Ruth Wishart: Artful of eastern promise

Published on 25/07/2012 04:12

This year Edinburgh has set about serious wooing in Glasgow to encourage more westerners to visit the capital’s art-fest, writes Ruth Wishart

Right, final checks. Passport? Tick. Phrasebook? Tick. Style Guide? Tick. Thankfully no need for currency exchange being in the same zone and all that. So, bags packed and off on the annual trip to the orient.

Edinburgh here I come.

And I have form. Edinburgh in August for this Weegie is the only place to be. Has been since you could still get change from a tenner for a ticket, and not just at the Fringe.

For serial groupies it represents a quite fabulous cornucopia of cultural delights. The International Festival for extraordinary companies and bands you may never experience or hear again. The Fringe for serial daftness and unexpected theatrical gems. The Book Festival’s magical kingdom: insights from the kings and queens of literature spiced with debate and discussion.

A cosmopolitan cast list of temporary residents thronging what streets they can still access without falling down tramworks.

Eating and imbibing with pals old and new, swapping hot tips about the must-sees and the better avoided. Too much wine, too little sleep, too few inhibitions: Festival visits really ought to be available on a properly enlightened NHS.

But the problem is there’s not enough of me! Glaswegians that is. West of Scotland types. Tourists from the other end of one of Britain’s shortest motorway links. Visitors who fail to take a 45-minute train trip.

And that problem is not new, nor confined to Festival time. Neither is the reluctance a one-way street. I have Edinburgh friends who will only stir to Glasgow for a good funeral and who claim a nosebleed occurs anywhere west of Falkirk High.

When I worked full time in the capital city I was constantly shocked by the level of indifference and ignorance about fellow Scots abiding in the largest city. Amazed to learn how few had darkened the doors of a Glasgow theatre or concert hall.

The divide, by common consent, is more psychological than geographical. Glaswegians will pop up to Oban, Edinburghers to Aberdeen. Or similar distances due south. But those 40-odd horizontal miles between city centres continue to be viewed with mutual suspicion.

And thus the stereotypes remain largely unchallenged. Grittier and friendlier versus prettier and snobbier. Gallus and glam versus reserved and stylish. In truth you can get all types in both cities depending on your leisure pursuit of choice. Neither Glasgow culture vultures nor Edinburgh clubbers are in much danger of becoming endangered species.

But what happens to those occidental arts groupies come the world’s biggest annual culturefest? The box office research varies from one festival organisation to another, but rarely strays from the 3 to 6 per cent sales band. A paltry take-up from the most populous corner of the land.

And everyone who comes to work in the cultural industries in Edinburgh thinks: some mistake surely. It can’t be science of the rocket-fuelled variety to seduce the good folks from Strathclyde with promises of sensory delights in every art form and all in a neatly packaged calendar month.

But nobody has yet cracked the basic conundrum: that people who spend a great deal of money on RSNO or Scottish Opera or Ballet tickets, folk who patronise the Citz and the Tron and the Theatre Royal, just do not turn up in numbers for Edinburgh’s festivals.

When Edinburgh International Festival managing director Joanna Baker first arrived as the head of marketing she did some research into the comparatively barren box office territory to the west of her fiefdom. This flagged up some predictable answers, such as the lack of late-night transport, but also uncovered a seam of a certain smugness. There was plenty going on on their own patch, thank you all the same.

She doubts she’d get the same answers now, but quite understands why Festivals Edinburgh should this week have launched its new pitch aimed at the denizens of Glasgow G12, the city’s West End, which is home to the biggest university and the highest concentration of ABC1s.

Customers, she reasons, are a festival’s best ambassadors and function as mobile marketers. Get folk to come and have a positive experience and they’ll encourage their friends and far-flung relations to do likewise. And so, helped by Visit Scotland’s funds for new marketing projects, Festivals Edinburgh, representing all the major players, decided to dip a fresh if modest toe in Glaswegian waters. Or, more particularly, to mount an outdoor poster campaign across 30 sites in the West End, each offering the chance to win two nights and days in Edinburgh.

They dreamt up the notion some 18 months ago, looking for ways to reduce any possible collateral damage from the Olympics in terms of visitor numbers. Though Faith Liddell, who heads up Festivals Edinburgh, says that they’re actually building on an evolving interest, suggesting that last year’s visitor numbers from the west were on a definite upward curve.

She thinks it helps that under the Festivals Edinburgh umbrella you can now access the whole package on their website, and buy tickets for everything in the one shopping basket.

It’s not enough to be on the doorstep, she argues, you have to make that doorstep more accessible and make sure it has a welcome mat nailed down. Like everyone else, she cites improved transport links as a key element.

Which is one reason why the Fringe, who also have Glasgow in their sights this year, have launched a Queen Street station-based box office, up and running from 27 July. Director Kath Mainland thought it was about time they stopped sitting around saying how weird it was that so few folks came from the west and started doing something concrete about it.

Armed with a grant from Creative Scotland, they decided to set up shop on the main concourse, aided and abetted by ScotRail’s pledge to put on their half past midnight service seven days a week during the Festival, and increase weekend services.

Kath, her feet now well under the Fringe table, offers an interesting sidelight on the longstanding reluctance of westerners to make the brief pilgrimage. Coming from further afield, she says, you would treat going to Edinburgh the same way you would a city break to mainland Europe. Do a bit of research, and advance planning. Not expect to know the locality in detail.

Coming for a day trip from Glasgow, she offers, the sheer scale of the Fringe programme and myriad locations probably seem a bit daunting. She cites the example of her own brother’s confusion parachuting in from Sheffield, at a loss to know where to start and sure that everyone else in the city would be clued-up.

Thus has the Fringe also partnered with a daily and Sunday tabloid to give their readers insights and tasters as to what to expect and how to make their Fringe debut.

So, one way and another, this is the year that the Festivals have come seriously a-wooing Glasgow and its environs…reasoning that in the age of the enforced “staycation” there’s no shortage of action in Embra for your hols, and this time around, no real shortage of transport options if you factor in more and later trains and assorted bus services.

With the completely revamped Portrait Gallery and Museum of Scotland there’s equally no shortage of free family attractions either, plus a full children’s programme at the Book Festival.

And if I’m beginning to sound like a one-woman Edinburgh Tourist Board, fear not, fellow Weegies, I’m the dyed-in-the-wool gallus Glaswegian as always was.

But see Edinburgh in August? Pure dead brilliant, as they don’t say there.