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Scotsman
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Still same buzz of excitement for our summer festivals
The Royal Mile during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe I was lucky enough to be appointed as Edinburgh City Council's festival and events champion for many years when I was a councillor in Edinburgh. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, 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 my 29 years of service I was given the opportunity to represent the city council at scores of events and festivals and always looked forward to the month of August when Edinburgh truly came alive. Although my days as festival and events champion are behind me, I still nevertheless get the same buzz of excitement as our major summer festivals gear up and prepare for the biggest cultural festival offering in the world – and this year is no exception. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Edinburgh International Festival opens on Friday. Founded in 1947 it showcases the performing arts in a programme that is unsurpassed anywhere in the world. It features some of the greatest performers of today. Dance, opera, music and theatre take centre stage, firmly establishing Edinburgh's international reputation as the place to be to enjoy the best performances on offer. The Edinburgh International Fringe, also founded in 1947, is also set to take off on Friday. Artists and performers take to the stage in hundreds of venues throughout the city as well as putting on free street performances at various designated venues. This Friday will also see Edinburgh Castle host the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Having been privileged to serve on its board of directors for a number of years I am well aware of the impact that it has, not only in promoting the city and Scotland, but also in bringing together performers from around the globe in a spirit of celebration and friendship. The Edinburgh Art Festival, the largest annual festival of visual arts in the UK, opens next week and will present a full programme of exhibitions, events and projects. The Edinburgh International Book Festival, founded in 1983, opens its doors next week with a programme of on-stage conversations, workshops and masterclasses, enhancing its reputation as a major public participation forum for the expression of differing views with writers and experts on a range of topics. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Edinburgh International Film Festival opens on the 14th of this month and is known throughout the world for discovering and promoting the best that international cinema has to offer. The Edinburgh TV Festival starts on the 19th and is promoting more than 60 keynotes, debates and masterclasses in addition to providing the opportunity to network with operators from around the world. The Foodies Festival at Inverleith Park opens on Friday with cooking demonstrations from celebrity chefs, cocktail tasting, street food stalls and live music as well as other attractions. I have served on the boards of several of these festivals and this has provided me with an invaluable insight into the hard work and dedication of the festival promoters and staff who are second to none in the arts and entertainment industry. Without them Edinburgh would not be heralded as the host of the biggest and greatest culture festival in the world – their contribution is immense and cannot be understated.
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Nicola Benedetti: ‘Classical music is threatened by young people's lack of basic discipline'
One day last week, the violinist Nicola Benedetti was in her office, staring at spreadsheets, when her teenage step-daughter came in. 'She peered at my computer, saw me looking at budgets, and said, 'You know how you started out as a musician... well, how do you feel about this?'' Benedetti tells me, laughing. 'It was 11.30 at night. My eyes were closing, and I knew I was going to be woken up in a couple of hours by the baby. But I've always been very clear about my purpose.' Right now, Benedetti, 38, is applying that sense of purpose to the Edinburgh International Festival, her third edition since becoming its artistic director in 2022. We've met at her office, on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, a fortnight before this year's festival opens, and she is evidently flat out. In May 2024, she had her first child, a daughter, with her husband, Wynton Marsalis – a celebrated American jazz musician 25 years her senior, who also has a teenage daughter and three older sons from previous relationships. 'There's a lot going on,' she says with a wry smile. Benedetti met Marsalis when, aged 17, she travelled alone to New York for the first time, for a concert at Lincoln Center. Over subsequent years, they have performed together many times; he has even written several concertos for her, his first compositions for the violin. A few years ago, rumours started circulating that the pair were in a relationship, which, until now, Benedetti had always refused to confirm. I ask her why she's been so guarded. 'People don't come to my concerts because of who I'm in a relationship with; they come because I play the violin,' she says. 'And I tend not to discuss my private life because I don't think people find it interesting. But there are all sorts of things people could find out – it's not like I'm really secretive.' I suggest that if, in interviews, she were less coy about her marriage to Marsalis, it would at least stop nosy journalists from asking about it. 