The Stove Network
What’s in store at The Stove this year? With building works continuing downstairs in The Stove this month ahead of our regular opening times from next month, the Stove’s operations and curatorial teams are busy preparing and planning for a bumper 2016 year. Select each image below for more details.
We asked ourselves a question: “Can a sign above a High Street building ever do anything other than promote and brand; can it ask questions, be part of a conversation with other signs… can our High Street ever be a space that prioritises people as well as sales?”
Whose downturn is this?
As a species we show ourselves to be resilient and forever adaptable, but what true opportunities are there between the moss and the ‘for sale’ signs? How do we re-make the spaces between the High Streets we remember and what is left when our High Street no longer meets the bottom line of the multinationals?
Our town centres have grown out of a need to gather, connect, meet, barter and exchange. Dumfries owes its place to the river, the cattle marts and the passage of people. But from our largely rural context, Dumfries has also been the gathering point, the melting pot of communities meeting and exchanging, not just economically but socially, our connection out into the world.
‘A marketplace (rather than ‘market’) is a sociable space in which buying and selling take place surrounded by other activities, a place you come to see friends, to hear stories, to argue about ideas. Crucially, unlike a Starbucks or a department store, it is a space where your welcome is not determined purely by your abilities to spend money.’*
Dumfries stands at a point questioning its identity, and it’s place within the world. Primark may not have arrived, but there is an air of anticipation and change whispering quietly amongst a growing number of the town’s communities. Now is the time to search for the new role we can play in creating the future of Dumfries, to reach out for a possible Dumfries.
Dumfries is not dead, only sleeping. Hidden Dumfries is in plain sight, behind the sagging bus stances and single occupancy street furniture.
Now is the time to act.
This action does not require grand master planners, or large scale redevelopment, but a little collective energy and small positive acts. Testing and experimentation, problem solving and lightweight interventions can lead the way to a more active high street, looking forward to a more valuable town centre. Small actions can highlight, question, explore and initiate discussion, growing from an inquisitive response to our everyday.
This is a call for new distractions.
Can we create a new visual language for our high streets?
*Dougald Hine, Space Makers. Quoted in how to save our town centres, by Julian Dobson.
Supported by:
Open House sees The Stove Network populating The Stove at 100 High Street for the first time since building works began last year, and welcomes the town and the wider network to stop by, get involved in and experience some of what we hope to bring into Dumfries’ town centre. Open House is a series of very different events that will show the versatility of The Stove as a physical space and the ambition of the project for the town centre.
We kick off with the third annual Dumfries Music Conference on 24th and 25th April. As in previous years, DMC2015 will feature workshops, talks, film, live music, expert opinion and creative collaboration. Through a collection of brilliant partners and guests, we hope to educate, inspire and entertain. DMC2015 will mark the official opening of The Stove Building at 100 High Street. In celebration of this we are going to fill the entire building with colour, music and people. Full details will be made available here as they are announced!
On 28th April The Stove hosts Open Mouth – a day of spoken word, performance and cooking. During the day The Stove building will hold workshops for school students before then moving into a performance workshop from 5pm. A public performance starts at 7pm featuring Moffat based Sarah Indigo and other performers from the Scottish spoken word scene and young people who have attended the daytime workshops. Full details available here
Open Mouth is specially created and delivered for The Stove Network by Sarah Indigo, Eryl Shields and Open Jar Collective
Produced in collaboration with Wigtown Festival Company
29th April sees House Warming – an open invite (12.30pm-4.30pm) to come and see The Stove building, have a chat and make a T-shirt.
From 6pm there will be a Stove Members Gathering, which will include a public bonfire, and Bannock making in the town square with Open Jar from 7.30pm. More details available here.
At 7pm on Saturday 2nd May come to The Stove for the public launch of HAME, an impressionistic journey through Dumfries & Galloway voiced by those who call it home. Film, voice, field recording and subtle music intermingle and connect across 2 floors and out into the High Street of Dumfries.
HAME is a film and sound installation by artists Mark Lyken and Emma Dove, specially commissioned for the opening of The Stove at 100 High St, Dumfries.
Full details of the launch will be announced shortly, and available here
Every Tuesday starting 19th May (until mid June) you are invited to Drop-In @ The Stove – pop in for a brew and a blether about The Stove and the town…. what would you like to see The Stove doing? What are your ideas for the town centre? What would you like to do at The Stove? We’ll be open and we’d love to hear your ideas! Drop In will run from 12 noon till 6pm every Tuesday, so just drop in on your way past! More details available here
Keep up with the latest updates on Open House via our social media on Facebook and Twitter, using #OpenHouse
Following on from our call out last month for a documentary filmmaker, John Wallace has been commissioned to make a short film documenting The Stove and 100 High Street, as we continue to gather pace towards the grand opening this year.
John’s proposal to explore the relationship of the building to the town as it is transformed into an arts space for Dumfries has led him in search of old images of what has previously been 92 – 102 High Street, Dumfries and needs your help!
The property at 96-102 High Street has been home to a game dealer, a fireman, several milliners, David Coltart drapers, Reid’s Shoes, millworkers and an umbrella maker. More recently it housed First and Seconds Ladieswear before becoming Happit.
But hours of trawling old photo collections and online research have revealed only a few scant glimpses, the best in a 1956 film of Guid Nychburris day.
“The front of the building kinks away from the rest of the High Street by about 15 degrees,” explains filmmaker John Wallace. “So, in all your classic postcard views of the Midsteeple from the English Street end it can’t be seen at all, while in views from the Midsteeple it’s hidden by Burtons or the coffee house that was there before”.
Can you help? If you have any photos of the High Street which feature The Stove building, please do get in touch with John (details below.)
John is also keen to speak to people who have had a past connection to the building, were you a taxi driver when there was a rank outside the Stove? Have you worked or do you know anyone who worked in Reids, Coltarts, Happit or the First and Seconds? Did you live upstairs? If you have any stories or connections, please get in touch with John, either by phone 07720 710 934 or by email at [email protected]
