Edinburgh Art Festival director Kim McAleese on why the event is putting down roots in Leith

However, this is not a move away from the galleries in town, it’s a move alongside them. Partners like the National Museum, Talbot Rice Gallery, Collective, Fruitmarket, Ingleby and Edinburgh Printmakers remain central to our programme, and some of our most ambitious 2026 commissions. Emii Alrai's sculptural work on Calton Hill, Catherine Opie's first Scottish museum exhibition at NGS and Eva Rothschild’s biggest UK show to date at Fruitmarket all sit proudly in that historic core - Leith and the city centre work hand in hand.

Over the past couple of years we have had a base of activity in Leith, such as 2025’s programme with Lewis Walker at First Stage Studios, our previous launch parties at the Biscuit Factory and Rabiya Choudhry’s public sculpture at Leith Library. Leith is made up of some of the most interesting spaces in the city - converted warehouses, dock buildings, the maritime remnants of a working port - sitting in close proximity to some of the city's best galleries. It's an honest backdrop for boundary-pushing work.

Moving into spaces like Custom Lane, Brown's of Leith and our new home at 92 Constitution Street gives us proximity to a wealth of cultural and social activity, incredible small businesses, restaurants and bars, and on a street with a working history rather than a preserved one. Further out, our Community Wellbeing Collective continues its year-round work in Wester Hailes, this August hosting a gathering celebrating photographer Sandra George, whose images of the community through the 1980s and 90s are held in the archive at Craigmillar Now and are showing at the City Art Centre until 27 September.

By decentralising lots of our activity to Leith, we also create a festival that residents can visit more easily without fighting August's Royal Mile crowds. People can encounter extraordinary work on their own doorstep, as well as in the beautiful centre of town they already know and love. Both belong to the same festival and the same city.

At 92 Constitution Street, our new year round space, we're presenting Del LaGrace Volcano's Love Bites Back, a pivotal and previously unseen body of dyke photography from the 1980s and 90s. Around the corner at Custom Lane, Trans Masc Studies' History is a Home creates a reading room tracing trans history and belonging, alongside Sadao Hasegawa: Carnal Desires, the first Scottish showing of a radical Japanese fetish artist's work. These are stories of resistance, subculture and self-representation, and they belong in a neighbourhood built on trade and reinvention.

Leith's history as a working port is a history of arrival and departure, of goods and people passing through and often staying. That isn't so different, in spirit, from a festival that has always tried to make space for stories that don't usually get told in art galleries - stories of social justice, resilience and solidarity - a festival that takes the time to build relationships that last. That's true of our deepened partnership with Falastin Film Festival for the closing weekend, and it's true of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's Zifzafa, a sound performance confronting the militarisation of the occupied Golan Heights, staged at Leith Theatre with artists from the community it explores.

None of this is straightforward - Leith has always fiercely guarded an identity distinct from the rest of Edinburgh. That's why our civic programme has spent years building relationships here, working alongside local organisations from Deaf Action and SCORE Scotland to LGBT Youth Scotland and the Community Wellbeing Collective, hosting more than 35 free civic events last year alone with around ten community groups, and welcoming close to 3,700 visitors annually. We're not simply arriving in Leith and hoping it works out; we're formalising a relationship we've been building for years.

READ MORE: Edinburgh Art Festival reviews: Sandra George | Wendy McMurdo

In July, Leith was named among just 15 towns shortlisted for the UK's first ever Town of Culture award, chosen from almost 400 applicants nationally. It's a community-led bid, put together by volunteers and backed by more than 30 local organisations, from Hibernian FC to Leith School of Art to Historic Environment Scotland, marking 900 years since the first documented records of the town. Leith didn't need a festival to arrive to prove its cultural weight. It has been building that case for itself for a long time, and I hope the judging panel recognises what so many of us already know. Our new home at 92 Constitution Street, and our programme this year and beyond, just adds to that momentum.

So when the EAF begins this August it will be the start of something we've been building quietly for years: a festival that lives here all year round, that is embedded in Leith, but one that still takes place right across the city.

The Edinburgh Art Festival runs from 14–30 August 2026, with year-round programming from 92 Constitution Street, Leith from this summer, see https://edinburghartfestival.com/

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