'I think it's pretty much out there now,' she says, laughing. 'I really don't care any more if people want to write about it or not. I'm certainly not trying to hide anything.' Besides, she's too busy to worry about such things. Within months of the birth, Benedetti was back at work, conducting meetings and dealing with organisational crises with her baby strapped to her chest. 'Luckily, she was asleep most of the time,' she says, 'and because I was able to physically get stuck back into work, I didn't have that [new mother] identity crisis where you wonder who you were before this other person came into the world.' Benedetti, who was born in Ayrshire, doesn't seem like the identity-crisis type. Her sustained presence in the top flight of classical music is testament not only to her precocious talent but also to exceptional resilience. At the age of eight, she was leading the National Children's Orchestra of Great Britain. By the time she was 15, she was making major career decisions for herself, quitting the Yehudi Menuhin School, in Surrey, because she wanted to focus even more intently on her playing than the school's academic schedule allowed. The following year, she won the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition and signed a £1m, six-album record deal with Universal Music. These days, she is regarded as one of Britain's greatest living violinists, second only, perhaps, to Nigel Kennedy. Her recordings of Shostakovich and Glazunov's concertos are particularly sublime. Yet Benedetti has always regarded herself less as a performer than as an evangelist for the life-changing beauty of classical music. For her, the main attraction of the festival directorship was the fact that it gave her 'the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of people with the arts'. As a result, she says, 'becoming the EIF's artistic director doesn't feel like a departure' from her violin career; rather, it's a natural continuation of her life's mission. The line-up she has assembled for this year's festival is not short on surprises, both musical and otherwise. Highlights include John Tavener's eight-hour mystical song cycle The Veil of the Temple; Figures in Extinction, a collaboration between the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater; and a new James Graham play, Make It Happen, about the role of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 2008 banking crisis, in which Succession's Brian Cox appears as the ghost of the pioneering 18th-century Scottish capitalist Adam Smith. 'Make It Happen throws a mirror back on to Scotland, so it will be interesting to see Edinburgh audiences debate that, which is exactly what the festival should be doing,' Benedetti says. She stops, as though wary of sounding worthy. 'But I promise there are plenty of other things that will be pure enjoyment from beginning to end. We're not always trying to change the world.' Although Benedetti has a reputation for steeliness, today she is warm and open. Instead of trotting out the usual box-ticking guff about diversity and accessibility, she goes off-message by telling me she thinks older concert audiences are an essential part of the classical-music ecosystem. 'I found myself quoting Tony Benn during a team meeting the other day,' she admits with a laugh. 'I reminded them that each generation tends to fight the same fights over and over again. Yes, we can get excited about being the first people to swap chairs for beanbags in the Usher Hall, probably. Yes, we can push to be the most affordable arts festival in the world, which under my watch is what we want to be. But, let's be honest, there have been promenade-style performances since medieval times; ticketing schemes for younger people are nothing new; and every single person who has run the festival before me was, in their way, trying to make it open-door. So it's good to have a bit of realism and humility about what we're doing.' All the same, few people in the arts have done more than she has to make classical music accessible. Her Benedetti Foundation, established in 2019, has worked with 100,000 people of all ages through its outreach and education programmes. She thinks listening properly to classical music for 15 minutes a day is as important for a child as reading a book, and has complained loudly about cuts to music in schools since the subject became a victim of the then coalition government's austerity policies in 2012. More than a decade since those cuts began to take hold, does she think the steady erosion of music education has had an impact on the amount of homegrown talent graduating from Britain's elite music institutions? 'In terms of numbers, probably not much; there are always people with money who will pay for the education that will put their children on that path,' she says. 'But in terms of who is getting that opportunity, yes, no question about it. 