The NQ favourite will be setting up shop at the ABC Building...
Northern Quarter favourite UNITOM has announced plans to expand to a second city-centre site at St John’s.
The independent bookshop, coffee stop and visual culture hub will open inside the ABC Building, on the former Granada Studios site, with two new concepts: UNITOM Kiosk and UNITOM Projects.
UNITOM Kiosk will sit at the front of the new site, offering a compact version of the brand’s Stevenson Square flagship shop. Designed and built in collaboration with Stockport’s Display Only, it will carry a curated selection of books, magazines and lifestyle items from UNITOM’s wider collection.
The kiosk will also nod to its neighbours, including Everyman, Clints, Permanent Orbit, Side Street and Tartuffe, with publications focused on cinema, fashion, food and music. Its location on the old Granada Studios site will also be reflected in a selection dedicated to Manchester heritage.
Coffee will come from a rotating selection of roasts from East London roastery Dark Arts.
Upstairs, UNITOM Projects will create a new exhibition space dedicated to contemporary visual culture, with around six rotating exhibitions planned each year. The space will support emerging Manchester-based visual artists, curators and the wider creative community.
The project space will launch with Goof City, a solo exhibition by Manchester School of Art graduate Mary Lou Lawless-Gill.
The exhibition takes its name from a Beat Generation idea coined by poet and activist Ed Sanders, describing an imagined, anarchic and peaceful society centred on laughter, art and community.
Lawless-Gill, who is based at Bankley Studios, constructs fictional scenes from photographs, film, music and memory. Her work explores urban life through fragments of everyday encounters, imagined narratives and recurring characters.
She graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2025, where she received the MAFA Graduate Award for Painting, and has recently exhibited at Oceans Apart in Salford, Texture Gallery in Manchester and taken part in the Joya: AiR artist residency in Spain.
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