BLOG: Making Space: How NOMA Is Supporting the Next Generation of Manchester Creatives

11 February 2026

There’s a familiar gap for young artists and students in Manchester. Once you step outside formal education, the places to learn in public, to experiment without pressure, and to show work to real people tend to thin out quickly. Studios are expensive, opportunities can be hard to come by, and confidence is hard to build in isolation.

At NOMA, that gap is increasingly being treated as a neighbourhood-scale problem and a neighbourhood-scale opportunity. Over the past year, spaces across NOMA have quietly become places for learning, making and exchange. Not through grand cultural statements, but through practical openness: doors unlocked, windows used, rooms offered up for work-in-progress.

At the centre of this activity is Altogether Otherwise, NOMA’s community space and hobby house. It’s a place designed for participation rather than polish, where students and early-career creatives can try things out, develop skills and encounter the public without needing permission or perfect outcomes.

Accessibility and participation have always been central to NOMA’s ethos and this approach continues into 2026, with a host of new workshops for Unit X, a collaborative programme led by Manchester Metropolitan University’s School of Arts in partnership with the Greater Manchester Youth Authority. The programme brings young people from across the city into the neighbourhood to explore art, design and creative expression, while giving space to youth perspectives that are often underrepresented.

NOMA is also continuing its partnership with Arts Emergency, the mentoring charity supporting young people who aspire to careers in the creative industries. By meeting their community in person at the hobby house, Arts Emergency is able to offer guidance and support in an environment that feels open, informal and human.

For many students, this kind of off-campus experience has already proved formative. At the end of last year, first-year Photography students from Manchester College used NOMA as an extension of their studies, documenting its streets, people and spaces with support from local creatives and industry professionals. Their work was exhibited in the windows of New Century House, inviting passers-by to see the neighbourhood through a fresh lens. These rotating window exhibitions have since become an established platform for emerging work, with further displays planned throughout 2026.

Recently, NOMA hosted  Mending and Making, an exhibition and workshop programme led by the 1838 Collective and designed specifically for recent fine art graduates. Combining public exhibition with practical sessions on making, funding and career development, the programme offered many participants their first opportunity to exhibit outside an academic setting while receiving meaningful, grounded support. In March this year Salford University graphic design students will be showcasing their work in an exhibition engineered to help them to meet leading Manchester creative studios.

Alongside these one-off projects, NOMA provides a regular learning environment for students from PINC College. Weekly sessions in ceramics, woodwork, painting and design support students who thrive through hands-on, practical learning, embedding creativity into the rhythm of the neighbourhood.

Taken together, these initiatives point to a simple idea: neighbourhoods can actively support the people by embedding learning, creativity and opportunity into everyday spaces, and by doing this they can help young people feel that they belong, that they can contribute, and that there is room for them to grow.