Arts correspondent Brian Ferguson speaks to Lyndsey Jackson, deputy chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, on the new home it is creating in a former school building.
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00:00Hi, I'm Brian Ferguson, Arts Correspondent at the Scotsman. I'm here with Lindsay Jackson,
00:07Deputy Chief Executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, and we are in your new headquarters,
00:12Lindsay. This must be a big moment.
00:14Yeah, it is. It's delightful to be in what is going to be the new Fringe Central, and
00:20actually at this point in time, the future potential of this project is amazing, so it's
00:24very exciting to be here, if not a little chilly.
00:26So you're in the building today for an open day. Tell us a bit about what's going to be
00:32happening in the building between now and you've been fully operational and open to
00:36the public.
00:37Yeah, so over the next year, a year-ish, we're going to take away all of the things in the
00:43building that have been put in temporarily. For those of you who've never been, it's an
00:47old school, so it's a beautiful square building cut up into lots of other lovely little squares,
00:53and our plan is to modernise and future-proof the building, so we've got two key pillars.
00:58One is around sustainability and one is around accessibility, so we will be restoring this
01:03former school back to its former glory, so we'll be taking out fossil fuels, installing
01:09a heat pump, new lights, new heat, new windows that are heritage-appropriate but fit for
01:13the future. We'll be installing a lift, changing places, toilet. There's going to be a lot
01:17of very busy people in this building over the next year or so, just really making it
01:22ready for the future, so we're less interested in shiny chrome veneers and more about what
01:28bits of the building we can keep, so you can see behind us some of this panelling. All
01:31of this will be stripped and put back, so we're really just going to restore it back
01:34to its former beauty and its former function, actually. The best thing about getting a building
01:39like this is it's so useful and we can do so much with it for ourselves but also for
01:43the wider Fringe community.
01:44Will a lot of the spaces in the building be quite flexible to be able to use them for
01:48different things throughout the year?
01:50Yeah, so our priority, especially because building projects can get quite expensive,
01:54our priority with the investment that we've been given is really about making the building
01:58as functional as possible, so we're not over-designing, we're not over-engineering. We want to keep
02:02things as flexible and as dynamic as possible, so whether that's office space, rehearsal
02:06space, shared working space, other space for artists to do rehearsal aerial work, as flexible
02:13and as dynamic as possible and as efficient as possible. We don't want to end up with
02:17a huge overhead for running a building, so if we can keep it warm, keep it tight and
02:21cosy then hopefully it will last us for many years to come.
02:24To what extent will this building be open to the public and also open and accessible
02:29to artists and arts organisations who are based in Edinburgh year-round?
02:34I mean, those two things are key pillars of the programme, so as the charity responsible
02:39for supporting the festival and its open access principle, it's really important to us that
02:44the building belongs back to the city and part of our case for taking over this building
02:49was we wanted to put it back to use, so the doors will be open all day, every day to anybody
02:54that wants to come in, whether that's because you want to hide from the rain or you want
02:57to look at some of the cool stuff we've put on the wall or you need to use the bathroom.
03:01Think of it like a library, people can come and go and there's no obligation for people
03:05to engage with us at any point, they just can use it as they want to. The outside space
03:09is similar, we want to really open that up to the city to use, it gets 16 hours of sunlight
03:14in the summer, it's enormous, so much potential and we don't need all that parking, let's
03:19give it back to the people of the city who just need somewhere quiet to eat their lunch
03:23or somewhere to sit down, let the kids run around and we're not going to be precious
03:28about it, so we know that the buildings of schools, it's very functional, it's very hard-wearing
03:31and we want people to use this building, so rehearsal space and working space will be
03:36ring-fenced for Edinburgh's performing arts community and we'll make that as affordable
03:39as we possibly can, so that the building is being used all the time for connection
03:44and creativity and people having good ideas and trying things out and experimenting, because
03:49that's entirely what The Fringe is about and that's very, very exciting.
03:53To what extent will people be able to learn a bit about the history of The Fringe? It's
03:58not that easy to find out the full history of The Fringe, are you going to be able to
04:02reflect that a bit more here than you've been able to in the past?
04:05Yeah, we've got tons of wall space in which to tell stories, but one element of the project
04:10is a new archive space, so our ambitions at the moment are to understand where all the
04:16history of The Fringe is, bring some of it into this building, but also be able to signpost
04:20people to it better and also realise some of the shared resources, so everybody's got
04:26lovely stories about The Fringe, so it's as important as posters from the 70s, as capturing
04:32the couple that met and got married after they're doing a Fringe show together, so in
04:36the spring we'll be undertaking an archive and oral history project in which to bring
04:41some of those stories into the building and then they'll live here, and we'll also have
04:45space for people who are doing research on The Fringe to come in and borrow old books
04:50or look at old things, as well as hopefully a digital resource that houses all of that,
04:54because people always ask us questions about The Fringe and people always have different
04:57ways of trying to navigate the stories of it, so our job is to help facilitate as much
05:01access to that information and doing it in this building just gives us another space
05:05in which to do that, so I'm hoping that a history of The Fringe around our walls, we've
05:10got plenty of them to put artwork on, very cool.
05:13And just tell us, if everything goes according to plan, when is the earliest you think you
05:17might be fully operational here at this point?
05:20Our current opening will be January 2026, and it's all on programme, it's all on schedule,
05:28building projects are always complicated, but we've got a really, really incredible
05:31design and construction team who are rooted in the values of what we're doing and really
05:35know that we're keen to be in as soon as possible, so for the festival it will be Fringe 2026,
05:42so give us 2025 to spruce you up a little bit and you're welcome to join us at the opening
05:47party in 2026.
05:48Looking forward to it, thank you very much, Lindsay Jackson, cheers.