'Rising costs are pricing Scottish performers out of the Fringe'
Edinburgh is preparing to welcome millions of people from around the world for a month of art and culture, including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Edinburgh Art Festival.
Comedian Ayo Adeneka has said rising costs and the expense of producing and promoting a full-length show are making it 'less and less possible' for homegrown talent.
'The Fringe should be oversubscribed by Scottish performers – you shouldn't be able to move for Scottish performers,' he said.
'But this year, in one of the big four [venues] there's only three Scottish acts. It's really impossible if you don't have financial backing or if you're not fortunate enough to come from money.
He added: 'If you're a regular person, which is where art comes from, you can't perform, you can't create without that money. There's not enough support for Scottish artists, or artists in general.'
However, Mr Adeneka described himself as 'lucky'.
He's been sponsored by Red Bull UK to bring his show Black Mediocrity to the Festival Fringe this year.
Brass Tacks Comedy, run by Edinburgh local Katie Palmer, spearheaded the funded Fringe idea after speaking to comics in the Scottish industry who felt the Festival was not an option for them due to costs.
She worked with Red Bull UK to invite applications to win a funded debut.
Comedy venue Blackfriars of Bell Street also joined forces with Brass Tacks Comedy to offer a funded Fringe debut for Scottish comedian Jack Traynor.
Ms Palmer said the idea came to her during Fringe 2024 when a Glaswegian comedian said he would not return in 2025 because he was 'completely priced out'.
'All of up front costs like venue deposits, marketing, and tech are unaffordable for so many people,' she said.
She added that's it's also like a 'full time job' to produce and write a Fringe show.
Those challenges are something the First Minister and his Government are hoping to address with more funding.
Speaking to invited guests at the headquarters of the Edinburgh International Festival on Thursday, John Swinney said it's his and his Government's role to assist artists in any way they can.
The Scottish Government previously promised to increase arts and culture spending by £34m this year, which includes increasing festival funding by £4m.
It's part of the Government's wider commitment to invest at least £100m more annually in arts and culture by the end of the decade.
'We've acknowledged that there's more we could do to support festivals than has been the case in the past,' the First Minister said.
'This fund is designed to put in more public expenditure to ease those pressures and difficulties.'
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Scotsman
25 minutes ago
- Scotsman
The surprising and forgotten roots of the Edinburgh International Festival and its Fringe
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... In 1945, as the clouds of war started to clear from Europe, people of great vision were already planning what became the Edinburgh International Festival. It was not just a cultural decision and certainly not a commercial one. Rather, it was a statement of optimism and hope, to create a better world; to bring people together; to celebrate the permanence of human creativity even as so many of the places through which it had been expressed, in the great cities of Europe, lay in ruins. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad There were many such statements at the time, as people of all nationalities aspired to an international order worthy of those who had sacrificed their lives and their dreams. Conceived of as a cultural manifestation of that mood, the Edinburgh International Festival has survived better than most. The theme of this year's Edinburgh International Festival, directed by Nicola Benedetti, is 'the truth we seek' (Picture: Jane Barlow) | PA Vision of a festival city Hopefully, within the Festival as it exists today, there will be room for reflection upon these noble sentiments as the resolve of 80 years ago, that the same must never happen again, is cast into doubt. War in Europe... the rise of anti-Semitism, these were never supposed to recur. The lead visionary, Rudolf Bing, was an Austrian Jewish impresario who fled to England after the Nazis took power in Germany, to inaugurate the Glyndebourne festival in 1936. As the great opera houses of Europe were reduced to ruins, the concept emerged in his mind of a festival city, where the cream of European talent could reassemble. