Introduction If everything goes according to plan, the centre of gravity of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will shift substantively northwards in 2011, the year presently earmarked for the relocation from London to Salford, Greater Manchester of five departments and in the region of 1500 employees. Initially advocated by ex-Director General Greg Dyke, and driven more recently öand with some zeal öby his successor Mark Thompson, the move to Salford is the cornerstone of the BBC's wider Out of London initiative (BBC, 2006b) öits endeavour to shape a BBC that is less focused on London and more representative of, and engaged with, the rest of the country. It will see the construction of new northern headquarters for the BBC in the shape of a state- of-the-art `media city', at an estimated cost to the BBC of approximately »250 million. The headline rationale for the move is a simple one. The BBC is paid for by licence- fee payers across the whole of the UK. Hence, the argument goes, the programmes it shows should reflect the lives and experiences of people and places throughout the UK, not just of a geographical minority. To this end, in turn, the BBC itself öas a living organisational entity öneeds to become more national in several critical respects: in its making of proprietary content; in its staffing; in its development of talent; and in its investment both in physical infrastructure and in independent programming. The move to Salford is regarded not as the be-all and end-all of this spatial transformation (Out of London contains a series of ancillary initiatives), but certainly as the linchpin individual project. This paper considers the geographical political economy of that project. It argues that, for all its specificity, the planned move to Salford has come to reflect, replicate, and reaffirm a broader urban development agenda very much along the lines of the one furnished by Richard Florida in his influential The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). The thrust of Florida's thesis öand, I argue, of the case propounded by the main architects of the BBC-Salford plan, both at the BBC and, increasingly, in Salford itself öis that `creativity is king', and that only by making themselves attractive to the `creative class' can today's cities stimulate economic growth and urban development The BBC, the creative class, and neoliberal urbanism in the north of England Brett Christophers School of Geography and Environmental Science,The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand; e-mail: b.christophers@auckland.ac.nz Received 12 February 2007; in revised form 21 May 2007; published online 22 February 2008 Environment and Planning A 2008, volume 40, pages 2313 ^ 2329 Abstract. The author examines the BBC's plans to move some of its key activities to Salford in the northwest of England. He develops a critique not so much of the plan to move, but of the specific proposals for that move (particularly as advanced by local parties in Salford) and of the economic- geographical claims assembled around them. To make these arguments, the author first identifies parallels between the proposals and Richard Florida's `creative class' formulations. He then draws on a range of critiques of the `creative class' concept to contest the substance of the BBC-Salford plan ö which, he argues, reproduces an entrenched neoliberal urban development agenda öand to question the premise that the move will create regional economic value more broadly. Framed against interna- tional research into creativity-led development agendas which has typically privileged metropolitan or regional actors, the author argues that, ultimately, the BBC's proposals, while locally situated, are tightly bound up with national economics and politics. doi:10.1068/a4030