Anticipation Uncontained – Sharp Project Visit #1

You can’t help feeling that it’s deliberate, the sense of confusion you’re dealt before your first Sharp Project visit. Talking to people, reading press reports and picking up fragments of information scattered around the internet, you’ll hear themes and comparisons, but that’s as sharp as the focus gets: a laboratory mindset might be mentioned; a business ecosystem; Silicon Valley comes up; an incubator; a place to try things; even a place to be allowed to fail and try again.

You’ll have picked up some concrete intel too, such as the fact that it occupies the building once used by Sharp Electronics. There are the names behind the project, whose credentials in promoting Manchester to the world are peerless (anyone who follows the city’s media, digital, arts, sports or politics has already heard of at least one of them). And finally, everyone knows about the shipping containers.

So as the car park barrier lifts rainwards and I see my first reclaimed container (the security lodge) I know at least that I’ve come to the right place.

It’s August 2010 and workers in hard hats and contractors’ machinery are very much in attendance, readying the spaces for their various roles. I’m handshaken enthusiastically by a few of the aforementioned, who are clearly excited about showing their baby to yet another visitor. This will be a brief trip – one small step for a Mancunian into one giant leap for Manchester.

Along corridors we march, past newly refurbished spaces inside what was the office block when the building was Sharp’s logistics centre. The white walls and utilitarian ceilings have Manchester culture coursing through them; soon they’ll be mere backdrops to great things and I feel a sense of privilege in seeing the vacuum before the big bang. Down stairs, round corners, through walkways; there’s a green room and purpose-built offstage facilities for film crews and performers who’ll be recording here. A major BBC production has already been and gone without a trace, and there are more to come.

And finally we enter the iconic part, the bright space housing the converted shipping containers. Any grim post-industrial imaginings are shattered by the jewel-like beauty and precision of the blocks. With their stark black and white exteriors and their end facets completely replaced with glass, you’ll lo and you’ll behold as the realisation envelops you. It’s that communal ethos you’ve read about. This is no partitioned office space; it’s a showcase, a celebration, a marketplace of talent. You might have seen sketches of the containers stacked two high; as yet it’s all still at ground level – but there’s room to grow.

Despite the hard hats around the entrance, the Sharp Project is far from being unused. Many of the containers are already occupied – you can see the installed workers silhouetted against the huge glowing monitors loved by designers and filmic types. Their busy-ness is everyone’s business. I’ll be meeting these people and new arrivals over the coming months, listening to their individual stories and most importantly seeing how they have interacted, because within the Sharp Project the digital and the traditional cohabit. We’ve got law firms, new media and SEO companies, music producers, graphic designers, TV producers and a dedicated motion capture suite inches from each other, separated only by a few folds of corrugated steel. Try and stop them from talking.

I strike through the ecosystem concept in my mental checklist. All businesses – at this scale, even ‘competitors’ – need to interact to share ideas and augment their services. I can’t imagine a more appropriate jungle than this.

My next destination is reached under tip and toe, with radio silence. The impressive studio is gloomy save for a few figures in the far corner illuminated by a screen. Then there’s a crackle of applause; invisibly, if not inaudibly, a children’s TV game show is being recorded behind a complex set concealing most of the activity. The claps allow us to advance with a little more pace. What can be round the next corner?

Whispering again, we’re shown the data centre. Here the mystifyingly powerful servers, data storage and fibre optic pipes are kept in stable ambience. The day I have all this explained to me might be taxing for all concerned, but I do know that 100Gb per second, one quoted figure for its potential capacity, is rather fast. And with fibre optics being deliverable to every desktop, the project is unquestionably serious about data transfer.

I’m now getting the whole confusion thing. It is absolutely intentional. How else but with a state of loosely regulated chaos can ideas form and crystallise? How can mortals create a space for inspiration by imposing their worldview from on high? It has been tried and tried, and the interfering fingers always get in the way. The Sharp Project’s approach is simultaneously brave, edgy and perfectly sensible. It trusts the creative minds to open themselves by offering them raw, unthrottled and very real technological power and the opportunity to digress and coalesce in a place designed to be fluid.

The next stage to be completed is still out of bounds for non-contractors, but it’s going to be where the project starts and finishes – the communal space, mezzanine floored with openness as the architectural and societal bases. By the time it is open, much of the workspace will be occupied, and the community that’s already interacting internally will be welcoming newcomers travelling to Manchester’s North East by road and tram, train and plane. They’ll be coming to talk ideas and engage in the new way of doing things now that anywhere in the world is milliseconds away. But I can’t wait that long to see it happen.

Charlie Hankers