The Yellow Door

Industrial building on Queen Street, Dumfries.
The Gallery at The Yellow Door is open Weds-Sat, 10-5.
Flats and studio spaces.

The Yellow Door is an urban mixed-use sustainable development project, to bring a run-down Victorian warehouse building back into creative use as residential and working studio spaces. The building is also home to The Yellow Door Group, a lively collective of creative practitioners in the visual and fine arts and literature, who run a programme of exhibitions, workshops and events from their Gallery at The Yellow Door.

18thC and earlier buildings on this site were extended and converted to a warehouse around 1860, and the building has variously been used as a pianoforte warehouse and sheet music shop, and for the curing of hams. The Victorian signage relating to this enterprise was discovered under layers of paint on the first floor lintels in 2013, and has been conserved and retained, reading 'ham-curing cheese & provision warehouse'. By the 1880s the building was in use as a bakehouse by Thomson Brothers, bakers, of Glasgow. Thomson Brothers ran a bakehouse here until 1963, when William C Gill & Sons, wholesale stationers and paper merchants, moved here from premises in Old Union Street. Wm C Gill & Sons traded from their shop on Queen Street until 2008, by which time the building had become very dilapidated, with large holes in the roof, and with the upper floors of the building providing a home to hundreds of feral pigeons.

Renovation and conversion works started in October 2013, and are progressing slowly, as limited funds permit. Plans to bring the building back into use have involved, initially, the restoration of the shop premises, which opened as an experimental pop-up shop and gallery in December 2013 and January 2014, successfully showcasing local creative talent. A group of artists, designers, makers and writers from Dumfries and the surrounding area launched a permanent shop and gallery in April 2014, in which to display and sell their work, and it is hoped this new space will play host to a developing and vibrant programme of small creative and literary workshops and events.

Further phases of renovation works will gradually bring the long-derelict remainder of the building back into use, with the creation of a mix of unusual 'loft' apartments and creative studio spaces. Work is expected to be completed in 2017.