Exclusive:Fringe in danger of becoming 'a date on a tour schedule' as rents soar to £25K a month

Charlie Wood, who founded Underbelly in 2000 with Ed Bartlam, said acts of all levels are opting for one or two dates in August in a bid to save costs.

This year, Underbelly has 28 one or two night shows playing across all venues, compared to just a “handful” 20 years ago, when the operator first launched its iconic Udderbelly cow.

Mr Wood warned the cost of performing at the Fringe is “getting very close to being prohibitive”.

“That’s why we’re getting so many more single night acts,” he said.

He said he had recently been quoted £25,000 for a three bedroom flat in the city’s Quartermile that his team had rented for £4,000 for a month last year, as landlords look to cash in on a lack of supply in the rental market.

“People are doing shorter runs and you can see why,” he said. “In the wider UK comedy industry, Edinburgh is predominantly just becoming a date on a tour schedule, whereas it used to be its own brilliant island of a month-long festival where so much happened.

“If Edinburgh becomes a tour date, or a few tour dates, I would argue it dilutes the brilliance of the festival, when you get that hotpot of different creations and artistic brilliances all happening in one place every night for one month. It dims everything.”

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He said certain types of performances, such as large circus shows, are still opting for longer runs due to the need to transport equipment, but that many with a small cast are cutting short their runs.

“There are some big names [doing that], like Simon Amstell, but it’s not just bigger names. A whole range of people tour, that’s the main way of earning money on the comedy circuit. There are some people who get the economics right and are able to make the Fringe pay, but that pool is becoming increasingly small. But for many, they don’t talk about the profit margin, but the loss margin.”

Mr Wood echoed comments made earlier this week by Fringe Society chief executive Tony Lankester, who called for council leaders to look at the “unintended consequences” of short term let legislation which is causing a bottleneck in supply and driving up festival accommodation prices to an unaffordable level.

He said the rising costs were not only affecting performances, but also the audience demographic, pricing out visitors from the rest of the UK.

He analysed figures published by the Fringe Society and the council over the past 20 years, pointing out a 160 per cent rise in audiences from Edinburgh since 2006 to 1.04 million - an increase of 635,000, compared to just an 80,000 increase from the rest of the UK.

He said: “What’s fantastic is that the Edinburgh and wider Scottish population has embraced the Fringe over the past 20 years. But the rest of the UK has just inched up.”

He pointed to international audience figures, which are up 60 per cent compared to 2019, the last Fringe before the pandemic. Meanwhile, the number of people coming from the rest of the UK in 2019, which totalled 1.1m, has almost halved to 650,000.

“It’s the ability to buy,” he said. “It’s the weakness of the pound. International visitors can afford to come, but poor old us in the UK can’t and a lot of that is to do with short term letting. I absolutely understand why the legislation was brought in year round, but it has unintended consequences.”

“We can’t blame Covid any more. The Edinburgh number is almost the same as pre-Covid.”

Mr Wood said to continue for another 80 years, the Fringe needs to increase, or at least maintain, its level of ticket sales.

He said: “If the Edinburgh festivals want to maintain itself as the UK’s premier arts festival and wider, it needs to find an audience that’s not finding its dominant growth from its local audience. It has got to look wider, nationally and internationally, because that’s where the economic growth comes from.”

He recalled his time as a student in Edinburgh during the Fringe, when landlords would rent out student flats to tourists in the summer months.

He said: “You walk down Marchmont Road now during the Fringe, it’s all student flats and all dark - they’re empty. That’s unused stock. That’s not helping Fringe artists or Fringe audiences and it’s not helping students or landlords. In anyone’s book, an empty house is a bad thing when there is a market willing to pay for it.

“There was a flat we rented last year that we paid £4,000 for. The quote for this year - and I literally fell off my chair - was £25,000. That person is chancing their arm and is hoping that some crazy person is going to think that’s market rate and just pay for it.

“If there was more stock - and it is about asking council and government to look again at the regulations - this wouldn’t happen as much.”

This year, Underbelly has had 4,468 applications for 468 jobs - most of them from local young people - which Mr Wood says has changed over the past 20 years due to applicants from further afield being unable to afford to live in the city during August.

“It’s fantastic to be a responsible big employer of local young people,” he said. “Building Udderbelly 20 years ago was the beginning of so many things we did and I can trace all of those things back to building a silly upside down purple cow in Edinburgh in 2006.

“And I think starting your career here in Edinburgh, whether as a technician, front of house or performing in a show, I meet people every day who have started here and that is fantastic.”