NIAMOS has lived many lives. Is this its last?

It’s a warm spring evening, and I’m walking through Hulme towards NIAMOS, where tufts of weeds grow through the cracks in the concrete. The sign is missing an M, and there’s a door open: I step through and hear the Untold Orchestra rehearsing an arrangement of Ain’t Nobody. There’s a large common room, filled with mismatched sofas, a piano, buckets filled with cluttered dirty dishes from recent communal meals, alongside a note gently asking people to clean up after themselves. The inside walls are covered in black and white photos of legendary parties at NIAMOS and posters about the importance of being respectful to your neighbours.

NIAMOS is in trouble. On 7 November, directors Maria Corrigan and Ronnie Walfall made an announcement. The radical arts and community centre, housed in a beautiful old Edwardian theatre, which had sparked a chain reaction of orchestras, arts collectives, theatre groups, social and political movements forming and has provided solace for Hulme’s most vulnerable communities, was in thousands of pounds of “historic debt”. Moreover, they were facing rising costs of bills and repairs, a situation made worse by their failure to generate enough income from ticket sales and big arts funding bodies. They urgently needed the community’s support “to ‘keep the lights’ on”.

But among those who created NIAMOS, this situation is not exactly described as unique. Janey Riley, a former sailor who donated all her time and energy into turning a former Ghanaian church into an iconic community centre, says she remembers many moments of joy in her time running the building between 2018 and 2021, but that joy was there in spite of a feeling that she was “literally just navigating through a storm, just to keep the building alive, to keep us there”. 

And then there’s her best friend, the psychotherapist Charmain Berry, who also played an essential role in its creation. In the early NIAMOS days, there was a weekly tradition where Berry and Riley would stay up late on Friday nights, their feet tucked up on the sofas, while someone cooked a big meal for everyone to share and musicians rehearsed in the studios above their heads.

Berry bursts out laughing when I tell her the figure that Riley has shared with me (despite amicably departing from the centre in 2021, she’s still looped into some emails) — that as of 21 December 2024, NIAMOS was in debt of £118,508.45 to its landlord, Gurmet Chumber, plus an approximate £70,000 of debt to its electricity provider. Many have assumed Chumber is the villain of the piece — that the story of NIAMOS is the usual sad tale of a profit-motivated landlord letting a beautiful building fall apart so he can eventually knock it down and build flats in its place. The reality might just be a bit more complex — but more on this later.

“Amazing,” Berry says, still laughing. “That’s in the spirit of Nia.” She stresses that she knows this is an unenviable position for Corrigan and Walfall, who are doing their best to steer the ship, but throughout our conversation, she has a feeling of déjà vu. “I’ve heard it so many times, six months from now we’re going to close, it’s imminent, we’re about to close,” she says. “It’s miraculous it’s still here.”

A catalyst and a coincidence

When Janey Riley first stepped into the Wonder Inn in Shudehill, where dozens of people gathered every week for freshly baked goods, music, yoga, wellness and spiritual healing sessions, the community centre’s brief golden age was already ending. Facing hefty insurance fees, as well as legal fees to convince the landlord to let her keep the lease, singer songwriter Kirsty Almeida realised she could no longer keep the show on the road. At a closing party, Almeida confided in an elderly woman, a regular at the Wonder Inn, that she felt like a failure. “No!” came the response. “God puts in your mind a vision, but it’s not always for you to complete a vision. Sometimes, it’s for you to be a catalyst”. 

“And that’s what I was,” Almeida says, speaking over the phone. “I was a catalyst for NIAMOS.”

The community spirit pioneered by Almeida was revived by Riley less than five months later. On 4 March 2018, it was official: a contract had been signed with the landlord, and Riley’s dream had become a reality. “A community arts and music cultural centre coming to you soon Manchester,” she posted on Facebook, alongside a photo of two clinking glasses. 

In the early days, NIAMOS had everything. It had dozens of volunteers, who gathered in Eastern Bloc in the Northern Quarter to discuss their visions for NIAMOS. Riley remembers the founding members on ladders, painting walls, in a frenzied interior design operation. “I was there that first week when they got the keys, just looking at the building in awe like, oh my god, it happened,” Berry remembers.

It received £13,800 from the Arts Council to put on a satirical pantomime, Snow White Privilege, in 2019, a play that I’m told by those involved in its creation was nothing short of euphoric. “All I can remember is that it was about the Royals, and Andrew was into animals rather than —” Riley says, and then starts snorting with laughter, unable to finish her sentence.

There was a pay-as-you-feel café in the common room, and a culture of people wandering in, playing the piano or having a hot meal or jamming with musicians, and then dropping out (Hulme resident and singer Yemi Bolatiwa tells me the space became “so many important things for people’s careers”). It wasn’t just for the creatives though, but the whole community. An elderly Jamaican lady held her 99th, 100th and 101st birthdays in NIAMOS, and many use the building for wakes and funerals. 

NIAMOS is an acronym. Throughout her life, Riley had ideas that were ambitious and quirky, the kind that people told her would never happen, Not In A Month Of Sundays. When it was looking like the Wonder Inn wouldn’t survive the financial nadir it was in, Riley decided she wanted her own community centre, and she wanted it to be called NIAMOS. As a shorthand, she would call it the Nia Centre — something she calls a “total coincidence”, given what she was about to discover when she stepped into the building in 2018.