Inside the eleventh hour bailout which saved historic theatre from being handed back to council
The theatre was hours from being handed back to the council
When Fiona Gibson’s phone rang in her office at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, she knew she was just two hours away from potentially having to hand back the keys of a beloved 120-year-old city performance venue to the council.
It was 11am on an unusually mild February day in 2023 and Ms Gibson, chief executive of Capital Theatres, was preparing for a crunch board meeting which would decide the future of the historic King’s Theatre.
“Our board meeting was on 24 February, 2023,” Ms Gibson said. “I recall that at 11 o’clock in the morning, the Scottish government rang me to say, ‘yes, we’re willing to put our piece of the jigsaw in’.
“The board meeting was due to be held at one o’clock. That was quite a nerve wracking time.”
The Scottish government’s eleventh hour bailout, which saw them donate an extra £3.85m to the funding pot, was the turning point for the £41m overhaul of the theatre, which reopened its doors to the public yesterday after a near-four year closure. Without it, Ms Gibson says, the theatre, known as the Grand Old Lady of Leven Street, would have had to be passed over to Edinburgh City Council, which owns the building.
The newly-revamped theatre has now been transformed into one of the most accessible heritage buildings in the UK, with new lifts offering level access from street to seat or stage, new cafe/bar areas and a range of technical facilities which will increase the types of performances which can be put on at the venue.
Back in February 2023, Ms Gibson had known the long-planned project would be scrapped by her board if vital funds could not be found within two hours.
Price increases due to the war in Ukraine had increased the project costs dramatically and initially successful fundraising - gathering money through a public appeal, as well as a £3m grant from Edinburgh City Council and contributions from other donors - had not been sufficient to plug a near-£10m gap.
Ms Gibson told Scotland on Sunday "Plan B" was scrapping any kind of refurbishment at all and "limping along" - or handing the keys back to Edinburgh Council which owns the building, which she said would be a “tragedy”.
“At the very beginning, in September 2022, we were due to start the project, then when the impact of Ukraine and Russia hit, almost overnight, the price of the project increased by £10m and we had to find it in a few months,” she said.
“We had to find it in time for our February board meeting, or our board would say, ‘no, we can’t proceed’, so that required massive effort on everybody’s part for collaboration of the statutory funders we were working with, as well as some donors.
“We had our big public campaign at that time as well and the public really got behind us and really supported it with a crowdfunder.”
However, by February, the funding pot was still millions of pounds short of its target, with the board meeting looming.
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She said: “Plan B I guess was that we would have had to continue limping along as is, but you can only do that for so long and we felt we’d got to the point where that wasn’t going to be workable - or you give the keys back to the council, who own the building. So really, there weren’t many other options at that juncture and it would have been just a tragedy if that had been the case.”
The new funding took the Scottish government’s total contribution to £10.85m, which then-culture secretary Neil Gray said was “testament to the value we place on the importance of its redevelopment and its future potential”.
Ms Gibson said: “I think it was evident to the statutory funders, the council, the Scottish government and the National Lottery Heritage fund, that this was almost a place of sanctuary for people and therefore we all needed to get behind it to help save it for generations to come and that’s what everybody did, so we were thrilled.”
The project costs have continued to rise, with the final price tag for the work deemed to be “commercially sensitive”, but just “a little bit more” than the last publicly reported figure of £40.7m.
In May, Ms Gibson admitted there was still £500,000 funding gap and launched a second public appeal - but said now, outside of optional improvements such as replacing windows, the required funding had been reached for the vast majority of the work.
“We’re pretty good now,” she said. “There are a few things that we’d like to do the final touches on that would cost a little bit, little things that we will do over time. It would have been nice to do them at the same time, but it’s not a problem.”
“Our statutory funders and the donors and the trust and foundations an the public generally have just been amazing to be on the journey with us and help us get it over the line.”
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