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad READ MORE: Meet three comedy couples collaborating at the Fringe this year Bruno Walter and Kathleen Ferrier perform at the opening of the Edinburgh International Festival in the Usher Hall in 1947 | Edinburgh International Festival There was no certainty it would be Edinburgh. Bing's first choice was Oxford but he ruled it out because 'town and gown' were too far apart. Bath was considered and so too was Liverpool but, said Bing, 'no money on earth could turn it into a festival city. Edinburgh was a different matter'. Both the newly elected Labour government, eager for such symbols of hope, and Edinburgh's city fathers got behind the idea. In 1945, before the war ended, Bing started working on the 'manifold challenges' which included the fact that 'many of the singers had never heard of Edinburgh'. Thus are the vagaries of history written. As far as can be recalled, the citizens of Edinburgh got behind it too, in principle if not in participation. At the inaugural festival in 1947, coal rationing was still in place and floodlighting the castle was prohibited. The people of Edinburgh donated their coal rations so it could be lit from dusk to midnight. READ MORE: Six myths about the Edinburgh Festivals debunked Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The audience stands for the national anthem in the Usher Hall as the first Edinburgh International Festival gets underway | Edinburgh International Festival Communist Party's cultural committee How much else they had to do with the Festival and the reputation it soon brought to their city, as a centre of cultural renewal, is more doubtful and this produced its own response – the creation of a 'People's Festival' which in time would turn into 'the Fringe'. Two of the leading instigators were also central to what would become the Scottish folk revival, Norman Buchan and Hamish Henderson. It had been 'a fortunate accident', Henderson later wrote, that Bing had decided to site his Festival in Edinburgh, not least because it provoked a reaction which had its own historic consequences. 'When it became clear that the Edinburgh Festival was to be in the main a prestigious showcase for the 'High Art' of the world… it was decided by the cultural committee of the Communist Party in Glasgow (of which Norman was a member) to create an 'alternative' festival' which would feature 'the finest traditional singers and musicians in Scotland and Europe'. It would be fair to say that the Fringe has travelled a very long way from these early objectives. Somewhere within it, there should be at least a nod towards these origins as a people's festival and a celebration of traditional music as a complement to the 'High Arts'. Why indeed should that modest counterpoise not have a place within the International Festival itself? Nicola Benedetti will understand that. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A slightly jaundiced view There is an endless, annual debate about whether the Fringe is too big, too expensive, too lacking in quality control; probably all true. However, these are best left as arguments for the market to decide though, by same token, it might reasonably be asked why such a hugely competitive market also requires public subsidy. Long ago, I formed a slightly jaundiced view of the Fringe when I was pressed into service as a reviewer of four or five shows a day, each more challenging than the one before to find something nice to say about. But I suppose that's what its many adherents expect of the Fringe – a hopeful search for hidden gems. Back in the day, there was the annual entertainment provided by whatever manifestation of 'filth' a Tory councillor in Edinburgh could be induced by the popular press to be outraged about. The views of the eminently quotable Councillor Kidd were as close as most of Scotland got to the cultural wonderland that was happening in the capital. Fringe nudity A dear friend of mine, Duncan Campbell, later a distinguished journalist at the Guardian who died recently, had a good story. As a student in his native Edinburgh, he appeared in a Fringe production which required him to run naked across the stage. Councillor Kidd was duly informed and readily agreed to be outraged. A tabloid furore ensued. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad To Duncan's horror, his mother decided that as an act of solidarity, she must attend a performance of this theatrical epic. 'If there's one thing you don't want to do,' he said, 'it's appear naked on stage with your mother in the audience.' Let that be a cautionary tale.
The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Mhairi Black: 'I underestimated how horrible my own side could be'
'That's been a strange thing, to learn how to relax after nearly 10 years,' she says as we sit together in the offices of The Herald. And has she? 'About two weeks ago I cracked it. I'm definitely getting there.' She certainly looks relaxed. It is late morning, July 24, and Black has come into the office to have her picture taken and to talk about her new Fringe show. Read more She is fresh-faced, accommodating (she's not in the slightest put out when The Herald's editor chases us from the room we're in because she has a meeting booked), chatty and honest. But then she's always been chatty and honest. Over the next hour she will pose uncomplainingly for photographs and talk to me about life and politics and her new Fringe show. The Fringe is the future. Politics the past. It's in our time together that she will tell me she has left the SNP (you may have read as much in [[The Herald]] the other week). How has she been spending her time since she closed the door on her career in Westminster, I ask when we sit down to talk? 'I've been enjoying the bliss of domestic life,' Black admits. 'My wife's raging because I've got more time to go on social media and see all these videos. And the algorithm clearly knows that I'm spending a lot of time in the house these days. It keeps sending me: 'Here's how to make your own bleach.' Turns out, vinegar is the basis of all cleaning products. So now my house just smells like a chippie. 