Would not want to raise hopes, but there are hints the powers that be are noticing the financial knock-on benefits of investing in the arts. Bradford has just launched The City of Culture. Much closer to (my) home, a local Council has hosted the ‘Swinton Ark’, a free, 12-minute, 3D-mapped animation by Illuminos projected onto the Salford Civic Centre featuring personal stories by Swinton residents gathered by artist Lowri Evans. The Information Booth at the event was quick to offer details of local pubs and restaurants in the vicinity to ensure the local economy benefitted from the project. Now, HOME Arches joins the list of forward-looking projects.

HOME Arches is a £3.5m project to support artists across a variety of disciplines in Greater Manchester by providing free, high-quality studio and training spaces alongside its extensive programme of residencies, events and workshops. It is financed through £2.3m UK Government Levelling Up funding (remember that?), a £0.7m contribution from Manchester City Council and £0.5m fundraised by HOME, including grants from the Foyle Foundation and The Wolfson Foundation.

Appropriately, in view of the name, the project is located in three heritage railway arches situated between HOME’s main building and Whitworth Street West. The building and programme design have been created in consultation with artists. HOME Arches offers 5,000 hours of free creating space annually, with 50% of studio space dedicated to artists from groups currently underrepresented in the industry, including members of the Global Majority, d/Deaf and disabled artists and artists from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Readers of the British Theatre Guide might be most interested in the theatrical aspects of the Arches. HOME Arches will also provide vital support for flagship projects such as the PUSH Festival, HOME's biennial celebration of North West creative talent, providing spaces to make and test work, a place for artists to come together to share learning, a hub during the Festival for workshops, talks and skills sharing. This year the Festival runs from 24 January to 8 February 2025, and an extract from the programme is made as part of the launch event for HOME Arches.

HOME Arches was designed in collaboration with HOME’s Artist Panel and consultation with the wider artistic community and has three main spaces. The central Arch 2, newly-named the 'Sir Bob Scott Arch' to honour one of HOME’s greatest supporters, former Chair of the Granada Foundation, houses co-working, meeting and networking space for artists. Arch 1 features a fully equipped studio space for up to 60 people, with sprung flooring and floodlights, where artists can explore their practice and test new ideas. Arch 3 is a double-height, creative making facility for up to 30 artists to collaborate across disciplines, creating work in an environment made for experimentation.

Whilst primarily a development space for artists to explore and test new ideas, the hub also houses Arches Windows, a custom-built public realm exhibition space that will present an ever-changing range of work from sculptural to digital, permanently visible to the public from Whitworth Street West.

A niggling concern is that the last Manchester theatre that made a small ‘p’ political point of securing the involvement of people who would not normally see themselves as performers was Contact, just down the road from HOME. The extensive refurbishment Contact underwent to benefit their artistic contributors is, however, now pretty much wasted, as the theatre is currently not staging any in-house works, just accepting the occasional one-night touring show.

There are, however, welcome indications HOME is sensitive to the works developed at HOME Arches being of interest to the wider public as well as benefitting the artists. The first speaker at the launch event is Jennifer Jackson whose play WRESTLELADSWRESTLE has already been staged at HOME and is now heading towards London.

Omid Asad is a visual artist born and raised in Iran and now based in Manchester. His work focuses on stained glass, colour and light as a response to the building itself. Asad’s stained glass installation, a cheeky design that uses a brick motif as part of the stained glass, is situated in Arches Windows facing Whitworth Street West where it can be appreciated by passers-by. Although it can be viewed at any time, as the stained glass is illuminated from the rear, so the effect of the display is probably best achieved if seen after dark.

As part of the launch event, visitors have the chance to experience installations in Arches 1 and 3. Sophie Mahon has created an interactive display in Arch 3—as visitors approach an apparently blank wall, sensors react and abstract images appear responding to the movements of the person. Although intended for up to six people at a time, the display works best with a smaller number as the abstract displays tend to blend to together, muting the impact.

Sophie Mahon uses projection mapping and light design in in Arch 3 to create It Comes in Waves, a meditative and relaxing experience. The installation is immersive, surrounding visitors on all sides and, as doors close and the room becomes dark, abstract images (inspired by water or waves) run gently from wall to wall while ambient music plays. It is possible, by looking at the mirrored wall, to get the full effect of the images on the other three walls at one time. Readers who are quick off the mark can see for themselves by booking for a free tour of HOME Arches including It Comes in Waves on 24 or 25 January 2025.

The launch event concludes with an extract from Lucky Tonight!, to be staged on 24 and 25 January 2025 at HOME as part of the PUSH Festival. This is an interactive pub quiz-cum-theatre show written and performed by Afreena Islam-Wright and directed by Julia Samuels. The show is staged cabaret-style with the audience seated in teams around tables and responding to questions from the author.

Afreena Islam-Wright hosts regular quiz nights around the city and is a former contestant of the TV quiz show The Chase. So, although the monologue is autobiographical, the play is structured as a quiz. The quiz questions are sufficiently general to give the audience a chance at getting them right but, during the monologue, a subtle connection emerges between the questions and events in the life of the author.

The interaction between the audience and the quizmaster is sophisticated, with answers transmitted via a computer tablet provided, which then tallies up totals and allows Islam-Wright to declare the winner. To say, at this early stage in the development of the play, Islam-Wright is not word-perfect is an understatement, but I’m not in a position to be critical as neither I nor my team partner are technically capable of working out how to enter our team name on the tablet and end up accidentally using the default name. Still, we manage to come fourth. Islam-Wright’s occasionally shaky delivery does allow the audience to experience a very practical stage direction from Julia Samuels, who advises the author not to declare the winner of the quiz too soon in case participants lose interest and leave early.

Lucky Tonight! is light-hearted in nature, with Islam-Wright relating the way in which her mother utilised Lego bricks as a means of trimming vegetables and drawing attention to comedic double standards—a boyfriend may be a drug dealer but at least he is Muslim. Yet there is a more serious undertone, with the author occasionally feeling an outsider both in the UK and during her visits to Bangladesh. More significantly, there is a chilling deterioration in the relationship between the author and her mother, resulting in the latter taking a very disturbing action towards the conclusion of the extract.

HOME Arches makes a significant contribution towards the development of artists in the Manchester area and to giving theatregoers a varied and interesting programme of work.