Creative Neighbours: making things in Masham.

Masham is a small market town in the Yorkshire Dales with an extraordinary concentration of makers, artists and creative spaces.

One of the pleasures of living and working in Masham is being surrounded by people who are making things.
Not in an abstract way, but in the everyday sense. Cooking, drawing, blowing glass, curating shops, running galleries. You see each other in the square, talk about the weather, borrow tools, and realise that what everyone is doing helps shape the place you share.
For visitors, it also means that a short walk around the town reveals an extraordinary concentration of creativity.

Right next door to the gallery Alison runs The Curious Merchant, a shop that rewards a slow browse. It’s full of carefully sourced objects, vintage finds, beautiful haberdashery and homewares. The sort of place where you go in looking for one thing and leave with something unexpected.

A few doors away is Where There’s Smoke, where chef Jon Atashroo cooks over coals and embers, building seasonal menus from local ingredients. What I particularly love is that the making doesn’t stop in the kitchen. The ceramics you eat from are thrown by the chef himself, part of a philosophy of doing things by hand.

Just along the street, inside the Community Office, is Flock — a small gallery run collectively by local artists. It’s a space that brings together painters, printmakers and makers from the area, and it has the feeling of something genuinely rooted in the town. Pop in on the right day and you’ll likely meet one of the artists themselves, sitting behind the desk and happy to talk about their work.

A little further along the market place you’ll also find Nolon Stacey Gallery, where detailed pencil and charcoal drawings capture the wildlife and landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales. Nolon works from his gallery here in Masham, creating finely observed studies of animals and birds that have found collectors far beyond the town.

And up behind the King’s Head is Uredale Glass, where Tim Simon has been working with hot and fused glass for decades, producing colourful pieces that catch and hold the light.

Creativity here is not only in the shops. Just outside the town, ArtisOn runs a wonderful programme of small group art and craft workshops. Painting, printmaking, blacksmithing, willow sculpture and many others are taught by practising artists and makers in a welcoming studio environment. We were involved in helping to found it, and it has become a much loved place where people can come and learn new skills.

Then there is our own Happy House Masham, a colourful space where we host creative gatherings. Collage clubs, poetry evenings, storytelling and other events explore the idea that imagination and creativity are part of how we look after ourselves and each other.

But these are only the visible parts. Living here also means being surrounded by poets, potters, musicians, woodworkers and artists whose work happens in studios, kitchens, sheds and spare rooms across the town. Some of them you know about. Others you only discover slowly.

When you list it all together it might sound unusual, but living here it simply feels normal. You walk down the street and pass a restaurant where the chef throws the plates, a glass studio tucked behind a pub, a wildlife artist drawing hares, a cooperative gallery of makers, a shop full of curious objects next door, and places where people can come to try making something themselves.

Perhaps that’s the real gift of a place like Masham.
Creativity isn’t something distant or rare here. It is simply part of the everyday landscape. The gallery is one small part of that wider web, one door among many where people are making, imagining and sharing their work with the world. If you spend a little time wandering Masham, you will soon find them.