The Royal Opera House and Manchester City Council have announced that they are in talks with the Palace Theatre in Oxford Street about the possibility of the ROH's establishing a base there for the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera.
Rumours about this have been circulating for the past eight months - and Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, expressed support for Covent Garden's being in Manchester at party conference this September.
What's new about this announcement is that it sets down whereabouts in the spectrum of options the ROH would like to sit. These had ranged from building an entirely new opera house to drawing on Covent Garden's capacity for skills-building and training.
Further details about what the proposal actually contains will emerge, apparently, in the next few days.
I blogged about this in September – the comments made by posters at the time provide a fair summation of the debates around the idea.
