Peter Saville: Creative Director of Manchester

Manchester was one of the great power-capitals of the Industrial Revolution. Its wealth came from cotton imported from America (“the colonies”) in the 18th century. Writing about the city in the 1840s, the young Friedrich Engels said: “If anyone wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air—and such air!—he can breathe, how little of civilization he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither.” The city has a long and noble tradition of political radicalism. Engel's disgust at the conditions of the Manchester poor was to fuel his co-authorship with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto.

Since the end of industrialisation, Manchester has festered in the shadow of its vanished past. The devastation caused by an IRA bomb in 1996, which ripped out the Victorian heart of the city, created an opportunity for the city authorities to rebuild its centre.

Today, the great northern British city is famous for rain, the world's richest football club, iconic pop music, a booming new commercial and cultural life and a television soap-opera called Coronation Street that has entranced Brits for the past 40-years.

To promote their rejuvenated city, Manchester City Council turned to the branding experts. A body called Marketing Manchester was handed the task of turning Manchester into a 'brand'. It's response was to mount a lack-lustre campaign built around the feeble sounding phrase, “We're up and going.” The paucity of the campaign angered a group of vociferous Mancunians. Calling themselves The McEnroe Group (after the tennis player's famous utterance “You cannot be serious”), they dismissed Marketing Manchester's efforts as “dull, mediocre and worthy of a cycling proficiency badge,” and challenged the city council to do better.

The McEnroe dissenters comprised a number of local movers and shakers, including Factory records-founder and TV-personality Tony Wilson and Manchester-born designer Peter Saville. The group stung the city council into a volte-face. One of the outcomes of which was the appointment of Peter Saville to the role of Manchester's Creative Director.

Saville's famous insouciance and legendary aversion to deadlines, makes him an unexpected choice for this task. Despite being the crown prince of British design, a sulphurous whiff of risk and danger always accompanies him. Yet he never seems short of clients.

Saville takes a predictably confident and grand view of the task facing him in the city of his birth: “Manchester has no longer got to compete with Liverpool and Sheffield,” he notes. “It has got to compete with Bilbao, Barcelona, Lille and San Diego.”

Saville is already making a mark on the city. The Peter Saville Show, a dazzling retrospective of his 25-year career, has moved from London to Manchester, and to coincide with his exhibition, he has been given eight billboards situated throughout the city, on which to leave a Saville-esque impression. The city-wide installation is titled At Home, and Saville has chosen to fill the boards with visual ephemera from his “estate.” It's a curious word to use, with its hint of mortality and artistic pretensions, yet it's part of Saville's genius (and perhaps his only genius) that he has always cleverly appropriated art world tropes, attitudes and terminology, both in his work as a graphic designer, and his life. But he is guilty of grandiloquence here. He's actually talking about a few pages from his scrapbook.

But what will Saville do for Manchester as its Creative Director? He has no track record in creating “branding” on this scale. And how do you brand a city, anyway? Happily, he is not short of advice. A local radio presenter called Pete Mitchell is reported as saying that Manchester has now moved a long way from the minimalist industrial style of Peter Saville's early work for Factory records. “Whatever Peter Saville does,” he states, “it needs to include more colour. It also needs to emphasise Manchester's rich musical heritage.”

A more pragmatic note is sounded by Councillor Pat Karney, a “city centre spokesman” and part of Marketing Manchester. “The main thing is to brand Manchester as an international city,” notes Karney. “This isn't art for art's sake. We are a global economy and the main aim is to bring jobs to the city. We want to see real benefits. I think brand Manchester needs to emphasise that this is an entrepreneurial city with some of the best people in the universe.” Ray Makin, chairman of the Manchester Civic Society sounds an appropriately dissenting note: “Why does (Manchester) need branding? It's a great place that is known worldwide for a variety of reasons. To try and pick a bit out and say 'We'll make it that' is belittling.”

Manchester's tradition of political radicalism, mixed with healthy northern-British truculence, will not make Saville's task easy.

Saville is facing the most severe test of his career. His detractors dismiss him as a designer who never gets his hands dirty with “real” work, but Saville's new task will involve him stepping out of his normal habitat of London-based record labels and chic fashion houses, and into the stew of local politics, civic pride and tribal allegiances.

He has the confidence, talent and insolence to pull it off. Whether he can become the arbiter of Manchester's visual style and emulate what Milton Glaser did (unofficially) for New York in the 1970s, is another matter.

The veteran broadcaster Stuart Hall has offered Saville some practical guidance. “The image that would best represent Manchester,” states Hall, “would be a smiling face underneath an umbrella.” Hall is known in the UK as the former host of an unashamedly vulgar TV game-show called It's a Knock Out (1966-82). When younger member of the British Royal Family appeared on the show and subjected themselves to a series of indignities involving silly costumes, buckets of water and crazy-foam, it was seen by many as stripping the House of Windsor of its last remnants of dignity and mystique. Many commentators trace the British monarchy's current “image' problems back to this event. Saville must therefore think carefully before accepting the presenter's advice in case it results in a similar erosion of his status as crown prince of British graphic design.