Monday September 1st 2025
Spiegeltent during the Fringe
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Joe Sullivan
Council officers will write to festival operators after a Fringe venue started construction without getting planning permission.
The Famous Spiegeltent, in St Andrew Square, only won planning permission in early August, some 37 days after construction began.
While it is legal to start construction without planning permission, some city councillors and community groups felt the firm had acted carelessly in filing it so late.
Concerns were also raised about tree protection in the square, with council officers scrambling to remedy issues with the company before construction began.
At a meeting of the full Edinburgh Council on Thursday, Green councillor Ben Parker brought forward a motion saying that the operators of the venue had operated with ‘contempt’.
Cllr Parker told the council: “At the highest level this is about a private company – Spiegeltent International – showing complete disregard for due process, and complete contempt for important Council policies about tree protection.
“As a company, either organisers were incompetent and failed to do even the most basic research about what needs to happen to run a successful event in parks and greenspace or, and I think this is probably more likely, they decided to ignore those requirements.”
He also remarked on how the Spiegeltent was the only festival venue this year to put in a retrospective planning application, and questioned why that was the case.
SNP councillor Simita Kumar also put forward a similar motion, and the SNP and Green groups proposed a course of action they wanted to see taken forward together.
It would have asked that a representative of the firm appear before the city’s Planning Committee to answer questions about the application.
However, a Conservative amendment to the motions won out, which reduced the scope of the council’s actions to writing festival organisers with concerns about the late application.
Conservative councillor Joanna Mowat said: “We have revised the process pretty much every year, we have a wash-up meeting, and that deals with trying to improve the process from applicants.
“But what we must remember is that we put on an enormous event in the collective festivals in the summer.
“We have changed, over the last five or six years, what we expect of those coming and bringing events in city.
“And that has taken a bit of time to bed in. That is beginning to bed in, and we have seen that there was only one retrospective application.
“I don’t believe in castigating anyone from a retrospective application.”
She then told the council that, if members disagreed with retrospective applications, that they should petition their parties at Holyrood and ask for the law to be changed.
She continued: “We may not like them, but they’re not illegal, there’s nothing wrong when they do them.”
Cllr Mowat also raised that, if planning permission had been denied to the tent, the timeframe for an appeal would mean any enforcement action could only take place after the runtime of the shows at the Spiegeltent was complete.
Both her and Cllr Parker sit on the Development Management Sub-Committee, which narrowly voted to grant the tent planning permission.
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