When I leave our new office at Daresbury Laboratory, if the traffic on the M56 is snarled up, I occasionally take a short cut through Daresbury village going past All Saints Church. Famously the curate of this church in 1832 was father to the young Charles Dodgson who will be better known to you by his later pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. The church has a wonderful stained glass window, designed by Geoffrey Webb depicting the nativity scene over five panels of famous characters from Alice in Wonderland including the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts and, most appropriately for its location, the Cheshire Cat.
The church has been building a Lewis Carroll visitor centre at the church and this will be opening very soon. Curiously, I notice that the Tate in Liverpool is also holding an exhibition called Alice in Wonderland which opened on 4 November 2011, running until 29 January 2012 showing how artists down the years have been inspired by Carroll’s stories and I will certainly be paying it a visit on one of my next trips to Liverpool.
The North West of England has a fantastically vibrant creative cluster, employing a remarkable 320,000 people across the region. Its music and arts range from the Beatles to the Hallé Orchestra, writers associated with it include not only Lewis Carroll but Anthony Burgess, Elizabeth Gaskell, Walter Greenwood, Beryl Bainbridge and Beatrix Potter. Liverpool is a world centre for the digital gaming industry and Manchester is now the second largest broadcast centre in the whole of Europe.
The facilities around Manchester for broadcasting are amazing. If you’ve not been out to Media City yet you should try to do so. I was taken round the studio facilities used by the BBC and others and saw the set for A Question of Sport (I couldn’t resist sitting in Tuffers’ seat!) and then the rehearsal rooms for the newly relocated BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s not just the BBC but ITV as well and soon Coronation Street will be filmed here. I was also fortunate enough to be taken around the newly opened University of Salford campus at Media City where 1500 students will mingle with industry professionals by its director Jon Corner. Jon brings real industry expertise to the role but also has a music background himself, he tells me. It’s a fantastic opportunity for students to be so close to the real world that they want, one day, to occupy and who knows what developments the industry will have as a result of this unique collaboration.
The results of all this creative effort are exported all around the world, the industry is alive and kicking and seems to be in great hands going forward for even greater international success.