The Edinburgh Festival: A Primer

Craig Riecke

05 Aug 2024 — 5 min read

The whole city is covered in posters like this

The first thing you need to know about the Edinburgh Festival is ...

It's big.

Big, big, big. It's bigger than big.

Bigger than a bread box? Oh yeah. Bigger than life? You bet. Bigger than the sky? Just about.

Even with the festival barely started (it's the 5th day of 28), I cannot wrap my mind around it. I cannot convey to you the chaos, the horror, the exhilaration, the wonder and shock and awe of the Edinburgh Festival. But I will try.

Did I mention it's big?

What is It?

The Edinburgh Festival is an international art festival. What kind of art? Every friggin' kind. Music, theater, books, painting, sculpture, film, crafts, storytelling, essays, food ... omg, what kind of art isn't there?

The Edinburgh Festival is not one festival. It is many festivals that take over the city of Edinburgh month of August. Most run simultaneously. The major ones are:

The Fringe - is the big daddy, the one with the most press, the biggest draw for outsiders. Tickets are cheap (in some cases free), anyone can perform, and the main focuses are music, theater, and stand-up. The drink of choice is beer. But interestingly, the Fringe started in 1947 as a band of rejects from...
The Edinburgh International Festival - is the hoity-toity festival. Edinburgh started it in 1947 as a antidote for the UK's post-WW2 fatigue and pessimism. It focuses on high cultural stuff: group theater, opera, large-scale classical music. Tickets are fairly expensive. The drink of choice is wine.
The Edinburgh Military Tattoo - is a military parade of Scots in their clam's highland garb, plus a whole lot more. They march from Edinburgh Castle across the stands where thousands of spectators gawk and take pictures. It is supposedly very moving. They do two shows a night on weekend and one on weekdays. Tickets are outrageously expensive.
The Edinburgh Film Festival - is what the name implies and focuses on Scottish films, and lasts a week. Tickets are pretty reasonable but they sell out way in advance.
The Edinburgh Book Festival - is a huge compendium of authors doing talks and book signings. Many have ties to Scotland's thriving literary scene. Amy and I are going to see the mystery novelist Ian Rankin, the internationally famous author of the Inspector Rebus series, set in Edinburgh (see the recent BBC production - people get killed in our neighborhood! Fictionally of course).

The Edinburgh Jazz Festival used to run at the same time, but was moved to July this year to reduce competition. Apparently there's a limit to how much stuff you can do in one month.

These major festivals aren't coordinated either, and have different catalogues and ticketing systems. This makes it quite a challenge to plan your days there. Many people do it months in advance, and particular shows and events sell it out long before. But some totally wing it, preferring to just hop in lines to whatever looks good and purchasing the ticket in line.

How Big Could it Be?

Pretty big. Of all the world events, only the Olympics and the World Cup have more ticketed sales than the Edinburgh Festival.

This is in the town of only 500,000 people. Many people think Edinburgh is the largest city in Scotland, but in fact it's second to Glasgow (with 2 million people). Still, 500,000 people is nothing to sneeze at. The Festival takes over the entire city of Edinburgh.

So let's take just the Fringe, the largest of the festivals. In 2023 there were:

288 venues - these are all over Edinburgh, but mostly in the city center. Generally an arts conglomerate like Pleasance or Assembly will run a group of adjacent venues and stick a beer garden and food trucks in the middle. Some venues are churches and community centers (including our own church, St. Augustine) that are taken over for 3 weeks by a conglomerate - smaller shows run there. One 2024 venue is a bathtub, with room for exactly one audience member. This is what you get when there are no gatekeepers for performing!
3,553 shows. Yee gods. To put this in perspective, my home town of Ithaca, NY has about 70 shows a year in all of its venues. And most of these shows run every day of the 3 week festival at the same venue and time. Every show is listed in a free catalog of 384 pages.
250,000 audience members. Gaah! 33% of these came from Edinburgh, 42% from England and Europe, 15% from the rest of Scotland, and 10% from overseas.
2,445,609 tickets. Some of these were free shows, some were around £20, but most were around £10. That means each audience member does around 10 shows. Some gluttons-for-punishment attend 300 shows during the Fringe. Their brains are probably melted by the end.

Where do they put all these people? Good question. Let's run the numbers.

Since 1/3 of the audience comes from Edinburgh, you need room for about 160,000 people.
Not all of these people are going to stay the entire three weeks, so now let's say it's around 100,000 on any given day
Edinburgh has about 167 hotels and 13,000 bedrooms. Needless to say, their all booked up months in advance. Rooms go for about £500 a night. So maybe you can do about 40,000 in hotels.
The University of Edinburgh, since it's not in session, opens its dorms to students. Not sure how much it costs, but you have to book way in advance.
The rest are AirBnb's and VRBO's rented out by Edinburghians who have skipped town for the month of August. Since these are very tightly regulated these days, a lot of these are rented under the table.

In short, they put all these people on my block.

Not really. Seems that way though. Lots of people travel through our Moray Feu neighborhood. They have their nose in Google Maps and are bumping into each other. Some are drunk. Many are trying unsuccessfully to get into the locked garden across the street.

But fortunately, the traffic dies down to a very small handful in the mornings before 10AM, when the Edinburgh Smell is most prominent.

How It Looks

It's really difficult to picture all this. While the Olympics or the World Cup is comparatively easy - you just take pictures of filled stadiums - the Edinburgh Festival is so spread out and covered by doors and roofs that a composite picture is impossible to stitch together. I will try to give you some highlights over the next blog post or two that will paint the picture.

But for now, dig this.

This is Usher Hall, and the opening concert of the Edinburgh International Festival. They are doing Mendelssohn's arrangement of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, a 2 hour piece following Jesus's life in the last week before crucifixion. There are 130 singers in the chorus, 30 additional in the youth chorus. There are 12 soloists. There's the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a pretty awesome band in their own right. And dig that organ! That huge organ is literally drowned out by all the instruments and voices in front of it.

At one point, about 1 hour and 30 minutes in, the chorus is playing the crowd during Jesus' trial. The tenor playing Pontius Pilate asks the crowd which prisoner who they want to go free. The chorus belts out:

BARABBAS!!!

And it's like someone punched you in the gut. Amy and I were literally 25 rows back, and it mooshed us into the chair like a Maxwell Cassette Tape ad.