Why Irvine Welsh is dead right about Edinburgh's Hogmanay street party

Driving south out of Edinburgh on Thursday, every layby was jammed with car-loads of tourists who had stopped to take selfies in the snow. It was good to see them happy after the disappointment of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay.

A lot of people had invested a lot of time and effort arranging to spend New Year in the city only to have their plans curtailed by bad weather. One US family spent $10,000 and travelled 4,000 miles only to be left in the lurch.

The organisers were at pains to point out that indoor events did go-ahead but that’s like going to Glastonbury to see Beyoncé on the Pyramid Stage and being told you can only watch Kajagoogoo in a tent beside the loos.

Third cancellation

On the night itself, the weather wasn’t as bad as expected but the decision to cancel was predictable given the event’s scale and the obsession with trying to remove any risk from every situation. However, this is the third time the street party has been called off, which begs the question, how long will tourists trust Edinburgh to deliver the goods?

Hogmanay in the city has evolved hugely from the gatherings that used to take place outside the Tron Kirk. They were boisterous but also free and attended mostly by local people.

Like the Fringe, Hogmanay in Edinburgh is now an event largely geared towards visitors to the capital and that is reflected in the price tag. You are more likely to meet someone from Malawi than Muirhouse on Princes Street on December 31.

Hogmanay was once Scotland’s gift to the world but it increasingly seems to have been captured by commercial operators who treat city centre public spaces as a theme park for entertainment rather than a place where people live and work.

‘Mad ones’ at the Tron

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Comrie flambeaux procession on Hogmanay continues as it has for centuries, unchanged by commercial pressures. Meanwhile in Stonehaven, the fireballs bring in the New Year as they have since the 18th century with no ticketing. Branded beanie hats and hoodies are the only nods to making money.

Maybe it’s time to rethink how Hogmanay is celebrated in Edinburgh. Everywhere else in Scotland, it is a spontaneous, grassroots, community event based around tradition. Only in the capital has it been turned into a pastiche of that to give tourists content to post on social media.

In a post on X, novelist Irvine Welsh summed up the frustration an increasing number of people now feel with the event: “When you think of the mad ones we had at the Tron with not a corporate buck in sight... please – get the **** out and give the streets back to the people.”

The current format for Edinburgh’s Hogmanay dates back to 1993 but in the current risk-averse culture where even JM Barrie’s Peter Pan gets a trigger warning, I’m not sure anyone would come up with a plan for 60,000 to be gathered outside when the weather is at its worst.

Another cancellation next year would be the final nail in the coffin for the event, so the smart solution would be to focus on more indoor entertainment for visitors in giant venues like the EICC and, as Irvine said, give the streets back to the people.