The name was always in contention, as John McGrath, chief executive of the Manchester International Festival, told me in 2021. I had asked him why the city’s gargantuan new arts venue was to be called “The Factory”.

It mattered because the project’s critics argued that the name was retrograde. Factory Records, its most obvious reference, was at the vanguard of a brief cultural era in the city that ended about 30 years ago. Manchester is at its best when it is rigorous in looking to the future, not stuck in the past.

McGrath, who is the momentum behind the £210 million project, was sympathetic. Back then he countered — convincingly — that Manchester deserved a venue that would resonate not just in the UK, but also on the global cultural scene. Factory Records is still known all over the world, Manchester was the workshop of the world 100 years before that. If the city wanted to attract the most innovative artists, the venue’s name should scream dynamism.

“We don’t want to be one of those places that’s about nostalgia,” he told me. “But then we looked at [Manchester’s] reference points — the industrial revolution, Factory Records — and those things were about innovation, about doing things for the first time. They are things for Manchester to be proud of.”

All that international resonance is gone at a stroke

Last year, the venue became Factory International to better reflect its ambition to elevate Manchester from provincial city to global cultural destination, for both audiences and performers.

Last week, the venue changed its name for a third time, to Aviva Studios. Aviva, the London-based insurance company, bought naming rights in a multi-million pound deal (reported by the Guardian to be £35 million) over 10 years. That’s three names before it opens, officially in October and for previews on 29 June. As one commentator said, “How unbelievably gloomy.”

All that international resonance is gone at a stroke. Aviva’s core markets are the UK, Ireland and Canada — the insurance brand means little to the rest of the world. “Studios” refers to its site on the former Granada Television studios, a history likely to be lost on most people outside Manchester.

The venue deserves international attention. Designed by Ellen van Loon of Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, the Dutch-based, international architectural firm, the 13,000+ square metre building looks a little gimmicky from the outside — a giant, mute claw on the banks of the Irwell.

Inside, however, it is strikingly innovative in its modularity. This super-flexibility means it is really two in one: “The Hall”, a 1,600-capacity auditorium with concert pit and theatre; and “The Warehouse”, an cavernous, raw-concrete room with a capacity of about 5,000 and 21 metres high, most obviously suited to stand-up gigs.

Enormous doors separate the two venues, which allow the whole building to be configured to host anything from vast raves to complex art installations to intimate readings, or multiple events all at once. As Es Devlin, the stage designer, described it at a preview last year, “Imagine if you took the Royal Festival Hall auditorium and trucked it along the Thames to the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, then just rammed it up to the wall.”

Much of the anticipation has been about the possibilities. There is nothing quite like it anywhere else.

Big-name artists find offbeat, innovative venues hard to resist, and Manchester has already benefited from Van Loon’s design. This year’s international festival opens with a site-specific installation by Yayoi Kusama, one of the most bankable, crowd-pulling artists in the world. Van Loon previously worked on Porto’s Casa da Música, a venue that helped lift a regional city onto the international circuit.

Naming rights are a strained business, particularly for mid-sized, already-familiar venues. In London, no one prefixes the Apollo with “Eventim”, the Shepherds Bush Empire with “O2”, nor Wembley Arena with “OVO”. Over in Docklands, the O2 and the ExCel are exceptions. These are functional venues with bigger capacities, however. They are big-boxes for extravaganzas. Few gig-goers are emotionally invested in their interiors. They could be anywhere.

The Factory is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Manchester

The Factory/Factory International/Aviva Studios venue is, of course, over budget and behind schedule, which explains the naming-rights sale.

Paid for with a mix of funding by the Treasury, the Lottery, Manchester City Council, the Culture Recovery Fund and private donations, its original budget was £110m. By last year it had reached £186m. The final bill, with increases largely attributed to pandemic-related hikes in building costs, stands at £210m. There is pressure to recoup the overspend.

The Factory is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Manchester, though. The wrong name risks squandering the very aspiration the venue was built to achieve.

Factory International remains as the name of the organisation behind the festival. Its supporters say it will add £1.1bn to the region’s economy over the next decade, along with 1,500 jobs. It offers arts training, which is valuable to a city dependent on the creative industries (its fastest-growing sector), under stress after a period of government indifference to arts education. The Aviva deal supports a £10 ticket scheme.

McGrath points out that the council stuck with its original vision rather than trying to scale down an ambitious plan in the face of rising costs, so it deserves to recoup some of that money.

Ultimately, the Factory was a vote of confidence in a city with a voracious global ambition. Factory International’s most recent press release claims the original purpose embodied in the building still stands: “It will ensure Manchester is a destination for world-class architecture, defining it as a modern, cosmopolitan world city.”

There is nothing quite like this venue anywhere in the world, just as there is nowhere quite like Manchester. The city has long earned its place on the international cultural stage, and Aviva Studios deserves to succeed. It also deserves a name that will allow it to do so.