Save Bankley Studios

It’s been a stressful couple of months for members of Bankley Studios & Gallery, where I am part of the management committee. In October, days after our highly successful Bankley Open 2025 exhibition launch and open studios weekend, we were served with two legal notices which warned that our lease would be ended if we didn’t meet a lengthy list of conditions.

What followed was weeks of anxiety as we tried to get our heads around what was being asked of us and to work out if we were actually in breach of our lease, as was claimed. Eventually we managed to get some pro bono legal advice, secured the services of a building surveyor and started to work our way through the list of demands. Our deadline came and went on 17 November and we thought we were going to get locked out of the building by bailiffs - this is what we were being threatened with by the landlord. For 10 days we had people occupying the building 24/7 on the advice of our solicitor, to prevent the locks being changed.

We have been fundraising to cover some of these emergency costs - but while things have quietened down, nothing has really changed for us. We are still in a very precarious position where the landlord claims we are breaching lease covenants and we believe we have strong evidence that we are not.

For now it’s in the hands of the lawyers but we still hope to negotiate a solution which allows us to see out the final two years of our lease and to stay in the building beyond that. The anxiety and stress remain but there are peaks and troughs. It is taking up valuable time and headspace that I could do without - we are having to think about our present very complicated predicament while also thinking ahead to what might happen in due course.

In the meantime we continue to fundraise via GoFundMe as we have a number of surveys coming up this month and need all the help we can get if our landlord follows through on his lawyer’s recent threat to take us to court to forfeit our lease. Thank you to everyone who has supported us and shared our story so far. And a huge thank you to solicitor Steven Jennings from Land Law in Altrincham. What a gem.

Update 07.12.25 - A piece I wrote about our situation at Bankley has run on Corridor8, a regional arts website.