With reports of great doom on the horizon, as accommodation prices soar out of control thanks to demand, and overdue legislation to protect residential housing stock, now is the time to think big. The alternative is to watch the Edinburgh Fringe, and the other Summer Festivals fall. With that in mind, here are some suggestions.
1. Improve connectivity with Glasgow, Dundee, and satellite towns
This is the only ‘quick-fix’ on the list but it could be a game changer. ScotRail do operate a Summer Festivals time-table, returning travellers to Glasgow, North Berwick, and Falkirk until a few minutes past midnight. There are extra carriages for trains serving weedbank, Fife, Perth, Dundee, Stirling, and Dunblane, but you’ll still have to get out of the city long before the witching hour. Further, in the past, those extra services to Fife and beyond have only run on weekends.
There’s hotel, and letting capacity under far less demand once you get out of Edinburgh even just a little ways, and I’m sure they’d love the business. A well organised official portal for Festival accomodation and travel could be transformative if coupled with a push from stakeholders for more regular, later, cheaper rail connections. Give people the confidence to know they can get to and from the city and let businesses in towns and cities within easy reach benefit from increased trade, at a far lower price point.
2. Build a Performer’s Village
The success of Queen Margaret University in offering affordable performer accommodation in 2022, demonstrates what’s possible when Fringe stakeholders and a responsible local business – QMU, leverage their powers in the interests of artists. However we need thousands more beds offered at limited prices to meet demand. For far too long many, probably most performers have come to Edinburgh measuring their success by how small their financial loss was.
For the world’s biggest, pre-eminent festival of the performance arts, which operates on a scale comparable to the modern Olympic Games, not to have built a dedicated performer’s/creators village is mind boggling. With an expanding tram network, and suitable investment in transport infrastructure, a site could, and should be developed.
Run as affordable student accommodation, under Council ownership, for 9 months of the year, such a development would be economically profitable, self-sustaining, and generate a great deal of local employment.
This would, at a stroke, vastly increase accessibility to the Summer Festivals for creatives, reduce demand on hospitality, and reduce the price for would be visitors.
Alternatively we could iterate on a camping/glamping model of temporary accommodation. We know it would work, Edinburgh Festival Camping ran a hugely successful camp site at the Tram served Royal Highland Centre up until Covid, and greedy landowners shut them down. This might even still be possible this year, again if Stakeholders and Council leveraged their influence to secure a site (preferably back at Ingliston given the Tram connection).
3. Demand better from student housing providers
The bespoke student housing sector – Purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) – is a stinking cash cow for faceless investors and their corporate fronts. It is past time legislation was brought into force them to make vacant summer rooms available for short stays. Too many lie empty, their usurious rents more than sufficient to line investors pockets. These disgracefully under-taxed investment vehicles for the privileged should do more than impoverish students and deprive cities of sites of affordable housing.
Step 1 would be to rent-control PBSA blocks, Step 2 would be to tax empty rooms. Their profits thus curtailed, those spaces would soon come available in Summer, and students wouldn’t be quite so exploited.
4. Reverse the Hyper-concentration of Summer Festival venues
With the 2021 move of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the concentration of festivals footfall in and around the Bristo mega-hub has only intensified. The way things stand, the Fringe exists predominantly in the Old Town. Yes the Assembly Rooms, Voodoo Rooms & the Stand remain in the New, and there’s always Summerhall, but the weight of venue space rest on the oldest bones of the city.
With Fringe HQ possibly now based in the St James Quarter, it makes no sense not to push for more venues nearby. The many hostelries, and restaurants of Rose Street, Broughton Street, and Top o’ the Walk would surely benefit from establishing enough venues to create a critical mass of footfall. It would only be a return to earlier days of the Fringe where the Newsroom on Leith Street was only one amongst many venues on the opposite side of North Bridge.
That won’t be enough in itself of course! Leith hospitality and retail is overdue to benefit from Summer Festivals footfall, and not just resident tourists who hot foot it up-hill. With the tram now serving one of Europe’s coolest neighbourhoods, now is the time to seek out sufficient venues to bait a new honey pot of comedy, drama, and dance (and more) to bring in those busy bee Fringe goers.
It is only in re-distributing the Summer Festivals city wide that we can hope to relieve the pressures which clog the cross-city arteries every year and enrage so many city residents. I say this as a critic who is completely unaffected, but we will not create a sustainable ecosystem if stakeholders don’t begin to make meaningful change in this space.
5. Curate, Curate, Curate
At it’s 2019 peak, the Fringe alone (not counting the Book Festival and International Festival and others), featured 3841 shows at 323 venues. Busy critics ie those of us who ping-pong from show to show from noon to the middle of the night, can attest to the lamentable emptiness of many of those venues. That was no less true in 2022, when 3,334 shows had to compete for overall ticket sales down over 25% from that 2019 peak.
You’re a performer and you’re still set on playing the Edinburgh Fringe, click here to read my advice NOW!
Anecdotally I can tell you that there are also far fewer critics doing the rounds since 2019 – and even then there weren’t remotely enough to see every show. In short, the chances of being discovered at the Fringe are probably poorer than ever, whilst the chances of losing a lot of money never higher.
If venues tilted their bookings towards just a little more towards quality, rather than quality, audiences could have more confidence in taking a chance on less know, or unknown performers. Creatives would have more chance of finding a crowd, and even a critic to show up and review the show. Even a 10% reduction in bookings would reduce demand – and thus price – of digs, whilst boosting the visibility of performances.
6. Allow tenants to legally sublet rooms
OK, so this is a stretch goal, but George Osborne wanted to make this legal back in 2015. If it makes sense to a Conservative Chancellor, a centre-left(ish) Scottish Government shouldn’t find it beyond the pale.
The incoming STL legislation in Edinburgh unfairly, in The QR’s opinion, targets those who short term rent out spare rooms as if they are hospitality businesses. Whilst they should have to conform to health and safety legislation, this practice has little to no effect on housing stock availability unlike secondary letting. Given noises from the Council, it seems some movement will take place here, and the spare room letter will be free to take in folks come the Summer.
However, the Scottish Government could, at a stroke increase the available number of rooms by the thousands if the many private long term renters of the Capital were given the right to rent out rooms during periods of peak demand at least. This would not only provide renters with a welcome source of income to offset their donations to the mortgages of others, but greatly relieve demand pressures. It would also funnel money back into resident’s hands, and thus the local economy in due course.
7. Do not reverse the incoming STL Control Area
Whilst I have great sympathy for the spare room letter, the same cannot be said for many of those renting out second, third, or 10th properties. The city is under immense housing pressure, and unregulated landlordism simply exascerbates rampant economic inequalities. Our housing regulations were never designed for the technological systemization of private short term letting, and have been slow to catch up.
Good thread, unfortunately. Treating the people of Edinburgh like *they* are the problem is not helping our cause. The Fringe has got to a near-unsustainable size, whether we like it or not. There aren’t easy answers but, as Rosie says, we have to work WITH the city on it. https://t.co/wOkRulqRNb
— Mark Watson (@watsoncomedian) February 4, 2023
For the Fringe and Festivals to find a sustainable future, there has to be a synergy betwixt them and the people of the city. There’s huge love for everything these cultural juggernaut’s offer, with over 50% of tickets typically bought by residents. However, as things stand, local and visitor are being forced into needless confrontation thanks to model of relentless Festivals growth, event concentration, and pressures on housing stock. The solutions exist, it is simply a matter of political and stakeholder wills to make changes before it’s too late, and another city has developed the strategies and infrastructure to steal the crown.
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