he’s actually needed by the younger brother, the successor?

As Peaky Blinders opens in its first series, we are presented with a perspective that Arthur Shelby, the older brother, is the boss of the family bookmaking syndicate and racketeering operation only to soon discover that his smarter, more ambitious, and more capable younger brother, Tommy, leads the family.

Being passed over naturally plagues Arthur, and his behavior consistently confirms why he isn’t fit to lead: he is quick tempered, demonstrates poor judgement, and goes on drug-induced benders. He is loyal when he is sober, and you can’t help but love him, but you wouldn’t hire him to run your company, either. By the opening of the show’s concluding series, he is shown passing his days in an opium shop, strung out and all-but-abandoned by his family.

Knight revisits this theme within the Guinness family in his newest show, set in the 1860s and three generations after the founding of the brewery, the family well-established as the first family of Ireland and wealthy beyond measure.

From the start, family tension and doubts about the brewery’s continued success are palpable. At the time of his father’s death, the oldest Guinness brother, also named Arthur, is frivolous, irresponsible, and debonair, having returned to Dublin for his father’s funeral after years of carousing in London. He is unkind, arrogant, and frankly does not care what happens with the company, so long as its sale finances the rest of his life. (You don’t root for him like you root for Arthur Shelby.)

At the time of the reading of his father’s will, anticipating he would inherit the brewery and the bulk of the family property only to sell it, Arthur Guinness finds his father had other plans, haunting him from the grave. He learns that he and his younger brother Edward – responsible and having apprenticed at the brewery – would inherit an equal stake of the brewery and family wealth, but that Arthur would be entitled to nothing if he did not participate in the running of the business, something he neither wants nor cares to do. He wants to be the older brother to inherit but has less-than-no desire to lead the family.

Saddled with expectations that he neither wants nor could succeed under, he continues his path of ruination – marrying for convenience, partying in unfit circles, and participating in election fraud, all bringing the family into public scandal and private torment. Moreover, and perhaps of greatest importance, he knows that he is the oldest son who cannot succeed, who was never built to, and that his father did not trust him. Thus, he pursues the only thing he is good at – willful self-destruction.

Well, this is great saga material – one that we will undoubtedly follow in the Guinness family in the coming years – but for us poorer mortals, why care?

I believe, and I don’t think this is an overstatement, that there is an older brother in all of us. We may not be the actual older brother ourselves waiting to be handed a family fortune only to not receive it, but odds are that at some point there was an expectation thrust upon us – or even one we placed on ourselves – to be a certain type of person or to achieve a concrete level of success, and that didn’t work out.

Have you, for instance, taken a chance in bringing the antiquated family business into the twenty-first century only to watch it go belly up? Have you found yourself in a relationship for too long “for all the right reasons” because everyone wanted it but you didn’t? Did you want to study architecture at university but read law instead because your father and grandfather were called to the bar and now you find yourself drawing neo-classical designs in the courtroom?

What happened, then, when that expectation or dream did not come to fruition? Have you, even to a small extent, arrived at the future and found you’re not who you thought you’d be? To not achieve that thing we were destined for, to not rise to the standard, as it turns out, can often leave us in the same state of the black sheep older brother – directionless, lacking a clear station in life and without a sense of worth.

What is interesting and what is helpful, if I can go so far as to say, is that we find this dynamic at the moral heart of family and social relationships across millennia, a dynamic which is presented in the Christian understanding of relationships.

Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – rests on two essential claims. The first is that humanity was created for one clear purpose – to love God and to live in perfect harmony with creation and fellow man. According to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, this was the expectation of our divine father, the role destined for all children of God. Yet Adam and Eve, the original children, failed to live righteously according to the standard God gave them and were viewed, thus, as guilty before God. All their descendants (which is to say all humanity) inherit that guilt because of what Christian teaching calls original sin.

That may sound both celestial and like Sunday school at the same time, and you, by the way, don’t have to take my word for it. But if you were to say that you do live in harmony with God, creation, and fellow man perfectly, I might be compelled to ask, “How’s that really going?”

When we look around and are honest, we are free to admit that things are not perfect, and we live with the weight of imperfection.

How do we feel, for example, when we let someone else down? How does it feel when we wake up with a moral hangover? How does it feel when we don’t get the position because of an unexplainable gap in our CV, even though we think we’re fit for it? We can see quickly enough that sublime internal or cosmic harmony does not, in fact, exist in our lives or in any of the created realms. More so, we find that it’s not actually attainable.

Are we left, then, to live lives with potential unrealized, spiritually incongruent, and unfulfilled? Will the black sheep part of ourselves – perhaps not evidently front and center but certainly left in the margins – become the core of who we are and how we interact with the world?

As it pertains to Knight’s dramas, a curious occurrence happens to each of these older brothers during the arc of their respective shows, particularly in relation to their younger brothers.

At some point in every series, Tommy Shelby realizes that despite everything, the one person he needs by his side is his older brother, Arthur. He needs him as he takes down crime boss Billy Kimber and expands the family business; he needs Arthur to be the one to end the vendetta with the American mafia, and, finally, to be his strength and support as Tommy faces his dark and uncertain future in the final series, telling Arthur in the darkness of a damp cellar, “You will change because I need you.”

Similarly, in House of Guinness, faced with looming political trouble, wanting to expand the brewery, and to continue the family legacy of philanthropy in Ireland, Edward Guinness looks to his older brother Arthur – the only person he can – to fulfill the other half of the inherited partnership and to gain political ascendancy, their father’s MP seat, for the cause of good. He needs him.

How do these older brothers—otherwise unfit for duty—respond?

In each case, paradoxically, they don’t crumble under the weight of expectation, but heartily rise to the occasion, becoming the man who their younger brother needs them to be. They are able to do this, by the way, not because there was some secret unfulfilled potential inside them all along (clearly they are who they are), but because despite their self-destructive patterns, the older brothers actually step up when needed because the younger brothers treat them as though they are worthy of being needed.

Put another way, having worthiness ascribed to them makes them feel worthy, and the result is that they change, they deliver, and their own self-worth changes with it. They each become, as it were, a new man.

What are we to draw on from this?

Returning to Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – we find its second essential claim: it is that God knows that our lives are not perfect and harmonious, that we do struggle, that we do have dreams and expectations unrealized, all of which can, depending on the severity, leave one quite weighed down and without a clear path forward.

If there is good news that can be spoken into that state (and there is), it is that God is not a father with his arms crossed forever disappointed in his firstborn. He is a father who sees the whole picture, knows all the facts, and he has done something about it in the great narrative arc of the Christian story – the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The result of which is that we flawed individuals are seen not as those who fail to love and obey God perfectly but as those who are worthy of being wanted.

If we can learn anything from these brothers in Knight’s dramas, it is that we need not climb out of imperfection and into success to be unburdened. We find that being seen as worthy is enough. And that changes – as it does for Arthur Shelby and Arthur Guinness – everything.

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