Capital City of Culture 2023

In 1990, I remember posters that appeared on Edinburgh billboards. The posters announced that the Cultural Capital of Europe was to be found forty miles THAT way – arrow pointing to Glasgow.

Edinburgh and Glasgow have long had that kind of feud: Edinburgh, capital city of Scotland, city of the International Festival and the Fringe, the city that named its main train station after a series of novels by Walter Scott, the city that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which hosts the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and the National Library of Scotland, the city that was known as the Athens of the North: but in 1990, Glasgow was the capital of culture in Europe, and Glasgow had no intention of letting that be overlooked in Edinburgh.