'So, yeah, driving my family demented has been a massive part of trying to relax.' Black hasn't just been waiting home for her wife Katie McGarvey to come home of an evening. Last summer she spent August at the Fringe with her debut hour Politics Isn't For Me, which she then toured around Scotland and even performed for five nights in London. And then there's a new show to prepare for this year too. Maybe things have not been totally languid after all. Mhairi Black during her Fringe show (Image: STEVE ULLATHORNE) Last year's show, Politics Isn't For Me, wasn't quite stand-up. It was more of a very funny Tedtalk, or 'Nedtalk' as she put it herself. It was an exasperated, amused discourse on why, in her experience, Westminster wasn't fit for purpose. This year's show will see her range more freely over life and politics. What that means in practice is not totally nailed down, she admits. This is, as the title suggests, a work in progress after all. 'I'd never heard of a work in progress until stepping into this world,' Black admits. 'Everybody kept talking about WIPs. I thought, 'I'd just left that world.'' (The ghost of Westminster still clearly haunts her.) 'The work in progress is basically, 'I've got a half-baked idea. Come along and help me figure out the rest of it,'' she continues. 'And that's really scary. I'm looking forward to trying something new, as in there's a bit where I don't know what's going to happen and that's half the excitement, I suppose. 'This is more talking about things I've experienced since leaving politics,' she adds. 'There will definitely still be stories I didn't tell the last time. But a lot more of me telling stories about how I'm figuring life out.' Figuring life out is what she has been doing for the last 12 months. Well, that and processing everything she's gone through over the last 10 years. Come election day last summer, I say, wasn't there even a tiny frisson of regret that she wasn't still in the fight? 'Oh, Christ, no. The minute he called that election I was dancing around the living room,' she says. (He being Rishi Sunak. Remember him?) 'Because I had already made my mind up in 2019 - I just hadnae told anybody that - so it wasn't fresh news to me. If anything, I'd been waiting for this day. Mhairi Black announced this week she had left the SNP (Image: Jeff J Mitchell) 'So, when he called the election before last year's Fringe I was like, 'Oh you dancer. Right, freedom.'' That's the word you'd use? Freedom? 'Oh, aye, definitely freedom. Freedom to be more myself.' Last year's show Politics Isn't For Me was really a show about institutional failure. She was part of that institution, of course. I wonder, does she feel she wasted those 10 years in parliament? 'No, I don't. I don't. 'It was an experience,' she adds. 'But I don't miss it. I still think I was right to leave when I did.' For all her criticisms of Westminster Black made a huge impact there. Her maiden speech was watched 10 million times on YouTube and she would go on to become the deputy leader of the SNP in Westminster. Mhairi Black at Westminster (Image: unknown) What does she think she achieved in her time in politics? 'When I think of the individuals that we helped, our little constituency team, that's what I'm proudest of, definitely; being able to put faces to these cases we had and going, 'I really did change their lives for the better, or I played a part in that,' which is great. 'In terms of actually changing laws, no. Didn't get anywhere close to it. The closest I ever got was a private members bill that was shot down in its first read.' It would presumably have been different if you had been in power? Maybe a little, she says. 'But even if in some magical world we had been in the UK government, I still think we'd have been, 'Rip this up, start again, try again.' 'The hours that are wasted doing nothing in that building is criminal. If it was any company it would be the first thing somebody would point out. 'What the hell are you doing this for?' So, the fact that parliament operates like that 'just because' was never a good enough reason for me. 'It suits the people in power. I imagine that's why it's not going to change anytime soon.' What would you now tell that 20-year-old Mhairi Black who got elected in 2015? 'Oh, that's difficult. I'd probably say don't doubt yourself as much and maybe be ready for how lonely it can be at times. I think that would probably be my two pieces of advice.' Lonely? Was that the case even within your own party? 'Oh aye, aye, because it's a very cut-throat world where there's people just always out to get each other. And that's just alien to me. I thought if you were part of a team you all work together. Mhairi Black and Nicola Sturgeon (Image: PA Archive/PA Images) 'But, of course, politics doesn't always attract team players. So, yeah, it took me a wee bit of time to get my head around that. I expected other opposition to be horrible or backstabby or whatever, but I underestimated how much of an issue it would be with your own side, definitely.' It's also worth remembering that Black was subject to death threats during her time in parliament. Perhaps it's no wonder that at the end of 2017 she had to take time off because she had effectively burnt out. 