Before moving into the Engine House together last January 2016, we were all friends working from separate studio spaces within Islington Mill. We were supporting each other’s work and borrowing equipment, and we already had a great love for the place and its ethos. A big part of the reason we moved in together was to gain space, share tools and skills and have more autonomy over our workspace. Before that we all had pretty ropey, cold, damp studio spaces elsewhere in Manchester.

We all work in some form of image making or visual communication. This includes illustration, graphic design and visual arts, but also textiles, furniture design and upholstery, prop and fashion styling, ceramics, education and social engagement. We have an interesting mix of commercial and non-commercial, university-educated and self-taught people, so our approach is often very DIY, collaborative, hands-on and a mash-up of physical and digital work. There’s no formal structure to the studio as we are all self-employed, or semi-self-employed. Everyone looks after the space, and each of us contributes different things to the gang.

Since sharing the space, all our practices have evolved – we’ve merged resources, and we’ve each been inspired to try new processes or work with each other in new ways on projects that would have been much more difficult before. Sharing ideas and tools happens casually when you are working side by side, and this opens up your work to the nature of chance and coincidence. We’ve also been approached specifically as a collective to work on projects, combining all of our skills to create new work.

In the past year we have worked together on lots of different projects. We’ve done Secret 7” artwork, a group show at Clerkenwell Design Week as ‘One of One’, a pop-up shop selling one-of-a-kind pieces, organised a Halloween screening of Ghostwatch and created Mystery Tubes (collating a lucky-dip of experimental, spare or rejected artworks for sale to help raise money for a new Islington Mill roof). We’ve also set up The Engine House Print Shop, and quite a few of us have contributed artwork to local brewery Cloudwater’s beer labels, as Textbook (run by Vicky Carr, John Newton and Chris Shearston) and do all their design work.

In the next few months, we’re excited to collaborate on Sounds From the Other City music festival again (a branding and decorating the festival, for which we host a bar and a stage from inside the studio), a cross-disciplinary educational project called Unit X with Manchester School of Art, and an audiovisual installation for Manchester After Hours at the Museum of Science and Industry. We started off working on smaller projects together, but as time has gone on we are attempting bigger and more ambitious work. It’s also nice to see individual members’ successes, such as DR.ME’s [Mark Edwards] book Cut That Out being published, Mariel [Osborn] launching the COVET Interiors online shop, Aliyah’s new jewellery venture, and Steve’s cycling zine TCOD taking off.

In terms of numbers, we’re pretty full! And as our collective is primarily a shared studio space, we don’t actively look for people to join, unless someone decides to leave. When forming the collective, we discussed wanting to share a space with people we trust, get along with and have a creative practice, but also people who come into work every day. We wanted to maintain a busy, fun studio culture. We also have a wider group of friends known as ‘The Engine House & Friends’ – our frequent collaborators, such as Stina Puotinen, John Powell-Jones and Rivca Burns.

It’s hard to say which of us has the most unusual job role, because all of us wear so many hats or are simultaneously involved in lots of different projects. Most people seem to have two or three ‘jobs’ on average. This seems pretty standard for creative freelancers. The weirdest jobs we do, furthest away from our actual jobs, are probably the bits of part-time work, including carpark attending, working at a blood bank, invigilating artwork in a garage, baking cakes or taking money on the door of a gig.

We are about 20 minutes’ walk from Manchester’s Northern Quarter, on the doorstep of Salford University, the People’s History Museum and the Working Class Movement Library, and loads of great cafes and pubs. Although we are separate to the main Mill building now, we still use the common room for cooking and meeting, and go to monthly pot-luck dinners with the other residents.

We have music playing all the time in the Engine House, even weekends. Everyone takes a turn DJing as we have pretty eclectic and differing tastes. On a Friday we have a retro hour, and we rarely need an excuse to open a few beers. We recently had a big studio Christmas party, and an Engine House First Birthday party to celebrate our first year together, which were both really fun.

After initially planning to rip out the kitchen on the ground floor to make more space, we now really love having it here and we cook and eat together regularly. We have fortnightly Friday-morning meetings followed by a home-cooked group lunch. In summer months we sit outside in Islington Mill’s courtyard, and we have regular ‘build days’ to improve the space, which are for painting, building storage, cleaning and installing new equipment or furniture. None of us pictured ourselves ordering 144 toilet rolls, industrial size bags of tea (1,200 lasts 14 people a year, apparently) or huge quantities of baby wipes and q-tips for the Risograph.

Not long after moving in, we started using Slack, and now we don’t know how we’d get by without it. We use it for everything – there’s a ‘bants’ thread, ‘housekeeping’ thread and ‘crit’ thread. For us, our entire lifestyle is work-is-play/play-is-work, but that’s not to say it’s easy. In the words of L. P. Jacks: “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.”