Impact case study database
Gothic Place-Making: New Cultural Production, Curation and Tourism in Greater Manchester and Beyond
1. Summary of the impact
Through their establishment of the website Haunt Manchester and its associated network of partners, researchers in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MCGS) have curated tourism-related digital content that received a Gold award for ‘Best Community/Business Engagement Campaign’ from Navitas Education in 2020. Haunt Manchester has been adopted by the city of Bristol, and has influenced similar heritage-based initiatives of Gothic tourism and place-making in the USA. The website is a product of MCGS’s mission to ‘make Manchester Gothic’ through a sustained programme of creative and collaborative public engagement that has stimulated the cultural life of Greater Manchester since 2013. Across the 89 research-informed events of the annual Gothic Manchester Festival (2013–19), they have initiated, produced and co-produced a multitude of new cultural offerings, including a concert with BBC Philharmonic and BBC Radio 3 at Stoller Hall, a public Gothic exhibition at the John Rylands Library and Gothic CPD courses at HOME cinema.
2. Underpinning research
MCGS is now the largest centre for Gothic studies in the world. Its research is multi-modal and thematically varied, spanning Gothic cultural production from the medieval and early modern periods through to the present day. Within the Centre’s extensive corpus of published outputs, it is possible to identify two distinct strands, both of which have directly informed its cultural impact in Greater Manchester and beyond.
The research of Foley, Liggins, Lindfield and Townshend coheres around interdisciplinary manifestations of the Gothic mode, including architecture, heritage and the built environment, soundscapes and cultural conceptualisations of haunting. Townshend’s Gothic Antiquity explores the relationship between Gothic literature and ‘survivalist’ and ‘revivalist’ Gothic architecture in the long eighteenth century, and pays sustained attention to concerns that are of direct relevance to place-making in and around Manchester, namely regionalism and nationhood; the political, religious and class-based significations of architectural style; and the development of notions of architectural ‘heritage’ from the late eighteenth century onwards [1]. Lindfield’s research on Robert Adam and the eighteenth-century Gothic Revival more generally establishes the different ways in which medieval architecture was revived in accordance with fashionable taste in the Georgian period. The research has been directly applied, via Haunt Manchester, to his outward-facing work on the city’s architectural heritage [2]. Framed by an interest in domestic architecture as a particularly gendered site of supernatural activity, Liggins’ The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories is a pioneering examination of female writers’ performative engagement with architectural space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [3]. This research has been applied to, and creatively reinterpreted within, the context of heritage sites in Greater Manchester, including the Tudor Ordsall Hall, Salford. Foley’s work on Gothic sound and soundscapes draws attention to the often-overlooked auditory dimensions of the Gothic through theorised accounts of the ‘voice’, directly inspiring new cultural production through a collaboration with the BBC Philharmonic [4].
The research of Aldana Reyes, Blake, Germaine Buckley and Ni Fhlainn variously explores modern and contemporary cultural manifestations of the Gothic and the role that it plays in mediating debates about politics, economics, identity, the body, childhood and education, nationality and gender relations. Focusing on anxieties about corporeality and identity politics, Aldana Reyes’s Body Gothic (2014) surveys numerous contemporary literary and cinematic texts that have interpreted the human body as a significant Gothic topos [5]. Blake’s co-edited collection Neoliberal Gothic addresses the ways in which Gothic literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts have interrogated, and been shaped by, the global effects of post-1980s Neoliberal economics. Ni Fhlainn’s wide-ranging Postmodern Vampires has located this seminal Gothic trope firmly within popular culture, analysing its political and economic significance in a broad range of British and American cinema and literature. Germaine Buckley’s Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic explores British and American children’s Gothic fiction and provides a theoretically innovative reinterpretation of constructions of childhood, education and children’s literacy in filmic and literary texts published since 2009 [6]. The insights of Aldana Reyes, Blake and Ni Fhlainn have been communicated to popular Gothic and Horror-cinema audiences in Greater Manchester through public lectures, film introductions and intensive CPD courses, whilst the work of Germaine Buckley has informed a variety of city-based children’s events and creative writing workshops. Taken together, the work of these researchers underlines the vitality and significance of the Gothic to contemporary cultural life in and around Manchester, in relation to film, literature, popular culture, politics, and children’s literature and education.