'Across the country today, those who are not from a more privileged background, who are studying an instrument to a high level at college, are often either foreign students who have come here to study, or have been supported by a charity.' However, when it comes to what she calls the 'Mark Simpsons of the world' – referring to the working-class Liverpudlian who became the first person to win both BBC Young Musician of the Year and Young Composer of the Year – 'who have shown talent aged four or five, been picked up by the local council and given free music lessons of a quality that enables them to really progress into a career in music? There is no question those numbers have been significantly depleted and impacted.' Benedetti's own upbringing was privileged. Her entrepreneurial father, who came to the UK from his native Italy at the age of 10, made millions after inventing a revolutionary cling film dispenser. Her Scottish-Italian mother made her and her older sister Stephanie (now a violinist with the group Clean Bandit) practise the violin for three hours every day during the school holidays. Recently, Benedetti has found herself questioning the way she and Stephanie were brought up. 'My daughter is only one, but my sister has two children, aged three and five, and seeing her experience has definitely made me consider our own childhood,' she says. 'But both of us have a realistic, even positive view of our upbringing. It was very strict – we feared upsetting our parents, or doing the wrong thing – but we also knew we were loved to death by our mum and dad.' Benedetti's combination of success, talent and youthful looks soon made her a magnet for attention far beyond the concert hall. By the time she was in her 20s, newspapers were running her picture alongside such suggestive headlines as 'Will Nic Air her G String?' She has also been a target for stalkers; in 2010, one broke into her London flat. But she has never seen herself as a victim of the way she was marketed in her youth, even though her early album covers certainly made the most of her sultry Italian looks. 'While the more time that goes by, the more clearly I see that, I knew what a photo looked like – I knew what I was putting on, I was not a blissfully naive 16-year-old. I was not.' And besides, she adds, 'I always had my dad saying, 'Make sure you are dressed decently.' 'The greater pressure, much more than sexism, was around the sort of music I was being encouraged to play,' she adds. Unlike the singer Charlotte Church, with whom she was sometimes lumped as two fresh faces of classical music, the young Benedetti always resisted demands that she perform 'crossover' pieces in favour of less-commercial classical repertoire. 'It's not something that is treated with nearly enough seriousness in public discourse: the power of really populist, saccharine, overly commercialised music. It's more potent than showing some cleavage, believe it or not. But even there I was in charge of my own choices. And I live by them. They were mine.' Today, she worries that the younger generation lack that toughness and are less equipped for the sacrifices required to become a world-class musician. 'The future of classical music is definitely threatened by the changes to work ethic and mentality. You cannot cheat your way through learning a musical instrument: ChatGPT is not going to teach you the violin. It's impossible to learn music on any level with AI. You cannot fake your way to becoming a musician. Yet I think young people have become used to a lack of basic discipline in their daily lives – and that really worries me.' While, as we saw recently at Wimbledon, it's not unusual now for elite young sports stars to have a psychologist in their entourage, according to Benedetti, in the upper echelons of music, the conversation around mental health remains 'very strange and hushed. You are just meant to get on with it. The psychological vulnerability of musicians is a very real thing. But on the other hand, you also have a choice about where you place your focus'. She's loath to spell it out, but it's clear that she thinks the younger generation have been encouraged to place too much focus on their mental health. 'I have definitely been through a period of time where the wellbeing industry, and I do mean industry, has captured my thoughts and made me believe that my focus needed to be turned inwards on my feelings. And it was the worst possible thing for me. I thrive when I am focused on things that are to do with other people and are for other people, such as performance. Of course, I can only speak for myself. Other people's experiences may be different. But it's a subject everyone is nervous to talk about. You can say the wrong thing and be demonised.' Having a child has made Benedetti think a lot about feelings recently. She wonders, for instance, whether it's right to leave her daughter to scream when she is upset: one school of thought in parenting argues that, instead of being distracted from their rage, screaming children need to have their emotions recognised. 'But distraction from feelings is good, too!' Talking of which, her daughter has also given Benedetti a 'renewed appreciation' for violin practice (perhaps, above all, when she is screaming?): 'There is something rather wonderful about telling your family that this is what you will be doing for the next three hours,' she says. 'Then you go into a room and it's just you, your violin, the notes on a page, and the sound.' The Edinburgh International Festival runs from Aug 1-25 at various venues across the Scottish capital. Details:
Telegraph
7 days ago
- Telegraph
Britain's tacky cities show we're no longer a rich country
