After August: What Can Edinburgh Learn from Another Festival Season?

As August draws to a close, Edinburgh begins another transformation. The stages, bars, hoardings and temporary structures start to come down. Streets that for several weeks have carried extraordinary numbers of people begin to return to their usual rhythms.

There is much to celebrate. Edinburgh is known around the world for its Festivals, and for a few extraordinary weeks the city is filled with creativity, conversation, music, performance and laughter. Residents have access to an astonishing range of cultural experiences on their doorstep, while visitors encounter a Festival setting that few other cities could reproduce.

There is another side to hosting an event on this scale, however, and Edinburgh’s residents know it well. Journeys take longer, familiar routes change and buses grow crowded. Pavements become performance spaces and queues. Residents become unofficial guides, helping lost visitors find venues and closes, while many also put up visiting friends and family.

It requires patience, and that contribution to Festival Edinburgh deserves greater recognition.

Earlier this summer, the Cockburn Association asked whether Edinburgh’s Festival streets could work for everyone. We argued then that the Festivals are one of the city’s great cultural and economic assets, but that they take place in a living city. After another extraordinarily busy August, it is worth returning to that question, not to make the case for a quieter or less ambitious Festival, but for what might be called Festival urbanism: managing an extraordinary temporary city while respecting the permanent one underneath.

When the city becomes the venue

Edinburgh’s streets and public spaces are not simply the backdrop to the Festivals. They are part of the experience. Nowhere is this clearer than on the High Street. During August, the Royal Mile has to be a performance space, visitor attraction, pedestrian route, workplace, residential street and servicing route, often all at once, and at the busiest times the intensity of use is remarkable.

The Council’s Summertime Streets arrangements are an important response to that pressure. Temporary traffic restrictions can make crowded streets safer and give pedestrians considerably more space, and additional cleansing and waste-management measures during the Festival period have helped too. August also demonstrates the value of public space itself: streets normally dominated by movement become places where people stop, meet and watch, and corners and closes are discovered afresh.

Across the centre, squares, streets, university spaces and other areas accommodate temporary venues, bars, seating, queues, advertising, barriers and servicing infrastructure. Much of this contributes positively to Festival Edinburgh. What needs watching is the cumulative effect, particularly where the same temporary uses return to the same spots year after year.

At some point it is worth asking whether the amount of infrastructure remains appropriate, whether pedestrian routes work as well as they could, and how much genuinely public space is left for someone who simply wants to sit, walk through or enjoy their city without buying anything.

A cleaner and more sustainable Festival

For generations Edinburgh has wrestled with the consequences of welcoming large numbers of visitors into a densely built historic city. Henry Littlejohn’s 1865 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of Edinburgh found deprivation and disease concentrated in the Old Town closes and wynds, the very streets that now draw visitors from around the world to explore their history.

The circumstances of Victorian Edinburgh were profoundly different from those of today, but there is still something recognisable in the underlying point: the condition of our streets has always mattered to how the world sees this city, and to those who actually live on them.

The intensive use of the city during August inevitably produces waste. Posters, flyers, food and drink containers and the paraphernalia of temporary venues all carry an environmental cost. Additional cleansing helps, but dealing with waste once it has been created can only be part of the answer. The better approach is to reduce it at source.

A more sustainable Festival would properly support all those who make it possible, including its city host; ensure that opportunities to participate are not limited by income; reduce unnecessary waste; and make environmentally sustainable products and practices the norm for food, beverage and flyer distributors. That matters particularly in a city which has declared a climate emergency.

Plastic dropped on a street does not necessarily stay there. It can enter drains and watercourses, while more intense rainfall places additional pressure on drainage systems and public spaces already carrying exceptional numbers of people. Edinburgh’s Festivals have always thrived on experimentation; environmental innovation belongs in that same tradition.

The morning after, and the Visitor Levy

One of the most impressive features of Festival Edinburgh is how quickly much of it disappears. Within days, substantial temporary venues can be dismantled and familiar spaces begin to re-emerge. But the physical effects of intensive use take longer to resolve: grass needs to recover, surfaces need cleaning or repair, and streets and public spaces have absorbed levels of footfall and servicing far beyond an ordinary month.

That is part of hosting the Festival, not an afterthought once the last audience has gone home. For the most intensively used public spaces, there is a good case for clear before-and-after condition surveys, agreed reinstatement arrangements and greater transparency about who is responsible for putting things right.

There is now an important new resource, and a new debate, around how we pay for this work.

Edinburgh’s 5% Visitor Levy came into effect on 24 July, just as the city was preparing for its busiest month. The principle behind it is straightforward: some of the value generated by Edinburgh’s visitor economy should be reinvested in the city that supports it. The practical question of where that investment goes is proving considerably more complicated.

That debate has sharpened markedly during this year’s Festivals. Festival organisations argue that the levy itself increases the already formidable cost of bringing artists, performers and staff to Edinburgh, particularly through accommodation. They are pressing for a greater share of the proceeds to be reinvested directly in the cultural organisations and events which generate so much of the city’s visitor economy.

Those concerns should be taken seriously. Affordability is already one of the greatest challenges facing the Festival model. If performers, technicians, seasonal workers and smaller companies can no longer afford to stay in Edinburgh, the diversity and openness on which the Festivals were built will inevitably suffer.

