Most cities look good in the glowing light of summer. What is harder, however, is looking beautiful in the gloom of a grey winter’s day. There’s one city that manages it like no other – Edinburgh.
With friends visiting for a weekend, we walked around the Christmas market, past the stalls flogging £10 waffles. That took about 20 minutes. I began to get worried. What do we do now?
I needn’t have worried. After 600 years as a capital city, and another 1,000 years before that as a large siege town, Edinburgh exerts a very strong and very particular type of pull. You can see it in the crowds of tourists who stand in the middle of the pavement, looking around in a kind of disbelief at the city of Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and – yes – Harry Potter. Each icy street corner has a story.
It looks beautiful in low winter light, with all those grey baronial turrets looming against the even darker skies. But the reality of seven hours of daylight is not so great. You can’t prepare for how quickly it gets cold. Edinburgh basks in autumn warmth – and then suddenly the pavements ice over and the cold is so intense that it kills most house plants. A friend joked about how much moisturiser English people seem to need to ward off chapped hands when the weather turns. Your skin’s not thick enough to cope with a Scottish winter, she jibed, before admitting that she too struggles with the cold.
As sunset creeps earlier each day, it feels as if I’ve managed to dodge daylight for the past few weeks.
A friend suggested a night out to hear some classical music, but it didn’t help to dispel the feeling I was slowly turning into a Victorian vampire, existing in the twilight and now indulging in the refined arts.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has a £6 ticket offer for under-25s that is cheaper than most club nights. Three hours without phones, notifications or TikToks to distract you. One stressed-out friend was convinced to come simply for the detox. Afterwards, huddled in the cold, we bumped into other groups of friends and realised we weren’t the only ones to have this idea. Over the past year or so, these £6 nights out have grown in popularity.
Overstimulated by our technology, we’re slowly returning to old-school forms of slower-paced entertainment – all for the price of two cups of coffee. Maybe it’s the frontal lobe developing, or maybe it’s our overexposure to 10-second videos and doom scrolling, but it seems that slow consumption of media and the arts is making a comeback.
These refined exploits seem to be part of a growing trend among people my age. Dark Academia, an aesthetic that romanticises the gloom of dark libraries, poetry and black coffee, has become a social media fixation that has seeped into books, TV shows and fashion. Candlelight concerts have gone viral for their beautiful music, cathartic settings and Instagrammable artistry.
Edinburgh, a sullen city with an ancient university and a dramatic backdrop of winding streets and tenements, is ripe for such an aesthetic. Joking with friends about the lack of daylight and the cold of tenement flats – which are listed and mostly single glazed – there’s a general consensus that the only way through these bitter months is to romanticise them. During the mundane routine of everyday life, the wonder of a city described as a “mad god’s dream” by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid and a “fairytale” by Queen Victoria, can easily get lost.
Nights of cultural opulence and tech-free simplicity are a help. Pop your vitamin D pills and work with what you have. Preferably in a warm library or cafe.
Abigail King is a student writer based in Edinburgh
