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Busker Days
"If ever you walk by a place where a busker may just be
Please stop for a little moment and give him your charity
It isn't much to hand a coin or stop and clap with glee
Cause a busker just sings his heart out for all of us to see"
~ Tania Montgomery
The end of summer and beginning of the harvest season is traditionally filled with festivals, fairs, and spectacle! Street performance is one of the oldest and most democratic art forms, turning markets, commons, and sidewalks into stages. From ancient Greek storytellers and Roman acrobats, to medieval minstrels and Renaissance jesters, performers have long carried music, theatre, and spectacle directly to the people.
Britain in particular has a deep tradition of busking. In medieval London, ballad singers filled the streets with news and satire, while fiddlers and jugglers entertained at fairs. By the Victorian period, organ grinders and Punch and Judy puppeteers were fixtures of seaside towns. Today, the UK’s cities remain alive with performers: Covent Garden in London, with its mix of opera singers, acrobats, and magicians; Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, world-famous during the Fringe Festival; Bath’s squares with their living statues; and Glasgow’s bustling Buchanan Street, renowned for music.
This tartan is dedicated to those performers—past and present—who keep that tradition alive. Conceived by street performer Kate Mior in conjunction with the Busking Project, it was shaped by the international busking community itself. Black and red reflect the traditional palette of street theatre and the creative passion and courage of performers. Gold signifies good fortune and the generosity of heavy hats filled with coins. Grey and white represent the pavements where the shows take place, with the 24 grey threads symbolising that somewhere, at any hour of the day, a performer is entertaining an audience. The adjoining black blocks contain 100 threads, a nod to the busker’s proverb that one hundred shows are needed before true proficiency is earned! 🖤 ❤️ 🤍 💛 🃏 🃏 🃏
This year's Fringe Festival runs through most of August and is one of the most attended of theatrical festivals in the world.
The Fringe story dates back to 1947, when eight theatre groups turned up uninvited to perform at the (then newly formed) Edinburgh International Festival, an initiative created to celebrate and enrich European cultural life in the wake of the Second World War.
Not being part of the official programme of the International Festival didn’t stop these performers, they just went ahead and staged their shows on the fringe of the Festival anyway, coining the phrase and our name – the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Since the dawn of this spontaneous artistic movement, millions have flocked to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to produce, and to enjoy art of every genre.
Year on year more and more performers followed their example and in 1958 the Festival Fringe Society was created in response to the success of this growing trend. The Society formalised the existence of this collective of performances, provided information to artists, published the Fringe programme and created a central box office.
Its constitution was written in line with the ethos that brought these theatre companies to Edinburgh back in 1947; that: the Society was to take no part in vetting the festival’s programme.
For more on this year's festival, click Hogarth's Southwark Fair, 1733