After 14 years of collaboratively shaping The Stove as it is today, Matt Baker shares a personal reflection on the journey, impact, and future of the organisation he helped to found. From an experimental idea sparked in a Dumfries bar to a nationally recognised model for community-led cultural change, The Stove has grown into something more powerful and alive. Ahead of his departure from his role as CEO, Matt took the time to offer insight into what’s been built, what’s still to come, and why, now more than ever, we need spaces like The Stove to imagine and shape a different kind of future.
Words by Matt Baker
I’ve been a full-time public artist since 1995. For fifteen of those thirty years, I worked in the classic way – on projects that were time-limited by the budget available. The pattern was always the same: creative activity would generate momentum in a community, then, when the project ended, most of that momentum would fade away. I would reflect on how community art projects always started as an add-on to something else — whether that was a building project or a public event. I was never involved in something (with a budget!) that originated from a creative process in and of itself. I wondered how it might be possible to build a project that became part of the ongoing story of a place — something that felt as natural a part of a community as, say, a school or a recycling centre — and that could be self-sustaining by continuing to be useful to the place. The Stove is an experiment that set out to test that idea.
The spark for The Stove was the opportunity to use an empty three-storey building in the centre of Dumfries. In early 2011, a group of creatives met in a bar in town to imagine how using this building creatively could play a role in turning around the fortunes of the High Street, which was haemorrhaging businesses and shops. Five of us started a thing called The Stove (the name deliberately ‘un-arty’ — an attempt not to put off too many ‘ordinary’ folk). Our vision was to use creative activity to prompt a conversation within our community about the town’s future. We hoped to be seen as an example of positive action — to inspire others to join in and/or start things themselves. The building would become a ‘people’s HQ’ for making things happen — literally a door to chap on if you had an idea or wanted to find out what was going on.
From starting a community river festival to crowdsourcing a new town charter and holding bonfires in the town square — everything we did was designed to bring people together, build new alliances, and exchange ideas. In those early days, everything was done hand-to-mouth, with an entrepreneurial approach to fundraising — adapting how we talked about our work to suit different funding objectives. We quickly learned that each successful community project created its own momentum, which we were able to maintain through local partnership working and more fundraising. This led to more opportunities for freelance creatives and, before we knew it, The Stove was at the centre of a creative scene in the town. The vibrancy of this scene led to more projects and more momentum. It was a virtuous circle — something we started to call ‘creative placemaking’.
Over the 14 years of The Stove, we have achieved amazing things, which I am so proud to have been part of. We have grown beyond Dumfries to become a key part of the toolkit for working towards an equitable future for everyone in our region:
- We’ve led a campaign to ‘buy back our High Street’ and set up a Community Benefit Society through which our local community now owns five High Street buildings. Our town has attracted more than £10M inward investment to redevelop them.
- We helped over 100 local creative freelance businesses survive the Covid pandemic.
- We employ 20+ people locally and have started four social enterprises which employ another 16.
- In 2023–24, we awarded 178 contracts to local freelancers worth a total of £187,000 — 31% of which went to people under 25.
- We’ve set up and now manage a Creative Placemaking Network for Dumfries and Galloway, made up of community anchor organisations and creative freelancers.
- We’ve worked with our local authority to integrate creative placemaking into the way Dumfries and Galloway Council develops capital regeneration projects for our region.
- We’ve played a leading role in embedding creativity in community-led regeneration projects in Stranraer and NW Dumfries.
At the outset, we identified that our region was being held back by a reluctance to collaborate, risk-averse working and an inability to acknowledge emotions in the way we worked together. We set out to champion the opposite values. As newcomers to the local scene, we saw our impacts at the margins very clearly at first. But, as time has gone on, we’ve become increasingly embedded in the ‘inside’ of how our region works.
This means we are genuinely changing the way things are done — and will be done in the future — but this is often harder to see on the ground, as The Stove increasingly works behind the scenes to allow new local structures to grow independently, rather than being the noisy gang shouting ‘follow us!’
The whole thing has genuinely been an enormous experiment. We’ve followed the maxim of the Artists Placement Group in the 1970s: ‘the context is half the work’, which means we’ve never seen The Stove as a thing in itself, but always as part of the momentum, the society, the economy of our local place. I don’t think The Stove is a model that can be repeated verbatim elsewhere — though in an attempt to bring together some general principles, we co-published An Approach to Creative Placemaking, with South of Scotland Enterprise.
In terms of running an organisation (something I never intended to do!), I’ve come to think of The Stove as another community — one of many we work with. I’ve tried to enable a culture of listening and support for the personal journeys of individuals as the momentum that continues to shape The Stove’s ecosystem. Being a conduit and a balancing presence within the organism, rather than ‘steering’ anything, has perhaps been the most profound learning for me. The number and quality of opportunities that people have found through the actions of The Stove — in a place as unlikely as southwest Scotland — is something I continue to marvel at.
Now, as I come to this threshold moment, I conclude that the original experiment has proven it is possible to build a cultural project that becomes part of the ongoing story of a place. The remaining question is: can it be self-sustaining? We’re a long way down that road, but, for me personally, the final piece is to step away and let the glorious organism that is The Stove evolve in ever more exciting ways without me.
It’s a special moment in many ways — one characterised by questions. The Stove has grown from ‘plucky outsider’ to ‘part of the furniture’. Have we joined the establishment? Was that the point all along if we wanted to effect real change?We’ve seen how it’s possible to leap from the hyper-local into the national conversation, and The Stove has had some success in ‘building the road ahead of ourselves’ — influencing national policy toward more place-based support for culture in community settings. But what will that actually mean for the future — locally, regionally, and nationally? Does The Stove remain one entity, or, as it grows, should it split into different branches of the same overall organism?
What I do know is that the people who have helped grow The Stove are ready to take it on new adventures and tackle these questions and many more. Over the years, we’ve grown into an incredibly tight team with complementary specialisms, united by dedication to The Stove’s values and ongoing evolution. I will miss being part of this team deeply. As a visual artist, I’ve mostly worked alone in my career and often envied other artforms like music or performance, which are made collaboratively. Being part of Team Stove has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I’ve made lifelong friendships and ongoing creative relationships. As the team takes on the reins of The Stove, I’ll be cheering them on. I hope you will too — or even get stuck in alongside them.One definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. As a place, as a community, as a country, and as a world, we need different. The Stove is part of the promise of different. And we need it now more than ever.
