Hidden Door, Edinburgh review: 'a eulogy to post-industrial spaces'
As it bids a fond farewell to the Paper Factory, Edinburgh’s Hidden Door festival must now look for a new home, writes David Pollock
Hidden Door, The Paper Factory, Edinburgh ★★★★
Subtitled “the last shift at the Paper Factory”, the Hidden Door festival’s 2026 iteration is the final outing in its current factory space on Edinburgh’s western edge, closing the latest chapter of an annual art, music and performance event which transforms the city’s derelict, soon-to-be-demolished industrial spaces.
Using less of the building this time, the usual collection of individual art interventions, outdoor graffiti murals and indoor promenade pieces persisted. Wednesday’s opening night saw audiences surprised by Abby Warrilow and Lewis Gourlay’s short Everyone Left dance vignettes, vivid and energetic movements fusing the setting’s industrial nature with a techno soundtrack, while choreographer Corey Owens’ hip-hop dance piece Hive and Ellen Crofton’s smooth, mechanistic Iterations were seen on a more formal stage.
A mini botanic garden grew from the concrete factory floor, a staff canteen was recreated as installation art and a sculpted water feature recreated the trickling water-ingress sound of abandonment. Edinburgh old-stagers the Sativa Drummers performed in both the Ghosts in the Machine and The Machine Stops interventions, the latter a work of text and visual poetry projected onto a huge piece of old plant machinery.
In the narrow, acoustically suited “long room”, varied live music offerings included hessian-hooded Leithers Doom Scroller, playing a theatrical fusion of choral electronic pop and metal, and Australian sexual anarchist Big Wett, whose liberatedly filthy raps to blunt electro beats were reminiscent of Peaches or a feminist, one-woman 2 Live Crew. Japanese solo artist Ichi was a revelation, a one-man band with glockenspiel, steel drum, occasional drum machine and an array of musical toys, marching through the audience in quirky celebration of live performance.
Hidden Door continues until Sunday, then it’s goodbye to this space. As the developer era gathers pace, with characterful post-industrial spaces demolished in favour of generic housing blocks, sites for culture to develop organically between the cracks are increasingly rare. Hidden Door is a eulogy to these places and a celebration of their continued existence, although I don’t envy their task of trying to find a new Edinburgh home.
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