The first month of the levy has also revealed some less glamorous practical difficulties. Accommodation businesses have reported problems with booking systems calculating the percentage-based charge correctly, leaving staff to make manual corrections. A new funding mechanism of this scale was always likely to require adjustment, but administrative costs matter too, particularly for smaller operators.

All of this makes the current argument about the distribution of levy income more than a dispute over competing budgets. It raises a larger question about what we mean by investing in Edinburgh’s visitor economy.

Festival organisations can make a compelling case that they generate visitors, employment and substantial economic activity. Supporting their resilience is therefore an entirely legitimate use of visitor levy funding. But the Festivals and the city that hosts them cannot sensibly be separated.

People come for performances, events and culture, but they come to experience them in Edinburgh.

The Old and New Towns World Heritage Site, the closes and wynds of the Old Town, historic buildings, parks, gardens, monuments, cultural institutions and distinctive neighbourhoods are all part of the attraction. So too are clean streets, functioning public transport, welcoming public spaces and a city centre in which people can move around safely and comfortably. These are part of the infrastructure of the visitor economy, even if we do not usually describe them in those terms.

The choice, therefore, should not be framed as one between funding Festivals and funding the city. A successful levy should help sustain both.

Investment could support the cultural organisations that bring people here while also improving cleansing and waste reduction, restoring heavily used public spaces, improving accessibility and supporting the historic environment and public realm on which the visitor experience depends. Measures addressing wider pressures created by the visitor economy are welcome signs of a more joined-up approach.

The debate taking place at the City Chambers this week should therefore be an opportunity to establish something more durable than an argument over percentages. Edinburgh now has a substantial new source of visitor-related income. The test will be whether we use it to strengthen the whole ecosystem that makes Festival Edinburgh possible: culture, heritage, public space, infrastructure, businesses, communities and the people who live and work here throughout the year.

Supporting the city in this way is not diverting money from the visitor economy. It is investing in its foundations.

A Festival for everyone

Sustainability is not only environmental. The Festival was built on grassroots creativity and on the idea that artists could come to Edinburgh and find an audience, and preserving that openness matters.

That means asking whether artists and workers can afford to take part, whether residents can continue to enjoy the Festival, whether free and low-cost opportunities remain part of August, and whether the people who keep the Festival city functioning receive appropriate support. It also means remembering that public space is one of the few Festival resources that belongs to everyone.

There are interesting examples elsewhere of festivals putting these principles at their heart. The Festival of Thrift in the north-east of England, for instance, has built its programme around community participation, creativity and sustainability. Edinburgh operates on an entirely different scale, and no model can simply be transplanted here, but the underlying ambition, to make environmental and social sustainability part of the event rather than an addition to it, is worth considering.

There is a temptation every August to cast discussion of the Festivals as a contest between residents and visitors, heritage and events, culture and liveability. It is a false choice.

Edinburgh benefits enormously from its Festivals: they support jobs and businesses, sustain cultural organisations and give the city an international presence that would be difficult to replicate, and residents enjoy them too. Equally, the Festivals benefit enormously from Edinburgh. The city’s architecture, landscape, public spaces and communities give the events a setting and character that cannot be transferred elsewhere.

Keeping streets accessible, reducing waste, protecting public space, managing temporary infrastructure carefully and repairing places after intensive use all make Edinburgh better for residents. They also make it a better place to visit, and a better place in which to hold a Festival.

Learning from August

August will never feel like an ordinary month in Edinburgh, nor should it. The crowds, performances, unexpected encounters and temporary transformation of familiar places are part of what makes the Festival season special, and some disruption is inevitable when a historic city hosts cultural events on this scale.

But each August ought to leave us knowing a little more about how to do it well.

There is an opportunity here for a simple annual review. Residents, businesses, accessibility groups, Festival organisations, heritage bodies and the Council all experience August differently, and bringing those experiences together need not become another elaborate consultation exercise. It could simply ask: what worked this year, what did not, and what should change next August?

This year, the Visitor Levy adds another question: how can the money generated by Edinburgh’s success as a visitor destination best be reinvested in sustaining the city and the Festivals together?

As this year’s temporary city disappears, we should look at what worked, where the pressure points were and what practical changes could help next August. That means listening to residents as well as visitors, supporting the artists and workers who make the Festivals possible, reducing their environmental footprint, and ensuring that the public spaces and historic environment carrying so much of the burden also share in the benefits.

The Visitor Levy gives Edinburgh new resources to begin that work. The controversy surrounding its first Festival season should not obscure the opportunity it creates: to think more carefully about the relationship between tourism, culture, heritage and the everyday life of the city.

Edinburgh’s greatest Festival asset is Edinburgh itself. Caring for it, and for the cultural life that animates it, should be at the heart of how we plan the Festivals’ future.

Sources and Further Reading

• City of Edinburgh Council – Edinburgh Visitor Levy
  The Council’s main Visitor Levy hub, including information for residents, visitors and accommodation providers, together with the latest updates on the scheme.
  Edinburgh Visitor Levy
• City of Edinburgh Council – First Round of Visitor Levy Spending
  The Council’s February 2026 announcement of more than £90 million of planned investment over three years across infrastructure, culture, heritage, events and destination management.
  Council agrees first round of Edinburgh Visitor Levy spend

Image: Upsplash – QZheng W