Has the North stolen London’s arts crown?

Manchester’s £365m arena Co-op Live may have had an inauspicious start, with power failures, cancelled gigs and a resigning boss but, asks Laura Barton, is the glitzy new venue’s arrival a sign that the North is finally challenging the South when it comes to arts and culture?

The boss of the Southbank Centre said this week that £50m would be needed for building repairs (Getty)

The glittering launch of the largest-capacity entertainment arena in the UK, Co-op Live, did not quite run as hoped. This week’s opening shows at the £365m Manchester venue – two sold-out turns by the comedian Peter Kay – were rescheduled owing to issues with the building’s power supply. The newspaper headlines spoke of “catastrophe”, “controversy” and “farce”. The arena’s general manager duly resigned.

Still, once the dust has settled and the doors are open, few may remember the hiccoughs of the Co-op’s early days. A 23,500-capacity arena situated next door to Manchester City’s football ground, it will play host to acts such as Olivia Rodrigo, The Killers and Nicki Minaj, plus local favourites James, Elbow, Liam Gallagher, and Take That. It will be the only UK venue to host the Eagles on their farewell tour this summer, and it’ll also be home to this year’s MTV Europe Music Awards. As an extra flourish, its design was developed in consultation with Harry Styles, who is also one of its backers.

Its scheduled opening coincided with news of another major arts centre’s ongoing woes – this one in the capital. As the stories unfolded, they became not just a tale of two venues, but a tale of two increasingly divergent cities – one in a cultural ascendance, the other in a state of faint humiliation.