3. References to the research
Dale Townshend, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), ISBN: 978-0198845669.
Peter N. Lindfield, ‘A ‘Classical Goth’: Robert Adam’s Engagement with Medieval Architecture’, in Colin Thom (ed.), Robert Adam and His Brothers: New Light on Britain’s Leading Architectural Family (London: English Heritage, 2019), pp. 161–82.
Emma Liggins, The Haunted House and Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), ISBN: 978-3030407513
Matt Foley, ‘Toward an Acoustics of Literary Horror’, in Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel (eds), The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 457–68.
Xavier Aldana Reyes, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), ISBN: 978-1783160921
Chloé Germaine Buckley, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: From the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), ISBN: 978-1474430173
Indicators of Research Quality:
Aldana Reyes: British Academy small grant 2013-16 (GBP4,885) 2018–2020 (GBP8,115)
Lindfield: Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship 2017–2019 (GBP162,000)
Townshend: AHRC Leadership Fellowship AH/M00600X/1 2015–2016 (GBP181,863)
4. Details of the impact
Haunt: A New Mode of Gothic Tourism
In 2018, the MCGS conceptualised, founded and launched Haunt Manchester, a unique public engagement website dedicated to promoting the city’s rich Gothic past and present. In recognition of its success over the last two years, Haunt Manchester received the Gold award as ‘Best Community/Business Engagement Campaign or Initiative’ at Navitas Education’s Heist Awards in 2020. Haunt is hosted on the Visit Manchester site, the official online tourist resource for Greater Manchester that attracts 2,500,000 hits per year. Providing a platform for publicising, reviewing, disseminating and reflecting upon all manifestations of Gothic culture within Greater Manchester, Haunt is populated with accessible yet research-informed articles on the city’s Gothic architecture, heritage, haunted locales, ‘horrid histories’ and contemporary Gothic cultural events. To date, the site has received 445,000 discrete hits. Statistical analysis from Marketing Manchester also demonstrates an international reach for the site’s content, with users accessing it from Europe, the US and South America [A].
Haunt also comprises an extensive network of over 200 Manchester-based individuals, groups, organisations and cultural producers, from individual performers and artists to local SMEs, including major stakeholders CityCo & Manchester Business Improvement District and Rochdale Business Improvement District. Marketing Manchester states that Haunt has provided a new and invaluable way of attracting visitors to the city and region, changing the city’s cultural offerings and making Manchester prouder and more aware of its Gothic heritage. Haunt content has also directly increased revenue for its organisation by generating page views that have been cited in its sales pitches for new members. This, in turn, has had a further effect on Greater Manchester as a whole, as Marketing Manchester is a non-profit organisation that re-invests its income in promoting the city [A]. According to market research commissioned by Creative Tourist in 2018, at the time of Haunt’s inception Manchester was the only city to curate alternative cultural content in this fashion [B]. The Heist judges noted that this winning entry to the ‘Best Community/Business Engagement Campaign’ ‘connected popular culture to the institution’s academic offerings and community commerce. It also provided a strong link to the city and its tourism strategy. The judges especially noted the use of research related to Manchester’s heritage’ [C].
