IN a cold, windowless unit in an industrial estate 10 minutes’ walk from Dundee city centre, a young man in paint-splattered overalls is busy affixing a cardboard skip to the rafters. The floor in the next room is covered with heaped mounds of peat ash, petroleum jelly, wool grease and silk. The oil industry by-products look like relics from the city’s manufacturing past, but all are exhibits in the latest show by local arts collective Generator.

“We maybe do 20 events a year,” says Generator committee member Kirsty McKeown. Set up in 1996 to create a space and support network for recent graduates, Generator is typical of Dundee’s burgeoning creative scene.

The gallery is staffed entirely by volunteers, all of whom are recent graduates of the nearby Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. The collective recently raised £1,500 through a crowdfunding campaign to pay for a new office and visitors’ space.

Rachel Maclean, Haroon Mirza, and Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon are among the artists who have survived the sub-zero temperatures and screeching seagulls of the city and gone on to international acclaim.

“The art scene in Dundee is very can-do,” says McKeown, below, who moved from Glasgow to Dundee to study fine art. After graduating in 2012, she decided to stay on the east coast. “If you have an idea there are people here who will help you to do it. It’s a very supportive, close-knit community.”

She wears a brown beanie with a “Yes” badge pinned to the crown. As well as the record vote for independence in last year’s referendum, Dundee’s is becoming increasingly known for its arts.

Among those attracted by the city’s art colleges, cultural history and affordable rents is 22-year-old Alison Scott, an artist also a committee member at Generator. “I ended up staying because I got quite involved in what was going on and it’s quite accessible to get involved in things,” she says.

Dundee, with its huge textile mills and busy docks, was long associated with heavy industry. Many of these old business are gone, lost in the deindustrialisation that blighted the city of “jute, jam and journalism” from the 1960s onwards. But Dundee is fast earning a reputation as a creative hub, winning plaudits nationally and internationally and attracting a new generation of people to the city.

The creative economy employs about 3,000 people in Dundee, generating turnover of almost £200m. The city has long been a hub for computer games design. Last year, it received the UK’s first Unesco City of Design award. Brian Cox has lent his support to a £120m project to bring a film studio to Dundee.

The high-profile addition to the city’s cultural landscape is the only branch of the V&A museum outside London. The V&A at Dundee is over-budget – £80m and counting – and running late but is expected to open on the once-derelict harbour in 2018. There are plans for a hotel, retail units, and apartments as part of a massive regeneration project that will connect Dundee city centre to the water.

“The growth within the creative industries has offered an alternative economy,” says Paul Harris, dean of Duncan Jordanstone College of Art and Design.

Universities have been key to this creative awakening. “The creative industries has really come about with an indigenous population of practitioners, coming out of the two universities and the college of further education, which has really established a new local economy within the creative industries,” says Harris.

THE city’s relatively small size is an asset too, says Anna Day,below, manager of Unesco City of Design. “The size of the city allows people to work together very easily, so that has meant that we can build from the bottom up a really strong group of creative within the city, places that take an underused building and create a space where people come to work together on projects.”

Dundee’s bustling creative scene is attracting newcomers to the city, too. In March 2014 Peggy Hughes moved from Edinburgh to take up a post at Literary Dundee, a University of Dundee-led initiative celebrating books, reading and writing. More than a year later Hughes, originally from Northern Ireland, has no regrets.

“The view from my house is of the Tay and north Fife on one side and Dundee Law on the other,” she says. “My commute to work is a 20-minute dander through a gorgeous park.”

“House prices and rents are cheaper than in Edinburgh or Glasgow, meaning young creative people can afford to live here without bankrupting themselves,” says Hughes. “Dundee is having a terrific cultural moment, and it feels like a great time to be able to contribute ideas and energy to that.”

Proving to clients that Dundee has the skills and the talents to produce quality work is still a challenge. “One of the things that we have been banging on about is ‘don’t send the work out to Edinburgh and Glasgow’,” says Ed Broughton, a 37-year old Londoner who runs film outfit

Bonnie Brae Productions at Fleet Collective, an arts collective housed in the eves of the Victorian-era City Chambers.

A desk at Fleet starts at just £100 a month, far cheaper than equivalent spaces in Glasgow or Edinburgh.

Beyond Dundee’s cultural quarters with their hipster coffee shops, the wider “knowledge economy” is growing too. The city’s reputation for life sciences now extends well beyond Dr Thomas John

MacLangan’s discovery of aspirin in Dundee Royal Infirmary back in 1876.

Not everyone has benefited from Dundee’s cultural boom. The city still has pockets of extreme deprivation. One in four children live in poverty, according to statistics from anti-poverty campaigners. Some Dundonians have questioned the wisdom of council decisions to invest heavily in expensive arts spaces when there is so much need in the city.

Back at the Generator gallery, Kirsty McKeown and Alison Scott are putting the finishing touches to the latest exhibition. Despite Dundee’s creative renaissance, both find making a living from their art a huge challenge.

“It is really hard to sustain yourself financially,” says Scott.

“There are not a lot of creative jobs in Dundee. Everyone who works here for Generator works for free, we are all volunteers. We all have multiple other day jobs to try and support ourselves.”

Alongside volunteering at Generator, McKeown works in a shop, teaches, and runs freelance art workshops. “Most people I know have more than one job as well as their career,” she says.

She is looking forward to the V&A’s multimillion-pound arrival, but is wary of the expectations that have been raised.

The V&A “will have a big impact on Dundee but I don’t think it will fix everything, there are a lot of other things that need fixed”, she says.

“Employment in Dundee is a big issue. We need infrastructure. A lot of people are pinning their hopes on the V&A fixing everything – it’s not going to do that.”

An expensive new museum is not a panacea for all of Dundee’s post-industrial problems but the city is going in the right direction, says Michael Marra, deputy director of Design in Action at the University of Dundee and a Labour campaigner.

“The city doesn’t look that different but people feel much more proud about it. How people feel about themselves has changed.”