On Festivals

And on housing

Photo by Tommy Kwak on Unsplash

It’s the end of summer, and the end of outdoor-festival season.

Summer festivals are sacred: secular versions of ancient religious rites, celebrations that combine scheduled rituals (programming, opening and closing ceremonies, bowing to priests – aka, aging rockers and comics – the crownings of new drama queens) with carnivalesque abandonment. But even when you’re far away from the bricks and mortar of urban life, wherever you are in the UK, you’re never far away from the realities of real estate.

It's been a few years since I dragged myself and my camping gear to a fallow farmer’s field for a music festival. But this year for the first time I ventured to Edinburgh for the annual August Fringe Festival.

Even in the midst of the hell that is overtourism and overpriced lattes and lager, I found the Fringe a delight. It certainly helped that I hit the sunniest days of the year. It’s useful too that Edinburgh is a city, not a meadow miles away from public transportation. I had a place to stay in Glasgow, so I took the train direct to and from the heart of the action. At a time when tickets for mega music festivals are closed to all but the digitally savvy, insiders, touts and cheats, the Fringe is so huge (almost 4000 shows this year) you can actually pitch up on the day and buy a ticket for whatever strikes your fancy.

If you can afford it, that is.

As early as a year ago panic set in when news emerged that Oasis was staging the Edinburgh gigs of its reunion tour this August, putting additional pressure on already ludicrously expensive accommodation prices during the Fringe. We heard lots about the costs to tourists of renting a hotel room or Airbnb in the city. What we heard less of was the costs for the artists themselves. But that’s starting to change: the UK housing crisis has made its way to the heart of the Fringe – if not centre stage, at least a cosy room in the attic of one of the central festival venues.

Enter House Party, a show that hit very close to home: literally in my case, since it’s about my neighbourhood, Hackney, the London borough that has become synonymous in the UK public imagination with gentrification. House Party is a one-woman show whose central character, Skip (played by the very funny and clever Chakira Alin) is the twenty-something daughter of migrants, raised in a series of Hackney flats that got smaller and more expensive as she got older. By the time Skip’s ready to leave her mother’s place she realises that, like most of the other working-class, Black and Brown people she went to school with, she’ll have to leave Hackney.

There are no more house parties in Hackney, because no one who grew up there can afford to buy a house.

The housing crisis in cities like London and Edinburgh is by now a familiar story. But House Party puts an additional twist on the tale. The main character is an out-of-work actor (until she lands a role as the “pregnant girlfriend of a drug dealer” in a Channel 4 series, convincing the casting team with her authentic “street” scream). At the audition for this part, Skip bumps into a former university classmate whose Home-County-dwelling parents have just bought her a flat to live in rent free in – you guessed it – Hackney. Our local hero’s response to this news? “‘Creative’ is a class category.”

I thought back to House Party as I read media reports about the increasingly high costs of performing at the Fringe. Historically, most performers have expected to make a loss in return for the opportunity for potentially career-making international exposure. But more and more of them are being turned off, and potentially shut out, by the rising costs of spending a month in Edinburgh. High accommodation prices especially have a knock-on effect on audiences and ticket sales: people might go for fewer days, see fewer shows, sticking to the bigger ones with starry reviews.

After we shelled out £12 each for our first show – one we knew nothing about but looked fun and turned out to be a bit of a dud – my partner, a seasoned Fringe enthusiast, reminisced about the days when tickets were a few quid. Part of the fun was seeing as many shows as you could, taking in stuff you’d never pay London theatre prices for, and finding some real gems in the process. Higher prices mean less willingness to take a chance. And as one critic notes, that caution is likely to hit smaller acts and those by global majority artists the hardest.

There are solutions to the housing crisis, just like there are solutions to the funding crisis in the arts. You can read or hear about these solutions just about anywhere – on TikTok or Instagram reels, on podcasts, in newspapers, in university classrooms, in local libraries and pubs, in parks where people take their kids to play and their dogs to walk. You can even hear about them at festivals – on stage or in the tents where activists, writers and artists share ideas about how the world works and how it can work better.

But as long as people with power care more about people buying up property to rent or sell to other people with money who want to fulfil their dreams of becoming famous or seeing famous people perform, shows like House Party will play to small audiences.

Until they can’t afford to play at all.

Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can leave me a tip.

Thanks for reading.