Love, hate and money Life for the locals in Festival City

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO LIVE IN A CITY THAT HAS NEARLY AS MANY TOURISTS AS RESIDENTS – IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BIGGEST ARTS FESTIVAL IN THE WORLD? VICKY ALLAN INVESTIGATES THE MOOD AMONG EDINBURGH FOLK

GETTING around the town … nightmare, eh?” says cleaner Deborah Doig, who works at Edinburgh City Chambers. “Getting home? Nightmare. It’s all right if you’re taking part in it and you’re on a day off and you can daunder about, but apart from that, nightmare.”

You’ll hear the same gripe from tens of thousands of Edinburgh residents during the Festival. In fact, Doig is a lover, not a hater, of the biggest arts festival on earth. She is merely doing what many Edinburghers do at this time of year and indulging in the sport of playing the jaded local. For her, the inconveniences are more than compensated for by the delights, such as standing on the pavement of the Royal Mile, as she is, taking in the grand carnival of theatrical life, people-watching.

“I just like a daunder,” she adds. “I like to go to all the venues and bars. Lovely. George Square, Underbelly, Grassmarket, all absolutely great – if the weather’s good, brilliant! I love spotting famous people. The other day I saw the woman from Take The High Road and a guy from River City in the kebab shop. I’ve seen Robbie Williams. I’ve seen Neil Lennon.” She even observes the festival at its bedraggled early morning messiest, at 4.45am when she comes in for work and the revellers and performers are only just heading to their beds. “You see all the stragglers. It’s great. They’re only just going home, because everyone’s got a 5am licence.”

When, each year, the biggest arts event on earth takes over the city with its six festivals, 50,266 Fringe performances, 3269 Fringe acts, 294 venues and a doubling of the population of the city, the inhabitants are bound to have complicated feelings about it. A huge proportion of the sales, across the festivals, reportedly, are in fact to locals. Some devour it. Others barely glance up as it passes through. One Leith resident says she had never been. In the Old Town, John Millar, a worker on the Royal Mile, notes: “I don’t go to anything myself. I don’t have time. I’ve got a wee boy at home. I’ve never been to anything.”

Most of those we speak to have been to see one or two shows. For Doig it was the Lady Boys of Bangkok. The big-name comedians also draw in the local crowd, as do latenight stand-up sessions. The wealthy middle classes frequent the Edinburgh International Festival and the Book Festival. But above all, what most locals talk about is attending the free shows, of which there are 643 this year. Indeed, the free Fringe is one of those festival creations both locals and performers love, offering audiences a cheap show, and the acts a venue with no upfront costs.

However, what makes the festival seem like it was created for the rest of the world, and not for the locals, is the fact that halfway through the extravaganza the schools go back. It has long been an irritation for the city’s parents and teachers.

For some, though, the arrival of the festival appears to trigger blind rage. On Mumsnet last week one local launched a thread asking “AIBU [Am I being unreasonable?] to hate living in Edinburgh during the festival?”.

“Trying to go about your usual way of life is a nightmare,” she writes.

“Buses are packed and take twice as long to get anywhere as tourists try to pay their fares with £20 notes not to mention using the drivers as mobile tour guides. Shows cost a fortune so it’s hard to go to more than a handful of them. Worst of all is hearing comics refer to your city as something that pops up for 3 weeks of the year then disappears for the other 49.” An 83-message thread follows, including a whole series of complaints by other posters.

“This is a working city not a theme park,” objects one.

“Most of it happens once the schools are back so trying to plough through tourists in the school run/ way to work is not fun.”

“Going to sleep before the nightly fireworks is just futile.”

“Work is a 10-minute walk away and it used to take double that dodging all the tourists and leafleters.”

Not everyone is moaning, though. One local declares: “I love the Fringe, it’s a privilege to live in Edinburgh.”