'From 2014 'til, say, 2020 even, it was just election after election after referendum. It was just constant, non-stop, and you can't maintain that level of energy and that level of responsibility at that intensity without having a proper break at some point. And that's what I got the hard way eventually. It got to the point where my body was like, 'We're making you take a break whether you like it or not.'' In the BBC documentary made about her around last year's election Black's dad Alan admitted that he feared she was drinking too much. When I bring it up she agrees. 'The way that parliament is, you can't leave the building because votes could be called at any point. So you're like, 'I'm stuck in here until 10 o'clock at night, but it's six o' clock and I've finished all my work. Do you want to go and get a pint?' 'And you'd sit and have one or two. I wasn't getting steaming every night … But you start to recognise, 'Oh, wait a minute I've been for one or two pints four days this week.' 'And I could see it even in my own colleagues or folk from other parties. This is how you end up in a state, or this is how you end up with a real problem. You can see it happening around you. 'I suddenly realised if I'm seeing you in here all the time it means I'm in here all the time.' 'That definitely got nipped in the bud pretty quickly.' And then of course she was given her ADHD diagnosis in the midst of all this. At the time she said it was a real positive for her. She still feels that way today. 'I see it as a real strength. I feel like someone's given me the map to the maze in my own head. 'I'm learning more about myself as it goes on. And this is the longest stretch of time I've been home for a good few years. I'm in the process of making new habits. It's quite fun and exciting, I have to say.' In the documentary you mentioned you were also being tested for autism? 'I've not had anything back officially yet, but … Given that my family is riddled with it everybody seems to be like, 'Yeah, you probably do have it.'' As for the world today, well, she's not hopeful. 'The speech that I'm proudest of giving is the one where I talk about facism. As time rumbles on I desperately want to be proved wrong.' But she's not seeing any evidence. 'We're still in this horrible, right-wing, creeping, authoritarian style of governance. 'Even when you're seeing just how much tech companies are being allowed to run wild and how inept our governments are at understanding the problem, never mind having a grasp on 'here's what we need to do about it,' it's terrifying. It's really terrifying.' We are speaking the day before President Trump arrives in Scotland for his private visit. Why, she asks, is the Scottish Secretary going to give him a warm welcome? 'This guy is a fascist. He is literally locking up children and people are dying on his watch and we're warmly welcoming him.' 'Why are we all pretending that we're in this cosy almost 1960s comic book world where we can rely on America to look after us? The world is changing and nobody's keeping up with it.' As for the SNP, she is largely circumspect today, but in last year's Fringe show she was, if anything, harder on her own colleagues than anyone else. 'Funny that,' she says, laughing. You're still a member of the SNP though? 'No, I'm not anymore.' Ah. 'Basically for a long time I've not agreed with quite a few decisions that have been made,' she explains. 'There have just been too many times when I've thought, 'I don't agree with what you've done there,' or the decision or strategy that has been arrived at. 'To be honest, I'm looking around thinking, 'There are better organisations that I could be giving a membership to than this one that I don't feel has been making the right decisions for quite some time.' 'The capitulation on LGBT rights, trans rights in particular.' She says, instead, she is going to back organisations such as the Good Law Project who are willing to fight on these issues in court. 'That's what I want to throw my money behind. She is still, she says, fervently pro-independence, though. There's another former big beast of the Scottish National Party in Edinburgh this month. Nicola Sturgeon will be appearing at the book festival. What does Black think the party's former leader's legacy will be? 'Time will tell. Undoubtedly no one can take away that she reached levels of influence and popularity and fear that I don't think anyone else has in recent memory … I can't think of anybody who has had that kind of impact, certainly on UK politics.' When you say fear …? 'Having been in Westminster at the height of Nicola's leadership, they were terrified of her, absolutely terrified. When she was in the building it spread like wildfire. You could see they're actually quite shaken at the very fact that she's here in person. 'So, there's no taking away from that. I've always said I think she is possibly the best politician I can think of UK-wide as to competency and being able to answer a question. I've never seen her shaken. She was always unflappable and I know from experience how difficult that is to do. 'So, as a politician I thought she was shit hot. 