This year has seen a serious rise in ill feeling about the size, and nature, of the Fringe - and the Festival, the Tattoo, and tourism in general - that is overwhelming Edinburgh in August 2019.
This one video, Bonnie Prince Bob’s There’s No Edinburgh In The Festival, has gone viral. I’ve had a couple of conversations about it with fellow show folk, who sympathise with a lot of its feelings. Whether the festival ever gave that much back to the residents is doubtful, but the degree to which it squeezes locals out and alienates them has undeniably grown.
The number of tourists on the streets, from the day we arrived in town (July 29, two days before Fringe shows started) was higher than I’d ever seen. Streets that were normally quiet shortcuts were full of people. This clearly demonstrates that it’s not just the Fringe causing the influx. Summer 2019 is, of course, the final summer before Brexit is supposed to happen, and a lot of people will be acting on that, not knowing whether they can come in future years. And the pound has dropped to another of its Brexitty lows, meaning tourists can afford to come here and spend all the more. Which is great, if you like tourists, but not if you want to be able to walk down the street.
And the passage of streets has become a major bugbear in 2019, thanks to Edinburgh City Council’s #SummertimeStreets initiative. This bizarre move has seen otherwise open streets cordoned off with roadblocks. So thoroughfares that are vital for Edinburgh residents and workers to drive along are impassable, leading to frustrating and impenetrable gridlock. Cockburn Street is closed, as is the lower section of the Royal Mile between Jeffrey St/St Marys St and the North Bridge. This throttles the traffic in the Old Town leading to constant traffic jams. The reason for these closures is inexplicable as the cordoned off street, though it occasionally hosts a street performer or two, is mostly just empty. There is not so much foot traffic on the pavement that these roads need to be closed to cars.
The same goes for Victoria Street, whose beautiful photogenic view from Grassmarket is not improved by concrete roadblocks and garish No Entry signs, and Candlemaker Row, whose corterisation is just daft.
This story in The Times (of which I, and probably you, can only read the headline and the first paragraph) tells how 10% of central Edinburgh properties are now on AirBnB. That’s a lot of locals letting out their flats, quite often to inconsiderate holidaymakers that make life unpleasant for their neighbours.
As I’ve noted many times before, the complaints that the Fringe has become too big for Edinburgh and its residents to take, is a regular phenomenon, coming round every August. A past blog of mine records the article from The Guardian in 1976 saying “The Edinburgh Fringe grows grosser every year like a fat old cat going to seed and not giving a damn.” At this point the Fringe was staging 200 shows. By 2016, when I wrote my blog, it was staging 3300 shows, and it’s now reached the 4000 mark.
At which point, in the midst of the throes of the festival month, everything becomes anecdotal. It’s impossible to get the bigger picture, and everyone is reporting their experiences from their own fraught bubble. I’m thinking about my show, whose biggest concern is that our venue is too hot because someone built a room without any air in. A thousand other shows are torn between struggling to get the punters in, or worrying that they’ve had no reviews, or agonising about whether they’re going to get onto the telly after all the money they’ve just spent trying to get noticed. Some are worried about the rain, others about their performance, and a few are giving a bit of thought to the locals and how awful it must be to have all this dropped on your home and workplace every summer.
There are calls to restrict the size of the Fringe and Festival, to curtail its length (to two and a half weeks for example); to limit the number of poster hoardings that cover the city (though this is counter-balanced by calls to open up the monopoly which one company, Out Of Hand, now holds over every official poster site in the city); to tax tourists more; even a petition to make accommodation affordable for performers (which seems to give little thought to the more pressing concern of keeping accommodation affordable to regular Edinburghians the rest of the year round).
What is to be done? To keep talking and hear everyone’s thoughts and concerns, is good and constructive. What will be done? In my experience, very little. The council will no doubt come up with more bright ideas, like their Summertime Streets roadblocks, and their tourist tax, which will make no-one any happier. As for whether the number of people putting shows on here will drop, I doubt it. I’ve lived through years when a financial crash and an Olympics made a material difference to the amount of money that came into all the shows, and predicted at the time that this would slow things down. And lo, the following year, even more moths were drawn to the flame, regardless. I console myself slightly that my venue, the Gilded Balloon, is Edinburgh based and works here all year round, so plays a smaller part in the feeling of ‘invading’ the city just for the summer.
Brexit might change things, but it might not. Scottish independence might happen, and then it might change things, but equally neither might happen. As it is, Edinburgh has a problem with tourism. It can’t live without it, but it also feels like it can’t bear to live with it. Is it bad of me to be grateful that I only have to spend one month a year worrying about it?
Yours, being part of the problem, but wanting to be part of the solution.
Kev F & the Socks
Until August 25th, The Scottish Falsetto Socks ROLL UP! at the Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose 9.30pm, every night of the Edinburgh Fringe 2019. On sale now!
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