Let’s face it: Edinburgh’s Old Town can be a bit overwhelming, and traversing its courts and closes is full of surprises. Among its streets you’ll find street performers, bagpipes, charity reps, but most notably, tourists. Before you even see them, the excited adventurer usually announces themselves in a thick, American accent: “Oh my god, I love Edinburgh, it’s so Harry Potter!”
The Harry Potter tourist has become synonymous with Edinburgh, perhaps unsurprisingly. The city’s £2.5bn tourism industry attracts more than five million yearly visitors, around 20 per cent of which are “citing literary, or screen-based reasons,” according to The National. That’s in the ballpark of the Warner Brother Studios’ visitor numbers in London.
To seasoned Potterheads, the rush is for good reason. J.K. Rowling not only wrote parts of the book series here in Edinburgh, but also took much inspiration from the city. The gravestones in Greyfriars Kirkyard gave name to Professor McGonagall and Tom Riddle, while Hogwarts’ architecture was inspired by the turrets and facades of Edinburgh’s historic buildings. After all, who doesn’t feel a little magical walking the cobbled streets on a foggy morning, perhaps ending up in a cafe claiming to be Rowling’s favorite writing spot?
With tourism naturally comes commerce, and it’s hard to argue that Harry Potter tourism doesn’t contribute to Edinburgh’s economy. Besides the numerous cafes, there are also walking tours, bars, and accommodation catering towards devoted fans. Most notable is Museum Context on Victoria Street, the merchandise store with its notorious queue.
One first-year student from Glasgow works at a restaurant right next to Museum Context. She told The Student that “a lot of our customers come straight from there” in search of the nearest place to eat, after finishing their guided tours ending on Victoria Street. This not only also allows the restaurant to charge higher prices, but also benefits employees: “Americans leave insane tips, they sometimes hand me £20 in cash on top of our regular service charge.” While she finds the amount of tourists annoying at times, “service workers in the area would definitely be worse off without them.”
Not everyone is happy about the amount of Harry Potter tourism in Edinburgh however. Overcrowding, a disregard for historic landmarks, and a more general “potterification” of the city, as The National describes it, are among the most commonly cited complaints. For example, Greyfriars Kirkyard is getting more and more overrun by tourists every year. The grave of Thomas Riddell, the one that inspired the name Tom Riddle, was recently vandalised.
Edinburgh’s grievances with Harry Potter tourism may run deeper than these mostly symptomatic issues however, uncovering a deeply rooted flaw in Scottish cultural identity. Harry Potter tourism could be seen as an example of how ordinary Scots have become culturally homeless in their own country. PPE student Logan from Ayrshire, who has worked as a tour guide at Holyrood Palace, shared his experience and research for his article “The Re-Invention of Scottish Culture” in the Retrospect Journal with The Student.
Elemental parts of Scottish culture including the kilt, bagpipes, the highlands, shortbread, golf, and even the political idea of Scotland as we know it today have been fabricated by the romantic poets and political elites of the 18th and 19th centuries after the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Sir Walter Scott has most famously contributed to this, merging distinct highland and lowland influences for a more spectacular, albeit kitschy synopsis first displayed as a backdrop to King George IV’s 1822 visit to Edinburgh. Logan emphasised that this was merely a “romanticised Scotland conceptualised not to preserve Scotland for Scots, but for the English and Lowlanders.”
Edinburgh’s fairytale architecture is also a result of this fabricated identity. The city’s gothic-revival churches, neoclassical newtown, and scottish-baronial style tenements dating to the 18th and 19th century all draw on euphemisms of the past that “must have inspired J.K. Rowling when coming to Edinburgh.” In a way, “Harry Potter is just an extension of a romanticised Scotland,” Logan told The Student. He added that from his experience, tourists especially are “drawn to dramatic sights and sceneries, which Edinburgh was quite literally built for.”
Logan feels that Scotland’s artificial identity has left him and many others “culturally homeless.” Beyond the tourist kitsch, it becomes hard to pinpoint what culture represents the ordinary Scot. The wand-wielding tourist frustrates locals because they are an example of how Scottish identity was reimagined for the amusement of outsiders, not simply because they overrun sights in Old Town. Addressing the city’s grievances with tourism might therefore require a more structural approach than levying a new tax on overnight accommodation, for example. Scotland may have to fundamentally reconvene with its cultural identity, whom it serves, and how to democratise it once again.