THOUGH one survey found that 89 per cent of Edinburgh respondents say the Festivals increase local pride in their home city, grumblings are common. Even on the streets on a sunny afternoon it’s possible to find such gripers. “Nightmare,” is a frequent refrain. Greg Rypak, relaxing on the Royal Mile as he waits for friends, observes: “It’s a pain in the neck. It’s too busy, crowded.” He has other issues too. Rypak, originally from Poland, has lived in Edinburgh for the last 11 years and is annoyed that he, too, often gets treated as a tourist. So far this year he hasn’t been to one show.

One frequent whinge is its sheer heaving size. Charlie Lewis, a civil servant who grew up in Edinburgh and started going to the Festival as a teen says: “It’s just grown and grown. If anything it’s possibly grown a bit too big. It’s the usual problem ... you grow something and with the traffic and people it’s impossible to move around.”

Nevertheless, catering for this mass of eating, sleeping, moving people is what makes Edinburgh its money. One study last year found that Edinburgh’s 12 festivals supported 6,000 jobs and generated £313 million for the Scottish economy – 24 per cent more than in 2010. Many, though obviously not all, residents are involved in jobs that in some way connect with it. Young people find summer work in the bars. One Edinburgh local says her daughter “and all her friends” have found work at one of the venues.

Who is making the money, and out of whom, is a key question. This year a whistleblower site was set up on which workers were urged to report the ways in which “those making a profit out of the Fringe are doing so through exploiting artists and frontline workers”. It declared that many venue staff were working in very difficult conditions, and that meanwhile “landlords and hoteliers make vast sums of money ... and some artistic directors of for-profit and not-forprofit venues take a handsome cut”. Edinburgh City Council replied that “complaints reviewed by the council about venues are rare”.

Edinburgh is, according to Trivago, the most expensive city in Europe to stay in, with hotel rooms costing an average of £207, up 39 per cent on July average room rates. Performers are struggling to pay what, at the top end of the market, are exorbitant prices. John Millar works doing maintenance for Old Town Chambers serviced apartments on the Royal Mile. “The Festival brings good money in,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of Chinese tourists staying in our apartments.” Online prices in these apartments for next year’s Festival are, for instance, almost £10,000 for a week’s let of a three-bedroom penthouse that sleeps six.

But, on some level, the arrival of the “sharing economy” of Airbnb has already started to open up a new market. It’s no longer just the professional landlords who are raking it in. Across Edinburgh anyone with a spare room is supplementing their income. Last year, 40,700 guests stayed using Airbnb during the festival – 61,000 are predicted for this year. Hosts frequently charge as much as double what they might during the rest of the year.

However, not all of them are charging extortionately. Rebekah Macrobert, for instance, a single mum living in Leith, rents out a small room in her flat to help make ends meet. She charges between £25 and £35 a night. It’s this, she says, that allows her to be able to look after her daughter and do her work with disabled adults. “I couldn’t do what I do. The workshops I run for adults with disability I run for virtually nothing. Airbnb subsidises me to be able to do what I do.”

Uber, which was launched in the city in November last year, has brought several hundred drivers a whole new way of making money out of the Festival. Adnan Bukhari has been working for Uber during the Festival, and, on top of his earnings working in international recruitment, has made around £1,100 through around 45 hours of driving per week. “It’s fantastic,” he says. “You’re dealing with people from all walks of life from all round the globe.”

These money-making opportunities mean even the worst Scrooges are seeing the bright side. As a post on Mumsnet put it: “Edinburgh as an ‘event’ rather than a real place bugs me too but am planning to Airbnb my house next year.”

Come Monday the final fireworks will mark the end. For many, they will be a source of relief – a sign of return to normal service. Another poster on the Mumsnet thread put it: “I know it is a massive privilege to live here and soak up all the culture but I can’t wait for it to be over.” For others, the end of the party is tinged with sadness. “You can see it is slowing down a bit already. I can see it dwindling,” says Deborah Doig as she stares out at the seething sea of performers and visitors. “See Monday, it’ll be like a ghost town.”