Every now and then you realise a stout oak you loved has been covered by ropes of ivy to the point of oblivion, which feels like an apt metaphor for the burgeoning chains of tourist shops smothering our great cities with their lucrative but charmless tat. Edinburgh's Royal Mile is now home to 72 gift shops, alongside 42 cafés and restaurants, 13 bars and three kilt specialists. You might as well rename it The Wee Jimmy Krankie Theme Park and abandon all claims to majesty. London's Oxford Street is defaced by American-themed candy stores (estimates range between 20-30 at any given time) spawning a host of investigations over high prices, business tax evasion and counterfeit goods, as they pop up, vanish and reappear with renewed vigour like Japanese Knotweed. Which begs the question – why aren't we all out on the streets, like the people of Barcelona, Palma and Lisbon, demanding change? I've been on holiday in Greece, where a crazy influx of visitors is bringing tensions to a head. I apologise to taverna waiters for being part of the contagion, explaining that I feel the same every summer in my hometown of Cambridge, now fielding 8.1 million visitors a year. The city's medieval splendour feels blighted by cruddy stores selling the same Cambridge University sweatshirts you see hanging in the West End. King's Parade is rendered bland by its Costa and Fudge Kitchen, while Indelibly Cambridge and the King's Parade Vape Store are intolerably indistinctive. I'm gaining notoriety as 'the indisputably crazy' woman who yells 'watch out' at grown tourists while pedalling furiously towards their soft, stationary 'I heart Cambridge' hoodies. How many Cambridge teddies, totes and T-shirts do milling visitors need? Meanwhile glorious independent boutiques like Ian Stevens Leather Goods, the best place in the world for bespoke belts, are priced out of existence. Stevens departed Magdalene Street for Norfolk last summer taking the heady elixir of tanned hide, history and craftsmanship with him. Despite the city attracting 8.1 million visitors a year, its Labour-run council is constantly fretting about how it can make Cambridge more 'visitor friendly', as if arguably the most ravishing architecture in Christendom, along with world-class museums, galleries and the gorgeous Cam rammed with punts, is not enough. They're steaming ahead with a £75m 'civic quarter project' to redevelop and modernise the town's Market Square, Guildhall and Cornmarket. The project involves stripping out the centre's historic cobbles to enhance access and endless 'sustainability goals', but in practice means the bustling stalls and wide range of wares (fruit, veg, flowers, cheese, bike repairs and second-hand books) will be reduced and blandly revamped for people who aren't residents. Meanwhile, the real environmental outrage – the pollution of the River Cam by sewage, leading to truly shocking E. coli test results – remains unfixed. My younger son and all his friends have been sick as dogs after swimming. And what about the looming, long-term domestic water crisis across the region? But who cares when you can rent out shop outlets to vendors of Chinese-made mementoes and keep our cities in lookalike mode with their Starbucks, Sweaty Bettys and Five Guys. I was in Bath earlier this year and I swear for a nanosecond I thought I was back in Cambridge – even the constant weekend hen parties felt the same.
BBC News
23-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Does Edinburgh's Royal Mile need 72 tourist gift shops?
BBC The Royal Mile is the ancient spine of Edinburgh, visited by five million tourists each year. The collective name for four streets that thread through the city's Old Town, it is home to a 900-year-old castle, a palace and a parliament. But the people who live there claim they are now seeing the overtourism problems being experienced across Europe. With tourists comes tourist shops, and BBC Scotland News walked the length of the Royal Mile to count up a total of 72 stores, selling everything from kilts to Highland cow fridge magnets. They are part of an industry that supports more than 40,000 jobs in Edinburgh. But locals say having so many similar shops in one place is symptomatic of the challenges that mass tourism brings. The gift shops - most of which are run by three main operators - sell every imaginable Scotland or Edinburgh-themed item, from postcards and soft toys to clothing. Included are two shops which only sell Christmas-related gifts. The Royal Mile is also home to 42 cafes or restaurants, 13 bars, eight jewellers and three kilt retailers. That's in addition to the museums, cathedral, court, primary school and homes located along the steep and narrow pavements. 'I'm not against tourism, I just think it has gone too far' One man who is almost uniquely qualified to understand the impact of tourism on the Royal Mile is 77-year-old Jimmy Robertson. He has lived on the Canongate, at the bottom of the Royal Mile, since birth and proudly refers to himself as a Canongotian. Jimmy, who has lived in five different homes, can list the "useful shops" that used to be a stone's throw away. They include hairdressers, butchers, grocers and a doctors' surgery - which is now a whisky shop. He said it used to be "a normal area" where people would live and work. "It was probably in the 1980s you saw a lot of people moving out and the street beginning to change," he explained. Jimmy used to work at the brewery which is now the site of the Scottish Parliament. He has long enjoyed sitting outside the 17th Century Canongate Kirk, where one of the benches has an inscription to his late mother. Jimmy added: "I would sit on that bench and you'd watch the world go by, saying hello to folk you knew coming by. "Now I sit there and it feels like it is just tourists that pass me by. "I'm not against tourism, I just think it has gone far in how it