In October, days after our 2025 Bankley Open exhibition launch and open studios weekend – which were attended by hundreds of visitors – we were formally served legal notice that our lease would be ended if we did not meet a list of conditions.
The Open exhibition had been a big success. Twenty artists featured in this year’s Bankley Open – whittled down from more than 400 entries. The show included everything from installation to moving image, photography and painting. Judges Zoe Watson, curator from the Lowry, and musician Space Afrika selected Bella Cagnoli as the winner for her absurd, animatronic ‘Face Cube’ (2025). Having prepared for the opening with warm support from our landlord, the sudden arrival of the eviction notices came as a surprise that was difficult to digest.
Bankley Studios is a cooperative of artists which has worked out of an old mill building called Bankley House in Levenshulme, Manchester, for almost thirty-five years. Artist Joanna Hart noticed a To Let sign on the building in 1991 and persuaded the then-owner to take a chance and rent to artists. The landlord partitioned the third-floor space, and over the years Bankley grew and took on more units. We now have three sections of the building.
I’ve only been a member for three years, but I have lived in Levenshulme for two decades and Bankley has been on my horizon throughout. Nosing around during open studio events was always inspiring and I attended some of their exhibitions. I’m a socially engaged photographer and facilitator – and encountering other artists’ work has helped me expand my own practice and thinking. Having a place to reflect, make a mess and test things out away from the distractions of home is something I value. This year I’ve also been part of the Bankley management committee – organising exhibitions with other members of the gallery team and experiencing the highs and lows of being part of an artist-led organisation.
We currently have thirty-seven cooperative members with very diverse creative practices, including painters, printmakers, sculptors, textile artists, and several darkroom spaces. One of our newest members uses grass and grain seeds to grow his work as moulded root systems. A few Bankley residents have been members for up to twenty years, while others are recent graduates. We work together as volunteers to run the organisation and there’s something special about that, which I believe is worth celebrating and protecting. As Dave Moutrey, Manchester’s Director of Culture, has said: the most vital parts of the Manchester art scene are underpinned by ‘being small enough to try things out and big enough and confident enough to make things happen’.
As well as the studio spaces, Bankley runs a gallery which programmes exhibitions and is also affordable to hire. We regularly host shows by student groups and emerging artists. In November, Macy Biss and technician Dillon O’Brien programmed *Staged, an ambitious group show in which artists contributed a finished painting which was then sculpturally framed by Biss to create a kind of theatrical set for each painting.
The Bankley Gallery exhibitions and events are free to attend and are a valuable feature of the Levenshulme and Greater Manchester communities. All of this programming is currently on hold, however – we are unable to take any gallery bookings or plan shows for 2026 – due to the uncertainty of our position in the building and our more immediate challenges.
When we published our Save Bankley crowdfunder on 16 November, our very real fear was that bailiffs could lock us out of the building in the days which followed. Upon the advice of our solicitor, we organised ourselves to occupy the studios twenty-four hours a day, for ten days straight. A few weeks on, that immediate panic has subsided a bit, but our future remains extremely precarious, with no resolution over our situation.
We now face a stressful and expensive period of legal action, surveys and potential remedial works, as we work to stay in our building. The threat around our lease currently remains.
We had to start fundraising to help us cover this series of unexpected costs as we work to secure our survival into the future. It was an emergency, so we kicked off with a crowdfunder, but we also have a series of creative workshops and other fundraising events being planned for the coming few months – with details to be released soon.
We have worked very hard to demonstrate that Bankley Studios is not breaching its lease and we still hope we may be able to overcome our challenges and negotiate to stay in the building long-term.
Thank you to everyone who has shared our story online and donated to our fundraising efforts. We have been touched by all the support we have received from the local area and the creative community – it has reaffirmed our feeling that Bankley does matter, our cultural legacy is valuable and that independent artist-led spaces are worth fighting for. We would also like to thank solicitor Steven Jennings from Land Law for his generous help.
Bankley Studios’ crowdfunder is still live and accepting donations at GoFundMe.
Ciara Leeming is a photographer, writer and researcher based in Manchester. She recently spent 15 months working with women from SWAP, a refugee and asylum seeker support group in Wigan, in a project commissioned by Open Eye Hub.
This is a volunteer article from both the writer and Corridor8. Donate here to support our work.
Published 07.12.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
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