page_title: Edinburgh Festival Fringe
section_title: Venues
hierarchical_section_title: Edinburgh Festival Fringe / Venues
caption_attribution_description: English: Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Festival 2013
context_page_description: The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest arts festival, which in 2018 spanned 25 days and featured more than 55,000 performances of 3,548 different shows in 317 venues. Established in 1947 as an alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival, it takes place annually in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the month of August. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has become a world-leading celebration of arts and culture, surpassed only by the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in terms of global ticketed events. As an event it "has done more to place Edinburgh in the forefront of world cities than anything else".
  It is an open access performing arts festival, meaning there is no selection committee, and anyone may participate, with any type of performance. The official Fringe Programme categorises shows into sections for theatre, comedy, dance, physical theatre, circus, cabaret, children's shows, musicals, opera, music, spoken word, exhibitions and events. Comedy is the largest section, making up over one-third of the programme and the one that in modern times has the highest public profile, due in part to the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.
context_section_description: Fringe venues come in all shapes and sizes, with use being made of nearly any viable space that is available, from regular theatres (e.g. the Traverse or Bedlam Theatre), function rooms (e.g. the Assembly Rooms), churches and church halls (e.g. the Quaker Meeting House, Paradise in Augustines), lecture theatres (including the notable George Square Theatre), conference centres, other university rooms and spaces, bars and pubs, temporary structures (The Famous Spiegeltent and the Udderbelly), schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, a double-decker bus and even in the audience's own homes.
  The groups that operate the venues are also diverse: some are commercial and others not-for-profit; some operate year-round, while others exist only to run venues at the Fringe. Some are local, others are based in London and elsewhere and transfer to Edinburgh for August.
  From the performers' perspective, the decision on where to perform is typically based on a mixture of cost, location (close proximity to the main Fringe hubs around the University is seen as an advantage), and the philosophy of the venue – some of whom specialise in amateur, school or college productions, some of whom are semi or wholly professional.
  In 2018 there were more than 3,500 shows registered in the programme taking place in 317 different venues.
  The main venue operators can broadly be split into four groups:
  The Big Four – Assembly, Gilded Balloon, The Pleasance, Underbelly. The term 'Big Four' being an adopted label. These are in some cases the most long-standing venues (Underbelly being a relative newcomer, having been founded in 1996). They each operate multi-room venue complexes, often across multiple sites. They tend to specialise in comedy, and in 2008, they briefly and controversially tried to re-brand themselves as Edinburgh Comedy Festival.
  Modern Fringe – Besides the Big Four (A term less used at the modern fringe), there are a number of operators running multi-room venues, and again sometimes operating across more than one site. These include theSpaceUK, C venues, Greenside Venues, Sweet Venues, Just the Tonic, ZOO venues, PQA Venues, Monkey Barrel and Paradise Green. They may specialise in certain genres or run a programme across all genres (theSpaceUK, C venues, Zoo Venues and Greenside Venues). Although focusing on new writing rather than comedy, one is larger, theSpaceUK hosted over 400 shows at the 2019 Fringe, making it the largest operator by number of shows at the modern fringe.
  Free venues – Some promoters use a different financial model. Instead of charging performers to hire the room, and audiences to attend, they make their spaces available for free, with audiences making a donation at the end of the show if they have enjoyed it. These promoters tend to operate out of pubs and clubs – the rooms being made free to use as a way of boosting bar takings. The original Free Fringe was set up by comedian Peter Buckley Hill in response to the increasing costs to performers of appearing at the Fringe. The other main free promoter is Alex Petty's Laughing Horse Free Festival. Although the term "Free Fringe" originally referred to Buckley Hill's operation, it is now often used as shorthand for any free venue.
  Pay What You Want – In 2013 comedian Bob Slayer introduced a new model to the Fringe, at his Heroes of Fringe venues, where punters could 'Buy a ticket in advance to guarantee a seat or Pay What You Want (PWYW) on exit'. The model is a mixture of Paid and Free and enables performers to find a paying audience without risking large marketing spend. Phil Kay, Tom Binns and Miss Behave were among the first established acts to embrace this model along with Adrienne Truscott who won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards Panel Prize with a PWYW show. Adam Hess was nominated for best newcomer in 2015. Other promoters such as Just the Tonic, The Pleasance and C Venues have since introduced the model to some of their venues. In 2016, Gilded Balloon adopted PWYW for the Counting House, which had previously been a Free Festival venue, and has since returned to
caption: The Pleasance Courtyard, 2013
exif: {"Image Make": "Panasonic", "Image Model": "DMC-FS10", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.0", "Image DateTime": "2013:08:13 14:40:02", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "636", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 14, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0xC6D2": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0xC6D3": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "180", "Thumbnail YResolution": "180", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "11764", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7622", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/125", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:08:13 14:40:02", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:08:13 14:40:02", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2560", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1920", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "10398", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "28", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal"}