affects people who live here." Jimmy said he now had to go out of the area to get his food shopping, or rely on relatives to bring it to him. He said the council was to blame for allowing too many tourist shops to open in one area. It is a point that some critics argue is borne out by data published by the City of Edinburgh Council last year which shows it owns and rents out 35 shops along the Royal Mile, many of which are leased to tourism businesses. Hanna Wesemann lives just off the Royal Mile and both her children attended Royal Mile Primary School. In 2004, this Victorian-era built school had 165 pupils but now the roll is down to 118 pupils – well below its 210 capacity. The 29% fall in pupils does not surprise Hanna, who says the Old Town increasingly "does not feel like a good area to bring up a family". Hanna puts this down to the pressures of tourism and the blight of anti-social behaviour by problem drug and alcohol users outside her flat, which requires regular calls to the police. She said: "It feels like all that's left here is shops for tourists, tourists, and people who have multiple and complex needs. "It [the Royal Mile] is on our doorstep but we never go there because there's nothing for us. "There used to be some useful shops, even charity shops, but now they are all gone and all I can see is gift shops which all seem to sell the same stuff." Increase in international visitors to Edinburgh Only London beats Edinburgh in terms of the most popular places to visit in the UK. Domestic visitors account for the bulk of the city's tourists staying for at least one night - a total of 2.6m in 2023, up from 2.47m in 2015. But it is overseas visitors who are driving Edinburgh's increasing popularity. After a dramatic fall in the Covid years, Edinburgh now attracts one million more international visitors every year than it did a decade ago. Combined with domestic visitors, that is 4.98m total overnight trips by all visitors in 2023. Where to accommodate these tourists, especially in peak periods like the Edinburgh festivals, has been a topic of hot discussion in the city for years. Edinburgh saw a well documented surge in residential properties being turned over to holiday lets in the previous decade. The number of listings by Airbnb in the city jumped from 1,900 in 2014 to 9,000 three years later. New laws requiring operators of short-term lets to have a licence has reduced this tally but data from Inside Airbnb - an independent website which gathers data on Airbnb's operations - suggests there are still just under 6,000 listings for Edinburgh properties today. BBC Scotland News counted 96 key boxes of the type typically used for holiday lets on, or just off, the Royal Mile earlier this month. The impact of holiday lets on people living in the most popular tourist areas is very familiar to Hanna and her family. She explained: "They're not bad people but they don't consider this as an area where people live as normal residents. "You can't build a relationship with someone for three days and I'm really tired of going upstairs every few days and saying 'Can you please be quiet, we have to go to work in the morning'." While much of the focus on where tourists stay has been on the controversy around holiday lets, there are now 181 hotels in Edinburgh - more than twice as many as there were in 2005. What tourism does for Edinburgh's economy There is little doubt that tourism plays a key role in the city's economy. Hosting the world's largest arts festival every August is a big part of that but tourism is now an all-year round industry. It is estimated the average overnight visitor spent £435 in 2023. That filters down to a range of businesses, from coffee shops to taxi firms, supporting thousands of jobs. A spokesman for the Gold Brothers Group - which owns 16 shops on the Royal Mile and employs 340 people in peak season - said claims about too many tourists were nothing new. But he added that there was still capacity for more visitors outwith the festivals in August. The spokesman said: "Our view is that a number of priority issues are being overlooked due to a fixation on tourist numbers. "The urgent priorities for residents, business owners and visitors to the Old Town are cleanliness as the place is filthy; anti-social behaviour; and criminality including violence and a serious 'theftdemic'. "Maybe Edinburgh's local population could come and visit and reflect on what the Royal Mile looked like years ago with its poorly maintained shops with little or no investment and then, without prejudice, consider the quality of outlets now." The spokesman called on the City of Edinburgh Council to "stride to its A game" by cleaning the Old Town more often and ensuring it is "safe and a joy to behold". Edinburgh 'a great place to live and visit' Council leader Jane Meagher said the local authority was determined ensure the Royal Mile was "clean and well-maintained". She also told BBC Scotland News the Old Town High Street was thriving. Meagher added: "Shopfronts are open, supporting local jobs and our economy, with a great mix of businesses in the area from independent kiltmakers to homemade crafts. "As one of the biggest landlords in the area we encourage this mix and work to make sure properties are occupied." The council leader acknowledged anti-social behaviour remained a concern but said the local authority was working with Police Scotland to address problems. Additional CCTV has also been installed around the Tron and Hunter Square. Meagher said: "We're also