National and International Impact
Haunt’s collaborations with external partners have ensured that MCGS research remains relevant well beyond the academy. This approach is validated by the adoption of the Haunt model of Gothic tourism in other cities. Declaring that this is the direct result of the MCGS’s work in and around Manchester, the regional tourist site Destination Bristol has replicated Haunt for its ‘Visit Bristol’ site. The Haunt Bristol homepage received 10,920 hits between its launch in January 2020 and November 2020. Destination Bristol has acknowledged the importance of the site in bringing new perspectives on Bristol to the fore, attracting new audiences, advancing opportunities for local retailers and helping Destination Bristol provide content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Destination Bristol testifies that Haunt ‘has had a positive impact on us as a business by helping to build relationships with organisations and people that we previously had no contact with in the city and allowed us to promote and engage with specific attractions, retailers, events and people that previously had no obvious “fit” on the Visit Bristol website and marketing offering’ [D]. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with organisational support from partner ‘Bristol Goth and Alternative Market’, Haunt ran an online trader’s market for Bristol and Manchester in June 2020. The market aimed to support small businesses and creatives at the time of national lockdown when markets were closed across the country, giving those involved a chance to make sales and gain new followers. To demonstrate the connections between research in the Centre and the traders’ art, the MCGS provided two ‘appreciations’ of the artwork on display, which were published on Haunt and used to advertise the partners’ work. Facebook metrics demonstrate that the market event itself generated 556 responses from individual attendees (either those ‘going to’ or ‘interested in’ it), with all posts on the page generating a reach of approximately 13,000. Of those traders who sent feedback on the event, 40% stated that it was their first online market, and 71% of the traders confirmed that they made sales. Positive comments from traders included: ‘The markets I have done with Haunt and Bristol Goth Market have been the best run, best attended and most profitable out of all those we have taken part in since lockdown. I can’t think of any improvements but think other online event organisers could learn a lot from you guys’ [D]. Farther afield, the Haunt model has also directly inspired the ‘Mythic Mississippi’ project at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As Professor Helaine Silverman has stated, ‘I am so impressed with what Haunt Manchester is doing as a model for integrating culture-heritage-popular culture-tourism-economic development that I am following it closely in CHAMP’s new project (“The Mythic Mississippi”) that I am co-directing in Illinois’ [D].
Making Manchester Gothic: The Gothic Manchester Festival
The success of Haunt is built on an impact strategy initiated in 2013 to ‘make Manchester Gothic’ through the public engagement work of the MCGS and The Gothic Manchester Festival. The Centre’s agenda is to unveil, celebrate and reflect critically upon the Gothic multifacetedness of Manchester, a post-industrial city hitherto better known in the public imagination for its music and sporting cultures. Launched by MCGS in October 2013, the annual Gothic Manchester Festival has foregrounded and enriched Manchester’s Gothic past and present, directly embedding MCGS research in local communities, cultures and subcultures to underline the relevance of the Gothic, past and present, to the city and its people. The MCGS is also an economic driver that brings investment into the city. For example, the Centre hosted 2018’s International Gothic Association Conference, which attracted some 300 international delegates, many of whom attended that year’s ancillary Festival of public events. As the archived material attests, each iteration of the Festival has been based on a theme that broadly reflects the research interests of MCGS . Accordingly, each programme has comprised, among other events, research-led public lectures and readings; Gothic CPD courses; walking tours; art exhibitions; dance and music concerts; and film screenings [E].
The Gothic Manchester Festival has attracted approximately 3,600 visitors to date, and its events have contributed to raising public perceptions of the city as a site of Gothic cultural significance [F]. Regularly reported in local press and radio and named as one of the Guardian’s ‘Top 10 things to do’ nationally in October 2017, it has achieved significant publicity via both traditional and social media. In 2015, the Manchester journalist, local historian and tour guide Jonathan Schofield wrote an article on Manchester’s Gothic locales, citing both the Centre and the Festival. The Festival hashtag trended on Twitter in both 2015 and 2017, while the MCGS’s closed Facebook group (1,204 followers) had 717 active members during the month-long Festival in October 2019. Together with the MCGS’s 5,477 Twitter followers, these citations and figures evidence a high level of two-way public engagement. MCGS have produced several online videos, including a series of ‘Gothic Summits’ between academic staff and cultural commentators, such as the musician John Robb. Media articles about the Festival and associated MCGS activity reached an estimated circulation of over 107,000,000 according to data from media analytics source Meltwater [G]. Highlights of the Gothic Manchester Festival include: two 8-week CPD Gothic film studies public programmes run in conjunction with HOME cinema in Manchester; co-curation of the ‘Darkness and Light: Exploring the Gothic’ exhibition at the John Rylands Library (2015; footfall of 103,965—an increase of 27,595 from the previous year in the same period); and a large-scale outdoor Gothic fashion show as part of the ‘Halloween in the City’ Festival in Manchester city centre (2017), attended by approximately 300 people. The partners on these events (Cornerhouse Arts Centre (now HOME); John Rylands Library; and CityCo) have all provided testimonials that reference the transformative effects that their collaborations with MCGS have had on these and other Festival events. As CityCo’s Event Producer has stated, ‘Manchester Met has changed the working practice of Halloween in the City’, adding that ‘working with academics has brought out and communicated what Gothic is, in an accessible way.’ The independent evaluation of the 2013–18 festivals concluded that ‘this collaborative approach has nurtured a long-lasting connection between MCGS and plural Gothic groups and organisations from Manchester and beyond’ [H].
