One year before
I'd wandered into the Hidden Door Festival (a interdisciplinary arts festival that takes place in abandoned or hidden places) on it's first outing last year when it had been held in the unused vaults under Market St in Edinburgh's Old Town. With a name like that I was always going to be intrigued. An army of volunteers had spent weeks clearing out these out-of-the-way and forgotten about arched spaces of all manner of junk that had accumulated there over the years. A huge effort in itself even before putting on the actual festival.
Inside the Dept of Highways Lighting Stores
Dept of Highways Lighting Stores
Unfortunately last year's site was sold and is now under commercial development. But when would a thing like that stop such an event? This year, the Old Lighting Depot just below Edinburgh Castle was to be the Hidden Door Festival venue. And what a great venue it was. Musicians, theatrical performers, filmmakers and visual artists of all ilks took part and made this festival what it is.
I found myself there unplanned one evening with some friends, a Fuji X100T in hand and so thought I'd to try to capture at least some of what this great festival is about. The fact it was in a venue not usually open to the public helped with the curiosity factor too of course.
Ma (Emma Smith and Annabel Kershaw) perform upstair in 'the cage'.
Admiral Fallow take the stage.
All images in this blog post were taken with a Fujifilm X100T camera
The border between Scotland and England is a wild and barren place. It runs for 154km between the solway Firth and Marchall There isn’t much in the way of people for a good distance on either side of it making it a kind of no-man’s-land. A large passing place and the food van mark the crossing point (this one at least).