This article appeared in Country Living in September 2002.
www.countryliving.co.uk Text by Hester Lacey, photographs by Ron Sutherland.

ON THE ISLES OF SCILLY, the seas are azure, puffins fly in for the summer, you can picnic on rocky islets accompanied only by seals, and you go about not by bus but by boat. It's a far cry from the traffic-choked streets of London's Soho, and it's not difficult to see why Toby Tobin-Dougin traded one for the other. Now when he's working he looks out on a field of flowers rather than a road swarming with taxis. There are hundreds of Scillies, some no bigger than rocks. Toby and Louise live on one of the larger islands, St Martin's, and run a bakery of the same name, supplying bread to their own island and delivering by boat to their neighbours on the other inhabited islands of Tresco, Bryher, St Agnes and St Mary's.

The bread is delicious: as well as traditional loaves, there are rolls, baguettes, croissants, pastries, flans, tarts, pies and, of course, Cornish pasties. Ingredients are for the most part produced locally and the flour and some of the vegetables are organic. One favourite is the Lawrence loaf, flavoured with seaweed gathered in Lawrence Bay just in front of their smallholding, with home-dried tomatoes and feta cheese added to the dough. The Tobin-Dougans prefer to work with a "poolish": a yeast batter prepared the night before, which gives the bread a better flavour and longer shelf life. And they don't stop at bread: they also make pizza, topped with home-smoked chicken; they produce their own pork joints, chops, salami and ham and they net grey mullet along the beach to make taramasalata with the roe and smoke the fillets.

It sounds idyllic, and in many ways it is. But it's also hard work, although Toby and Louise are now helped by a night baker, Barney McLachlan, who produces most of the basic breads overnight. They bake on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the winter, and every day including Sunday during the summer. On baking days they have to be up at four in the morning to get the dough under way. They shape all their loaves by hand, finishing the baking by mid-morning, when they prepare the deliveries and man the shop, where the queues often snake out of the door.

So what inspired them to leave the rat race and move to one of the mildest climates and most beautiful environments in Britain? Toby, 44, first visited St Martin's in the early 1980s and was irresistibly drawn to the island. At the time he was living in Brighton but working in London, running a photographic lab. He finally sold up in 1992, packed his bags and moved to St Martin's. He found lodgings with a local fisherman and crewed on a boat, chasing cod, pollack, monkfish and crayfish. He then did some gardening and maintenance work in the St Martin's Hotel. Louise, 34, from Bristol, also fell in love with the island during a holiday nine years ago, and found a job in the same hotel. They have been married for five years.

Louise moved on to work on a farm growing scented narcissi - the mild climate has made the island famous for their early spring flowers - but they both knew that they wanted to start their own business. Breadmaking came about almost by chance - the learning process was very much trial and error. "We taught ourselves to bake, in our own kitchen", Toby recalls. "We'd put our loaves out at the campsite nearby for the campers to buy - just 25 or 30 a day." The fledgling enterprise expanded rapidly: "People would come up and say 'You didn't deliver today,' but I had, and it had all gone."

The Tobin-Dougans decided they needed to work on a larger scale, so they applied to their landlord, the Duchy of Cornwall, for help. Processing their request took two years; but once all the red tape had been sorted out, the Duchy was very helpful. It arranged the renovation and refurbishment of what is now St Martin's Bakery, just a field's-length away from Toby and Louise's cottage. The bakery opened its doors four years ago and this month work began on converting the old fire station next door in order to extend.

For ideas and inspiration for new recipes, Toby says they do a lot of reading - particularly old cookery books. "I have just bought two Ambrose Heath books from the 1930s - he must have been the Delia of his day," Toby says. New for this year is a croissant bread and butter pudding - "sort of death-by-butter", Toby says.

Their bakery shop is becoming more like a deli, offering picnic treats for holidaymakers to take to the beach. The fields next to the cottage are now filled with salads, tomatoes, herbs and garlic for the quiches, pies and breads. There are strawberries for tarts, potatoes are grown by a farmer on St Martin's, while the beef for pasties comes from the Limousin herd on neighbouring Tresco. In one field is Lucky, the formidable and hairy Gloucester Old Spot pig, and her near neighbours, 30 ducks and a dozen chickens. Lucky is indeed a fortunate beast, because Toby and Louise decided to keep a pig to breed from - if not, she'd be sausages by now, like her two sisters. One good reason for breeding their own pigs, Louise says, is that it is not at all easy transferring a wriggling, squealing piglet from a boat to the quayside. The free-range eggs from the chickens go into the baking, while Lucy deals with any leftovers. "Our pig is the sweetest in the world, because she's fed on croissants and pastries," Toby says. Lucky Lucky, certainly. But this is actually an eco-friendly and efficient way of recycling waste in a community where all deliveries and rubbish are transported by sea.

It has taken determination and courage to get this far. You have to know how to do a little of everything, Louise says, and be prepared to tinker and build and fix things yourself: "We had a huge passion and desire to succeed right from the beginning. And it helps that there are two of us, working as a team: it's easier to be calm in a crisis - such as the day the pigs got out and were recaptured barely in time to save the campsite from a trampling."

They also share a passion for good food. They eat very well: Toby hunts for woodcock, pigeon, snipe, partridge and rabbit. He is particularly scathing about the bread most of us eat. "Supermarkets have destroyed the small individual bakeries, even their organic ranges are mass-produced. People have accepted the blandness, the lack of flavour. The way to turn the tide is to get people baking their own bread." To that end, in the quieter months of the year, Toby and Louise have started running baking classes. "People think it's an extraordinary, magical process, and it's not," Louise says. "Anyone who comes on one of our courses will leave knowing how to bake," Toby adds. The Tobin-Dougans also hope to publish a book of their recipes.

The point of all their labours, Toby says, isn't money. They both earn less than they would have if they'd stayed in hotel work. The satisfaction lies in providing a useful service - and in living in a spot for which they have a real "love and affinity". Is there anything they miss from their pre-Scillies life? As their two dogs, Galtee and Jazz, sniff happily around and a peregrine falcon swoops overhead in the fresh wind off the sea, there is a long silence. Eventually Toby confesses that he misses browsing for junk in second-hand shops, but he doesn't sound as if he misses it that much.

The next baking course at St Martin's Bakery is on 6 November, with others planned for January, February and March 2004. Each course runs with a maximum of six people, from Wednesday to Monday, including free time to enjoy the island. The price of £695 per person inlcudes transport from Penzance to St Mary's by helicopter, transfer by boat to St Martin's, a chalet or cottage accommodation, all lunches, evening food, a folder of recipes and everything you've cooked. It costs accompanying non-bakers £225. For more information, call 01720 423444, email stmartinsbakery1@btopenworld..com or visit www.stmartinsbakery.co.uk

Country Living September 2002.
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