Creative Communities

When artists in Dumfries began working creatively with local people in 2011 to imagine the future of their town, they didn’t set out to create a major regeneration organisation. They created The Stove – a community led hub that has become a real catalyst for social, cultural and economic development.

Since establishing a permanent home on Dumfries High Street in 2015, The Stove has transformed a former shop into a welcoming community café and events space where ideas, partnerships and local action can grow. Through year round cultural programming, creative engagement and practical support, it has helped residents shape the future of their town while bringing more people into the town centre.

The impact of creative communities being intrinsically involved in placemaking is evident in this The Stove example.

It turns over £0.9m per year and since 2011 has attracted £7.1 million of investment into Dumfries and Galloway, with 74% secured from national sources.

It employs 21 local people and supports many more through work experience, internships and meaningful paid opportunities.  Since 2015, 1,284 freelance contracts have been awarded, worth £1.87 million, with 37% going to practitioners under 30. Supporting not only a circular community but a growing economy for all.

The strength and success of The Stove means it now plays a role in creative placemaking for the region, for Scotland and for the UK.

The Stove have articulated their expertise and experience over the last 15 years in A Creative Placemaking Approach, a practical methodology for how creativity and culture can support community wealth building, place development, cross-sector collaboration and deeper community benefit.

Hear more about The Stove’s innovative approach to embedding arts within local development and the policy framework that supports this work in the podcast below.

It has supported the development of more than 14 community-led organisations and social enterprises, many of which have evolved into major regional organisations and charities, attracting significant investment and continuing to deliver lasting social, cultural and environmental impact across Dumfries and Galloway.

The network has also created space for national and international learning around place based cultural practice. Hosting kNOw One Place, Scotland’s first Creative Placemaking Forum, bringing more than 100 people from public, private, independent and charitable sectors together in Dumfries to explore grassroots and community-led approaches to placemaking. Followed in 2026 with Creative Neighbourhoods, which mapped out a collective blueprint for empowered communities.

Partnership work across heritage, active travel, cultural identity and community-led change further drives The Stove’s portfolio including, Moving Stories, a region-wide creative campaign celebrating everyday journeys across Dumfries and Galloway; Hear Here, developed with Fair Scotland and Dumfries Showpeople to celebrate Rood Fair as living culture; and ongoing regional creative placemaking activity through What We Do Now.

Back in Dumfries town centre over the last year, The Stove delivered 205 free public activities which engaged more than 10,000 attendees and nearly 6,000 participants.

This example from The Stove, shows that when creativity is embedded in community engagement, it can do far more than deliver cultural activity. It can build confidence, strengthen partnerships, attract investment, grow local economies and empower communities to lead lasting change.

Deveron Projects is an art organisation rooted in Huntly, Aberdeenshire for over 30 years. They don’t have a gallery or art centre, instead Deveron Projects makes art collaboratively with artists and communities in public, across the town. This includes organising regular events, producing collaborative projects and developing creative community infrastructure. Taken together, this work catalyses citizenship and supports communities to organise together around the issues that impact them most.

In 2018, in response to Huntly’s collaborative town strategy Room To Thrive, Deveron Projects purchased an empty shop on Huntly Town Square with support from Scottish Land Fund. The organisation’s decades of projects exploring public space, food cultures and food security, identity and belonging, climate breakdown and community organising, laid the foundations for a development that involved communities at every step, inviting them to imagine together how the building should be used with architects Drassana and Jill Andrews in the project What Can We Make This Place?

Today, Square Deal is a thriving community hub, home to over 50 groups and organisations, from youth groups to yoga, book clubs to music and much more. Deveron Projects coordinates the hub, supporting people make their ideas happen. As just one of three buildings taken into community ownership on The Square (see also No. 30 and Orbs Bookshop), Square Deal is focused on being a safer space for communities who experience barriers to other public spaces in the town. This shows how collaboration with other organisations is key to Deveron Projects work – even in a small town, anchor organisations can work together to complement and enhance each other’s initiatives, better representing the diversity of communities who live there.

For Deveron Projects, relationships are everything and are what makes real change possible. Getting to know people well and building trust, allows for deeper and meaningful collaboration over many years. Communities from Square Deal, and from the organisation’s regular community lunches, community cookery workshops and community garden sessions learn new skills and build connections with each other. This makes for a joined up and collaborative ethos, where ambitious ideas can be realised and communities are empowered to realise change on their terms.

A significant example of this is the project the Town is the Garden, funded by the Climate Challenge Fund. Despite taking place a number of years ago, Huntly is still feeling the ripple effects today. The project brought people together to craft gardens, vegetable plots and orchards, and attempt to rethink how a community might feed itself as it faces up to the global climate and ecological emergency. It established the Brander Community Garden, which has continued to be developed and activated through projects Flax Turns and Caretakers Garden. Other initiatives developed through the project are now stewarded beyond Deveron Projects – the seed library and orchard are developed and cared for by an independent group called Greener Huntly, who were set up in response to The Town is the Garden and Room To Thrive strategy. They are working to establish a decentralised market garden across the town, among other ambitious plans.

Out of the Blue Arts and Education Trust is a social enterprise based in Edinburgh where creative communities are acting as long-term drivers of regeneration, local economic resilience, and community wealth building through the stewardship of cultural space.

At the heart of the organisation is a simple model: provide affordable creative space; enable cultural production and participation; generate social and economic value and; reinvest surplus into community benefit. Over time, this approach has developed into a multi-site network of studios, venues, and learning spaces across Edinburgh.

Established in 1996, Out of the Blue opened a gallery but this was just the start of the creative community coming together and shaping the opportunities they had access to, locally.

By 2018, Out of the Blue had:

• Converted a near derelict bus garage office into an arts centre
• Purchased the Drill Hall on Dalmeny Street, converting space for studios, performances, events and a café
• Created additional workspaces for artists in Portobello in The Powerhouse and Arts Factory
• Repurposed an unused building in Leith and opening the Leith Walk Studios for bands and musicians
• Engaged young local artists through the power of print, Out of the Blueprint
• Established a centre for craft and design with workshops, Abbeymount Studios
• Created new studio and community spaces in empty buildings

A defining strength of this is the long term stewardship of buildings and securing opportunities for creatives and the wider ecosystem. These initiatives have involved repurposing multiple underused, vacant and heritage properties into thriving cultural hubs and has seen £1.8m expenditure on Edinburgh’s cultural infrastructure.

In 2026, Out of the Blue was granted a 75 year lease of the Powderhall Stables, which the City of Edinburgh Council restored and refurbished into studios, co-working spaces and events spaces.

They will also be an anchor tenant at Granton Lighthouse, being redeveloped as part of wider waterfront regeneration. Combined investment from the Scottish Government’s Regeneration Capital Grant Funding (£2.2m), Heritage Place Fund (£1.6m) and The City of Edinburgh (£0.2M) will see the redevelopment of Granton Lighthouse as a community arts and education hub.

These long term asset arrangements are critical. They provide stability for investment, allow spaces to evolve over time, and position cultural organisations as custodians of place rather than temporary occupiers.