making the Royal Mile a safer place for pedestrians and cyclists, while making sure it is clean and well-maintained. "Our refurbishment of North Bridge is a visible commitment of our plans to ensure the area remains at the beating heart of the city, as is the extra £1m we're investing this year to tackle litter and graffiti in our communities." The funding includes additional resources for washing pavements and closes in the Old Town. Meagher said: "Once Edinburgh's visitor levy has launched, we hope to invest even more money to manage the impact tourism has, to ensure our city remains a great place to live and to visit." The future of tourism in Edinburgh Getty Images The latest Scottish census suggests just under 9,000 people live in the areas in and around the Royal Mile. This covers the tall blocks of flats that flank either side of the Royal Mile and the nearby council-built estate of Dumbiedykes, which has about 600 homes but no shop, GP surgery, pharmacy or post office. All of these residents feel the direct pressure tourism can bring but there are wider pressures on the city too. A 8.4% jump in the city's population in the 10 years to 2023 has contributed to a deepening housing and homelessness crisis. Next year Edinburgh will introduce the kind of tourist tax that is common around Europe and city leaders have pledged to invest the £50m it is expected to raise every year on infrastructure improvements. This has been mostly welcomed but some fear it might not be enough to help Edinburgh adapt to the growing demands of tourism. Edinburgh becomes first 'tourist tax' city in Scotland 'I was homeless - now I show tourists my city's hidden side' Record number of overseas tourists visit Scotland in 2023 Tourism Scotland Edinburgh Impacts of tourism Airbnb
BBC News
22-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Overtourism: Does Edinburgh's Royal Mile need 72 gift shops?
The Royal Mile is the ancient spine of Edinburgh, and one of the top destinations for the five million tourists who come to the city every collective name for four streets that thread through the city's Old Town, it is home to a 900-year-old castle, a palace and a the people who live there claim they are now seeing the overtourism problems being experienced across tourists comes tourist shops and BBC Scotland News walked the length of the Royal Mile to find out just how many there research found a total of 72 stores, selling everything from kilts to Highland cow fridge are part of an industry that supports more than 40,000 jobs in locals say having so many similar shops in one place is symptomatic of the challenges that mass tourism brings. The gift shops - most of which are run by three main operators - sell every imaginable Scotland or Edinburgh-themed item, from postcards and soft toys to are two shops which only sell Christmas-related Royal Mile is also home to 42 cafes or restaurants, 13 bars, eight jewellers and three kilt in addition to the museums, cathedral, court, primary school and homes located along the steep and narrow pavements. 'I'm not against tourism, I just think it has gone too far' One man who is almost uniquely qualified to understand the impact of tourism on the Royal Mile is 77-year-old Jimmy has lived on the Canongate, at the bottom of the Royal Mile, since birth and proudly refers to himself as a who has lived in five different homes, can list the "useful shops" that used to be a stone's throw away. They include hairdressers, butchers, grocers and a doctors' surgery - which is now a whisky said it used to be "a normal area" where people would live and work."It was probably in the 1980s you saw a lot of people moving out and the street beginning to change," he explained. Jimmy used to work at the brewery which is now the site of the Scottish Parliament. He has long enjoyed sitting outside the 17th Century Canongate Kirk, where one of the benches has an inscription to his late added: "I would sit on that bench and you'd watch the world go by, saying hello to folk you knew coming by. "Now I sit there and it feels like it is just tourists that pass me by."I'm not against tourism, I just think it has gone far in how it affects people who live here."Jimmy said he now had to go out of the area to get his food shopping, or rely on relatives to bring it to him. He said the council was to blame for allowing too many tourist shops to open in one area. It is a point that some critics argue is borne out by data published by the City of Edinburgh Council last year which shows it owns and rents out 35 shops along the Royal Mile, many of which are leased to tourism businesses. Hanna Wesemann lives just off the Royal Mile and both her children attended Royal Mile Primary 2004, this Victorian-era built school had 165 pupils but now the roll is down to 118 pupils – well below its 210 capacity. The 29% fall in pupils does not surprise Hanna, who says the Old Town increasingly "does not feel like a good area to bring up a family".Hanna puts this down to the pressures of tourism and the blight of anti-social behaviour by problem drug and alcohol users outside her flat, which requires regular calls to the police. She said: "It feels like all that's left here is shops for tourists, tourists, and people who have multiple and complex needs."It [the Royal Mile] is on our doorstep but we never go there because there's nothing for us."There used to be some useful shops, even charity shops, but now they are all gone and all I can see is gift shops which all seem to sell the same