Urbis to become National Museum of Footy

The National Football Museum is to move from the “spiritual” home of Football, Preston, to the Urbis in central Manchester. The move has been not been popular with Preston City Council who are threatening legal action, which may delay the move, although it looks inevitable. The move is supposed to begin in April 2010, with the museum opening about a year later in 2011. The main reason is lack of funds; the museum just costs too much to run for relatively few visitors, about 100,000 a year. Manchester City council claims they will attract 400,000. No contest, it would seem.

This isn’t wholly unsurprising. Like the National Centre for Popular Music, based in Sheffield for just under a year, before closing, it’s visitors numbers were wildly optimistic, and it was charging about £21 a ticket for a family of four, for something which you can experience by turning on the radio. The striking building it inhabited later became a live music venue, and then Hallam University’s Students Union. Provincial museums always struggle, especially when they are so off the established tourist trail. Going to Preston for a day out is about as appealing as it sounds.

This is a bit of a coup for Urbis, which has always seemed a little unpopular. When the museum of urban life opened in 2002, it failed to draw in the crowds, it charged for entry, and wasn’t about anything. A museum of urban life in Manchester, a small provincial city? What exactly is city life? A video about life in Denton? At some point it changed to wholly showing changing exhibitions, and hosted Channel M, Manchester’s very own TV station. This marked a bit of turning point in Urbis’s fortunes and visitor numbers slowly increased. Despite this, the place still seems to lack focus. I’d have difficultly describing to a tourist what it is. It sometimes shows art, sometimes design, sometimes historical exhibits. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. It has a television studio, and an upmarket restaurant. Occasionally, a gig will be on. It’s neither one thing nor the other. It’s the cultural equivalent of a village hall, a space where stuff happens.

I think the biggest problem with Urbis as a museum, or platform for art or music, is the Urbis itself. Nothing it has shown has been anywhere near as exciting as the building itself, which is a brilliant piece of contemporary architecture. It competes for attention with the exhibits, and wins most of the time.
Where will these exhibitions currently held at Urbis be housed in the future? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does at the moment. With tougher economic times looming and arts funding on the chopping block, there sadly probably won’t be any exhibitions to house. There’s always Islington Mill.
That it’s going to become the N.F.M. isn’t the outcome I’d have picked for it, personally. I’d rather it had become a dedicated space for contemporary art in Manchester, but that was never likely. Manchester is already synonymous with Football, and this seems like a populist subject to match the mass appeal of the building itself.

The beautiful urbis, as seen on Google Streetview.

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