Inside UNITOM Projects: Manchester's Boldest New Gallery Space Is Making Noise

There is a particular kind of cultural institution that feels, from the moment you step inside, like it belongs entirely to the city that made it. UNITOM, the indie bookshop and coffee hub that has quietly become a cornerstone of Manchester's Northern Quarter, is unquestionably one of them. Walk through the door of its Stevenson Square flagship and you'll find carefully curated books and magazines rubbing shoulders with a rotating cast of art-world regulars, all set to a soundtrack that sounds like someone with excellent taste handed over their vinyl collection. It is, in short, the sort of place that cities dream about and rarely manage to sustain. 📚☕

Now UNITOM is doing something bold: it's growing. The brand has announced plans to open a second city-centre site inside the ABC Building on Quay Street, the former Granada Studios site now at the heart of Manchester's creative St John's neighbourhood. The new space brings two entirely new concepts under one roof: UNITOM Kiosk and, more thrillingly for the art world, UNITOM Projects.

UNITOM Kiosk will occupy the front of the site, offering a compact but perfectly formed distillation of everything the Stevenson Square store does best: books, magazines and lifestyle finds, curated with the intelligence and wit the brand is known for. Designed and built in collaboration with Stockport's Display Only, the Kiosk will nod knowingly to its new neighbours, including Everyman, Clints, Permanent Orbit, Side Street and Tartuffe, with publications spanning cinema, fashion, food and music. Given the address's storied history, a dedicated Manchester heritage section feels both inevitable and entirely right. Coffee will come from Dark Arts, the East London roastery whose rotating selection of roasts has earned a devoted following.

The new exhibition space is dedicated to contemporary visual culture and will host around six rotating shows a year, with a clear focus on nurturing emerging Manchester-based visual artists. 🐝

The launch exhibition, fittingly, sets the tone with real conviction. Goof City, a solo show by Manchester School of Art graduate Mary Lou Lawless-Gill, takes its title from a Beat Generation idea coined by poet and activist Ed Sanders. First introduced in his 1963 Poem from Jail, "Goof City" describes an imagined, anarchic and peaceful society, a warless city on the hill built on laughter, art and community, its spirit closely tied to the energy of New York's East Village and Lower East Side. It is a remarkably apt title for a debut show that feels both intensely personal and strangely communal.

An imagined, anarchic and peaceful society, a warless city on the hill centred on laughter, art and community.

Lawless-Gill, born in 2004 and based at Bankley Studios, constructs fictional scenes from the material of everyday life: photographs, film, music, memory. Her paintings are populated by recurring characters caught in quiet, fragmented moments. There is an ambiguity to these scenes that is entirely deliberate. They sit somewhere between observation and invention, between what was witnessed and what was imagined, and the figures within them seem to carry a weight that extends well beyond the frame. 🎶

Her work explores the contradictions of urban life with a formal intelligence that belies her age. Figures appear masked and unmasked at once; atmospheres shift between intimacy and unease; gestures read simultaneously as tenderness and withdrawal. These are paintings about the performances we stage for one another, and the gaps that yawn between how we present ourselves and how we are truly seen. That such concerns feel urgent rather than academic is a considerable achievement.

Figures inhabit scenes that feel simultaneously overheard and invented: a gesture caught at the edge of meaning, a room that could belong to any city and no city in particular, a face turned just far enough away to remain unknowable.

Lawless-Gill graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2025, taking home the MAFA Graduate Award for Painting. Since then she has exhibited at Oceans Apart in Salford and Texture Gallery in Manchester, and completed the Joya: AiR artist residency in Spain. Goof City represents something of a homecoming and, if the work on display at UNITOM Projects is anything to go by, the beginning of something we should all be paying close attention to. 

For Manchester, a city that has long known how to build culture from the ground up, UNITOM Projects arrives at exactly the right moment. It is a reminder that the most exciting things in the art world rarely happen in the institutions you expect. They happen in the spaces bold enough to imagine something new.UNITOM Projects

🖼️ Goof City by Mary Lou Lawless-Gill 

📅 Showing 5th June until 11th July

📍 ABC Buildings, 21–23 Quay Street, St John's, Manchester M3 4AE

🧩 Fine Art Jigsaw Puzzles  

🎥 Film Scenes Inspired by Famous Paintings 

🖼️ Real-Life Locations of Famous Paintings