Hidden Doors
Taking a sneak peek at Granton festival
This year's Hidden Door Festival remains true to its ethos of bringing a disused place to public attention, but the only building on the site will actually be out of bounds to the public, and probably also the performers. The festival, which takes place between 15 and 19 September, will be a major happening in Granton right next to the gasometer. It is an ideal location - out of doors with plenty of space to allow for social distancing - while bringing somewhere that is underused to public attention, which is always part of the Hidden Door aim.
It was Depute Council Leader and local councillor,
Cllr Cammy Day, who first proposed the idea to festival organisers, responding to their search on Instagram earlier this year and saying that he would love the festival to come to Granton.
Cllr Day told The Edinburgh Reporter: "The festival that's going to happen at West Granton will be just the start of it. I've also had recent discussions with the Fly Festival, which some people might know brings 3,000 to 4,000 young people into the city centre every year. That event has been a huge success, and organisers may also be keen to come here. We've had some formal discussions with the Festival Fringe about whether this could become a venue of the future for some events that they host. So yes, it's an absolute up and coming place.
I want to put out a call to the development world to come to us with ideas for the tower
OPPORTUNITIES
"Some say that we have turned our backs on the waterfront for many years. It's now time to face up to that, and do something exciting. Granton is a place for people to live and work. There is a site for 4,000 homes here, and we also want to have jobs so that people can live and work in a 20 Minute Neighbourhood.
"It's the best part of the city for me. It has so much opportunity to create amazing houses for people, and jobs, as well as already having Edinburgh College and major employers like Scottish Gas. I want to encourage more big employers and I want to put out a call to the development world in the future to come to us with ideas for the gas tower. You know there's a park built into a gas tower in King's Place in London or it could be like another tower in Dublin which has homes inside. Across the world there are gas towers which have been transformed into something amazing and I am confident the same will happen here.
"Hidden Door Festival is an extremely creative group of people. They have a track record of opening up sites like this and making them usable by the public and I am really looking forward to seeing what they will do."
The festival's Creative Director, David Martin, says that the thought of an outdoor festival on this disused site is exciting, and certainly the initial images from a photo shoot show what will be a beautiful backdrop.
This site ticks the boxes in more ways than one being outdoors, and it is a site which needs to be brought to public attention.
This was not the only location that the festival organisers had in their sights, but they had to cancel "quite a well-formed plan" at a venue which they may be able to use in the future, but which David admitted would certainly not be suitable for 2021.
He said: "There is a fence between us, but the gas tower looms up at the back of the site in a kind of exciting way. It's difficult to find an outdoor site that is dominated by a 157 foot high Victorian landmark, so it's a brilliant thing to have that nobody else is doing.
"It's just a big empty yard, so we have to work quite hard to kind of turn the site into something which will be really fun and exciting to be in. I suppose part of the fun and the pleasure of organising the event is that we can design it with a really blank canvas. Normally, we have a building to work with, which dictates the shape of the event for us. We will make sure this time that if there are even Level one or Level two social distancing restrictions in force, Hidden Door will still be able to take place.
“The idea of exploring and finding is very much what we're really all about.”
Learn more about Hidden Door at: hiddendoorblog.org