'As the leader of a political party, I thought she could have done so much better. The same is true of Alex Salmond when he was in charge and even John Swinney now. The actual structure of the party has never grown or adapted to that influx of membership, which I think has actually played a role in why a lot of folk have turned away from the party. It's because the structure just wasn't there to give people the kind of membership they were craving. 'So, there's definite failings and as time goes on I'm sure those failings will become much clearer. But I think for all the negatives that might be associated with Nicola Sturgeon I do think there are a hell of a lot of positives and there are a lot of folk who are now gunning for Nicola Sturgeon who at the time were clinging onto her coat tails for dear life. I'm not without cynically noticing, 'Oh, you've changed your tune all of a sudden.' 'Whereas there were people who had legitimate concerns and queries that were ignored for years, but they don't take it to the front pages of newspapers.' As for Black, does she have any idea of what she's going to do with the rest of her life? 'Genuinely I don't and for me that's half the excitement at the minute. I'm in a lucky enough position where for a year now I've been able to make a living out of just having a laugh. And I'll do that for as long as it suits me and as long as I feel that I can. 'But it's not like I've decided to do stand-up all my life. It's just trying on different hats and seeing what fits.' Next year she will be writing a book. Beyond that, who knows? 'I could see myself ending up in college lecturing, so maybe that's something that will one day come along. But for the time being I'm just enjoying sleeping in my own bed and being able to have a laugh because so much of that was missing for a good chunk of time there.' Mhairi, you've been in politics for a decade and now you're at the Fringe. It does suggest you might quite like a bit of attention. 'I know,' she says, smiling. 'That's what my wife says to me all the time. 'Do you not get enough attention? Was the theatre of people applauding you not enough? You need my praise?' 'Yes, I do.' Mhairi Black: Work in Progress, Gilded Balloon at the Appleton Tower, August 10-24, Midday Mhairi Black on Nigel Farage: 'He's the British Trump. Poisonous. I have absolutely nothing nice to say about him. How far have we fallen as a society when all it takes is a millionaire in a cravat holding a pint and suddenly we're like, 'Oh, yes, you must have my interests at heart?'' Mhairi Black on Keir Starmer: 'The guy believes in nothing. I've no doubt that he goes home and convinces himself that he's a very practical, reasonable set of hands who is guiding us through a very turbulent time. I just think it's rubbish. Naw, you don't believe anything. In order to guide people you've got to have an end goal and end destination. Keir Starmer cannae even make up his mind what that end destination is, so the idea that this guy is the saviour is nonsense.'
The National
2 hours ago
- The National
It's time we tried to rebuild the ambition of Scottish Modernism
There's much to say about the Serbian fabrics master. In his 60s and 70s heyday, Klein sent multi-coloured tweeds from the Borders to the world's leading fashion houses. The building just saved was Klein's collaboration with the leading modernist architect (and fellow Borderer) Peter Womersley, who also built Klein's family home close by. I want to begin in a visceral way, triggered by the current photos of the 1971 studio in this week's press reports. It's essentially intact as an elegant, angular structure – but how neglected as a sight. READ MORE: Scottish crew 'excluded from Spider Man 4 filming' Water-damaged, graffiti'd, mossy, glass walls shattered … It's as if the modernism of the place itself had been under attack. Of course, the real reasons are prosaic. Built in Klein's first burst of success, the studio (latterly promoting local textiles) declined as the weaving industry did in the Borders. It's laid derelict for the last 20 years. The site has been secured by a brace of august institutions: National Trust for Scotland, Scottish Historic Buildings Trust and the Klein Family Foundation, with the National Lottery Heritage Fund indicating it will fund and support. Does the Klein studio mean we are finally deciding to treasure and preserve our Modernist past in Scotland? Has our mood shifted on this? Because up till recently, it has mostly seemed vengeful and neglectful. I'm a fan, though maybe inescapably so. As I revelled in the grid windows and load-bearing columns of these Klein-Womersley buildings, a long-buried memory came to mind. My comprehensive school, St Ambrose RC Secondary, built in 1961. My feelings about my experiences there ('76-'81) would honestly be both treasurable and vengeful. But to adapt Le Corbusier's phrase, architecturally it was indeed a 'machine for learning'. Photos on the web show angular glass corridors bearing shuffling teenagers from block to block. A Guernica-scale metal sculpture, composed of forces and objects, sets you up for the tender mercies of the tech studies building. In retrospect, I was ripened (and toughened) in the grids of High Modernism. Right across from our Victorian family home, surmounting the West End park, two 14-storey high-rises