stuff." Increase in international visitors to Edinburgh Only London beats Edinburgh in terms of the most popular places to visit in the visitors account for the bulk of the city's tourists staying for at least one night - a total of 2.6m in 2023, up from 2.47m in it is overseas visitors who are driving Edinburgh's increasing popularity. After a dramatic fall in the Covid years, Edinburgh now attracts one million more international visitors every year than it did a decade ago. Combined with domestic visitors, that is 4.98m total overnight trips by all visitors in 2023. Where to accommodate these tourists, especially in peak periods like the Edinburgh festivals, has been a topic of hot discussion in the city for years. Edinburgh saw a well documented surge in residential properties being turned over to holiday lets in the previous decade. The number of listings by Airbnb in the city jumped from 1,900 in 2014 to 9,000 three years laws requiring operators of short-term lets to have a licence has reduced this tally but data from Inside Airbnb - an independent website which gathers data on Airbnb's operations - suggests there are still just under 6,000 listings for Edinburgh properties today. BBC Scotland News counted 96 key boxes of the type typically used for holiday lets on, or just off, the Royal Mile earlier this month. The impact of holiday lets on people living in the most popular tourist areas is very familiar to Hanna and her family. She explained: "They're not bad people but they don't consider this as an area where people live as normal residents."You can't build a relationship with someone for three days and I'm really tired of going upstairs every few days and saying 'Can you please be quiet, we have to go to work in the morning'."While much of the focus on where tourists stay has been on the controversy around holiday lets, there are now 181 hotels in Edinburgh - more than twice as many as there were in 2005. What tourism does for Edinburgh's economy There is little doubt that tourism plays a key role in the city's economy. Hosting the world's largest arts festival every August is a big part of that but tourism is now an all-year round industry. It is estimated the average overnight visitor spent £435 in 2023. That filters down to a range of businesses, from coffee shops to taxi firms, supporting thousands of jobs. A spokesman for the Gold Brothers Group - which owns 16 shops on the Royal Mile and employs 340 people in peak season - said claims about too many tourists were nothing he added that there was still capacity for more visitors outwith the festivals in August. The spokesman said: "Our view is that a number of priority issues are being overlooked due to a fixation on tourist numbers. "The urgent priorities for residents, business owners and visitors to the Old Town are cleanliness as the place is filthy; anti-social behaviour; and criminality including violence and a serious 'theftdemic'."Maybe Edinburgh's local population could come and visit and reflect on what the Royal Mile looked like years ago with its poorly maintained shops with little or no investment and then, without prejudice, consider the quality of outlets now."The spokesman called on the City of Edinburgh Council to "stride to its A game" by cleaning the Old Town more often and ensuring it is "safe and a joy to behold". Edinburgh 'a great place to live and visit' Council Leader Jane Meagher said the local authority was determined ensure the Royal Mile was "clean and well-maintained".She also told BBC Scotland News the Old Town High Street was added: "Shopfronts are open, supporting local jobs and our economy, with a great mix of businesses in the area from independent kiltmakers to homemade crafts. "As one of the biggest landlords in the area we encourage this mix and work to make sure properties are occupied."The council leader acknowledged anti-social behaviour remained a concern but said the local authority was working with Police Scotland to address CCTV has also been installed around the Tron and Hunter said: "We're also making the Royal Mile a safer place for pedestrians and cyclists, while making sure it is clean and well-maintained. "Our refurbishment of North Bridge is a visible commitment of our plans to ensure the area remains at the beating heart of the city, as is the extra £1m we're investing this year to tackle litter and graffiti in our communities."The funding includes additional resources for washing pavements and closes in the Old said: "Once Edinburgh's visitor levy has launched, we hope to invest even more money to manage the impact tourism has, to ensure our city remains a great place to live and to visit." The future of tourism in Edinburgh The latest Scottish census suggests just under 9,000 people live in the areas in and around the Royal Mile. This covers the tall blocks of flats that flank either side of the Royal Mile and the nearby council-built estate of Dumbiedykes, which has about 600 homes but no shop, GP surgery, pharmacy or post of these residents feel the direct pressure tourism can bring but there are wider pressures on the city too. A 8.4% jump in the city's population in the 10 years to 2023 has contributed to a deepening housing and homelessness year Edinburgh will introduce the kind of tourist tax that is common around Europe and city leaders have pledged to invest the £50m it is expected to raise every year on infrastructure has been mostly welcomed but some fear it might not be enough to help Edinburgh adapt to the growing demands of tourism.
