🪩 Edinburgh Culture Minute: 23 - 30 July 2025
Days Festival headliners, Punchline On Leith, The Gilded Saloon + one week until festivals begin
Welcome to the 97th weekly Culture Minute: a round-up of Edinburgh’s local creative news, events, jobs and opportunities.
If I’ve missed anything please get in touch. Thanks to everyone who contributes!
👀 The most-viewed links from last week’s Edinburgh Culture Minute:
- 🎬 Ten highlights from the new Edinburgh International Film Festival line-up.
- 🎤 Sadiq Khan & Kirsty Wark among Matt Forde’s live Fringe podcast guests.
- 📸 Collective’s new Calton Hill panorama exhibition.
News:
The festivals start next week. Also starting next week, for August only, the Edinburgh Culture Minute is going DAILY! This will be in addition to the usual daily Edinburgh Minute (of mostly non-festival ‘life goes on for locals’ news).
Exclusive to paying subscribers, you will get a handy round-up of festival news and useful links every day. It will be short. You can expect the usual Minute approach: ad-free, PR-free and curated for locals on mobile phones. Phone signal here sucks at the best of times, so the idea is you can screenshot whatever you like from each edition, share it with pals and get organised more easily without the usual overwhelm. I’ll make the links as useful and direct as possible. I’ve been in media for more than 20 years now (eek) and have some well-placed sources behind the scenes who are involved in running all the festivals, so you’ll also get insider tips and some exclusive deals…
📲 Each day’s Edinburgh Culture Minute Daily newsletter will follow a simple format highlighting shows of note happening today and tomorrow. Each edition will use the following template headers:
🎭 Today at the Fringe
🎭 Tomorrow at the Fringe
📚 Today at the Book Festival
📚 Tomorrow at the Book Festival
🟡 Today at the International Festival
🟡 Tomorrow at the International Festival
⭐️ Four & five star reviews
🏴 Local interest
🗞️ Talk of the town (things people are talking about)
👀 Minute readers’ tips.
There are roughly 2,000 shows per day. I’ll curate that down to about 10 or 20 essential links per day. Readers told me they wanted something practical and useful that wasn’t overwhelming. The newsletter will include the emerging hot tickets, Free Fringe shows, locally-produced shows, family-friendly events and likely some unpredictable nonsense.
Other websites try to cover everything during the festival, and good luck to them. I can’t do that. So the Edinburgh Culture Minute Daily will not be everything. It will be a useful starting point to help you find anything, though. There is a lot of great coverage produced locally and I’ll help you find it. And each festival has its own app and website. But there’s currently no single newsletter with the sole focus of being a highly curated daily briefing of everything at all the festivals with a focus on usability for locals that is not ad-funded. The Minute is reader-funded (thank you) so you can trust there’ll be no PR guff here. As local punters, you and I want genuinely useful info, not to be bombarded only by the shows with the biggest PR budget. The goal is to reduce the overwhelm and help everyone find good things and have good times.
🎟️ If that sounds useful and you’ve not already subscribed, please sign up here for £5 per month. You can cancel any time. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. It’s literally cheaper than a festival pint though. Your backing in advance will ensure this exists!