Issue - meetings

By Councillor McNeese-Mechan - The Edinburgh Festival Voluntary Guides Association  75th Anniversary

“Council notes:

The roots of the Edinburgh Festival Voluntary Guides Association go back to 1947. That was when Sir John Falconer, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh and the driving force behind the first Edinburgh Festival, appealed for local people to volunteer to run walking tours of the Royal Mile for the many visitors that were expected to attend the Festival. Twelve volunteers stepped forward. The tours, which were advertised in the Festival's official Souvenir Programme, attracted large numbers of visitors and received favourable mentions in the press.

Further volunteers were recruited for the 1948 Festival, at which point the group was officially constituted as the Edinburgh Festival Voluntary Guides Association, with John Bowman, a former City Water Engineer, serving as its first president. In 1998, in order to increase their public profile, they became officially part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe rather than the International Festival. They have been running tours as part of the International Festival and the Festival Fringe ever since.

Since 2003, the Association has been entirely self-supporting. They receive no public funding of any kind but are, instead, financed by donations and by the charges they make for custom tours outside the Festival season.

In 2013, they were obliged to move their base out of Cannonball House - after 67 years. Thanks to the support of the City of Edinburgh Council, they now use the City Chambers as their meeting point.

In 2019, the Association became part of the Edinburgh's Open Streets project, in which most of the Royal Mile and other streets in the Old Town are closed to traffic – and therefore open to visitors on foot - on one Sunday afternoon each month. These afternoons have provided them with an excellent opportunity to run their tours in a traffic-free environment.

In acknowledging the positive work of the Edinburgh Festival Voluntary Guides Association, Council requests that the Lord Provost, who is the patron of the Association, marks their 75th Anniversary in an appropriate way.”