In Britain, an Unlikely Call to Redistribute Cultural Capital Imagine planning a trip to Britain with a stop to hear a new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage at a newly built version of the Royal Opera House, not in Covent Garden, but in Liverpool. And from there, you might drive northeast to savor antiquities at the British Museum, which will have painstakingly rebuilt Sir Robert Smirke's grand Greek Revival building in Morpeth, the county seat of Northumberland. Civitas: The Institute for the Study of Civil Society, a London think tank, released a report on Wednesday that stopped short of proposing specific sites, but argued that if Britain hopes to rebuild its economy, it must redistribute its cultural assets more evenly through the country. "Key public institutions ought to be dispersed outside London," Patrick Diamond wrote in "Transforming the Market: Toward a New Political Economy," the institute's report. For example, the House of Lords ought to have a regional base; cultural institutions such as the Royal Opera House and the British Museum ought to be re-located in Northern cities. Mr. Diamond, a lecturer in public policy at the University of London and a visiting professor at Oxford University, spent a decade as an adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who preceded David Cameron as prime minister. But in the report, he accuses both the Labor and Conservative parties of maintaining approaches that are intent on "shoring up the old economic model, despite evidence that a more fundamental crisis of the "mass production paradigm," which until recently defined Western market capitalism, is underway." Moving London's cultural institutions out of London, he said, would stimulate the economy of other regions. The British Museum told the BBC that it had no response to the proposal, but noted that it had sent about 2,000 objects (from its collection of about 13 million) to museums around the country. The museum's website says that it has about six million visitors a year in London. A plan to rebuild the Palace Theater in Manchester as a northern outpost of the Royal Opera was proposed in 2008, but was soon shelved because of the economic downturn.