loomed. All manner of teen troubles tumbled out of them, for me. So believe me, I can understand the ambivalence about reviving Modernist ruins. Yet still, there's something about their confidence and optimism that remains compelling. Particularly from our current era's standpoint, where hope for the future feels more fractured and tentative than ever. On a recent music-biz photo session, we sought out Modernist – indeed, brutalist – scenes and textures, across the expanses of Glasgow. It was a thrilling brief. We found ourselves glorying in the rough-casting of overbearing concrete structures, loving the infinities implied by paving stones and steps. Given the next Hue And Cry album is 'electro', in the broadest sense, it felt that a celebration of big, confident engineering was a good backdrop. Yet big, confident engineering often sits at an angle to the hearts and minds of residents and users. The Modernist 'megastructure' (as the architects put it) that made up the bulk of Cumbernauld town centre was guided by cutting-edge theory at the time. Flows made up of humans, shops, transport and meeting places were elaborately modelled; the whole place was designed so that structures could amend and adapt themselves. It had the spirit of utopia about it. But the ambivalence about the current demolitions of Cumbernauld's megastructures is manifest. The 2024 book Concrete Dreams: The Rise And Fall Of Cumbernauld Town Centre talked to many locals. 'They had used [the city centre], they were fond of it, they had lovely stories attached to it and they understood the kind of utopian idea of it and why it was being built', said co-author Alison Irvine. 'But yet they still want to get rid of it as well.' In Glasgow, the blind spots of 20th-century post-war Modernist planners – most obviously their slavish devotion to car use, and to towerblocks replacing tenemental living – is evident to the everyday citizen of the city. There seems to still be 'future ambition' (in council plans) to roof over the M8 at Charing Cross and make a park out of it. But the smashing of social bonds and continuities can barely be pasted over. Maybe, to return to the Bernat Klein buildings in Galashiels, we need to make the modernist case at the level of domesticity, community and creativity. Glasgow School of Art's Bruce Peter is the author of the forthcoming volume Modernist Scotland (the book is currently close to its crowdfunding deadline). Peter lays out 150 post-war buildings, built from 1950-1980, making a case for their preservation (where they still exist). What a tour he provides! There are small-scale sci-fi extravaganzas I'd never heard of. Like the Dollan Baths in East Kilbride. Or Womersley's miraculously balancing triangular stand for Gala Fairydean FC. Or Aberdeen University's tomorrowlandish engineering building. There seem to be many poignant Modernist churches, tucked away in Scottish locales. Poignant, as they were built in an age of secular dominance – though nowadays they look like exactly the kinds of luminous spaces we need (religious or not) to get our heads together. Go visit St Columba's Parish Church in Glenrothes, or St Francis Xavier's in Falkirk, or St Charles Oratory in Glasgow's Kelvinside. We should still attend to the parlous decay of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, whose demolition would be such a loss to this tradition. The tumult of Modernist style in Peter's book makes you reassess buildings you'd taken for granted. Like the sandstone consistency of the 70s extension to the old Mitchell Library in Glasgow, whose solidity and reliability I've leant on for many decades. (Its interiors are well described as 'resembling a luxury hotel in Moscow'). Or even my home town's Monklands Leisure Centre, which I can now see as a brutalist masterpiece of swooping and corrugated concrete (as opposed to somewhere I could grab a ping-pong table). There are many more exquisite examples of the Scottish Modernist tradition in this book. Peter ends with a plea against the 'eyesore' charge often made against modern-era buildings. 'It is apparent that many people are unable to distinguish between superficial decay spoiling the appearance of a building and the potential of its underlying architecture', he writes. 'When buildings of any kind are neglected or derelict, it is necessary to make leaps of imagination to envision how splendid they could look if sympathetically renovated.' Exactly this case seems easily made for the Bernat Klein studio. What awaits it, according to the renovation team, is an archive of Klein's most notable fabrics, alongside education programs. Klein used tweed techniques from the Borders area but crammed multicolours into the threads, taken from the colourations of the Borders. And his clients: Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent … Oh, to be so blithely adorned in dreams. (Although the nightmares of the Cold War, and the Holocaust, of course subtended every escapism.) We should try to recover at least the optimism and ambition of Scottish Modernism – if we can keep its buildings and methods relevant to our current scale and agenda: community-centred, planet-challenged. A possible goal for Klein's soon-to-be ex-ruin. The crowdfunder for Bruce Peter's Modernist Scotland is still running at
