Time for the Festival to reset and downsize

Edinburgh event should take stock and look to better suit the city, says

It wouldn’t be August in Edinburgh without queuing. On Monday night the line snaked along the pavement in George Street. However, this year it was for a very different kind of show, Rishi Sunak’s bestselling ‘Eat Out To Help Out’.

According to the latest figures, the scheme has boosted business in pubs and restaurants at the start of the week by 20 per cent. However, it will have to do a lot better than that to match normal August turnover in Scotland’s capital city. By this time the Festival and Fringe would usually be in full swing with packed pavements, choked streets and ‘full’ signs on every nook and cranny that Airbnb could market as tolerable sleeping accommodation for the human body. This August things are very different.

For the first time since 1947 there is no Edinburgh Festival and Fringe thanks to the coronavirus restrictions. Instead, local people are walking on the pavements, getting on the buses, eating out in restaurants and sitting down in pubs. The city is catching its breath.

All this has happened at an opportune moment. In recent years complaints have been mounting about the size of the Fringe and it’s growing commercialism. With three million tickets sold last year, the strain on the city and it’s infrastructure was becoming clear. Edinburgh City Council had pledged to address the issue but coronavirus has done the job for them with a full system reset.

So do we just hope for a return to business as usual next August or does this extraordinary year provide a greater opportunity? In recent times

Edinburgh has felt like an unstoppable moneymaking machine. The Fringe must get bigger (not better) every single year. The Book Festival has to expand to keep up. The Christmas celebrations must grow and grow to make more and more money for the operators. However, all this has a cost and that is the creaking fabric of the city and the patience of the people who live here.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Edinburgh’s World Heritage Status and stunning architecture and history will always attract the tourists back. But what takes place against the backdrop of one of the most stunning cities on the planet is up to us.

The Edinburgh Festival emerged from the ashes of the Second World War to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”. So it should again. When we emerge from the biggest crisis since wartime, the return of the Festival will be the measure of our recovery.

But it needs to be different. We cannot go back to how things were before.

Edinburgh needs the Festival but a Festival that is sympathetic to the capacity of the city that provides the venue and the local people who are the players in the daily drama that is played out here every August.

If that means limiting the numbers and raising the quality, so be it. It suits the vested interests who make the money from the Fringe to grow and grow but it doesn’t work for the rest of us.

If one good thing comes out of Coronavirus for Edinburgh it will be an honest discussion about what we want August to be like in the future and that has to start and finish with the people of the city.