Stimulating New Cultural Production
These partnerships have directly inspired new forms of Gothic cultural production in Manchester (art; music; dance; literature). Three particular highlights include the co-production of Scoring Fear with the BBC Philharmonic; an ongoing partnership between MCGS and the Dancehouse Theatre; and MCGS’s longstanding relationship with the Manchester Gothic Arts Group (M:GAG).
Inspired by their engagement with MCGS, the BBC Philharmonic produced Scoring Fear at the Stoller Hall in August 2018, a classical music concert comprising scores from modern and contemporary Gothic and horror cinema. The concert was programmed with MCGS and BBC Radio 3, and presented by Matthew Sweet in conversation with Dr. Matthew Foley. Attracting a public audience of 333 (86% of whom were attending Stoller Hall for the first time), Scoring Fear was also subsequently broadcast on Radio 3 as The Sound of Gothic, an episode in the popular ‘Sound of Cinema’ series that reached an estimated 152,000 listeners [I]. In 2019, Emma Liggins collaborated with the Dancehouse Theatre and Dance Company in Manchester to produce an original production called Monster Mash, an event that was conceptualised around the Festival theme of ‘Gothic Hybridities’ (130 tickets sold). Responding to the annual themes of the Gothic Manchester Festival, artists affiliated with M:GAG have produced new, original artworks that have been publicly exhibited in the city since 2013. The ongoing relationship between MCGS and M:GAG is illustrative of the Centre’s commitment to nurturing and supporting local cultural producers at all levels. Matt Carson of M:GAG has provided evidence of the value of this collaboration: ‘I’ve started thinking of MMU in terms of a patron really, because they commission exhibitions from us and have done for many years, and that’s really supported our growth as an arts group, both in opportunities to produce work and exhibit, introduction to potential buyers, and all that kind of stuff . . . That kind of opportunity to grow as artists also keeps us alive, keeps us working . . . and allows us to grow our group’. In response to the COVID-19 epidemic, the 2020 edition of M:GAG’s exhibition was offered entirely online, utilising the digital presence of the award-winning Haunt Manchester website [J].
5. Sources to corroborate the impact
Evidence to corroborate the reach and significance of Haunt Manchester including Marketing Manchester statistics and testimonial.
Market research report by Creative Tourist confirming the uniqueness of the Haunt Manchester tourism offer.
Information on Haunt’s award for ‘best community/business engagement campaign’ and judges’ commendation evidencing significance of research-informed activities.
Information corroborating national and international significance of Haunt Manchester including information from Visit Bristol (website; media coverage; Destination Bristol testimonial); Testimonial (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).
Gothic Manchester Website and Festival programmes from 2013 – 2019.
Gothic Festival audience data, including 2019 feedback.
Evidence of reach of Gothic Manchester Festival and activities including relevant media; https://www.youtube.com/user/ManMetUniHLSS/videos and Meltwater data.
Testimonials from cultural partners including Manager (John Rylands) Event Producer (CityCo and Halloween in the City; Independent Evaluation Report, Laura Ager, 2018.
Independent Evaluation Report, Laura Ager 2018 and RAJAR data corroborating reach of collaboration with BBC Philharmonic.
M:GAG quote from Evaluation report; and online link re: M:GAG activities https://www.visitmanchester.com/ideas-and-inspiration/blog/read/2020/10/explore-an-online-exhibition-and-retrospective-from-manchester-gothic-arts-group-something-old-something-new-nothing-borrowed-nothing-blue-b1387
Additional contextual information
Grant funding
| Grant number | Value of grant |
|---|---|
| G1 | £4,885 |
| G2 | £162,000 |
| AH/M00600X/1 | £181,863 |