The email nobody wants ten days before their Fringe run opens went out on Monday 27 July. It told 17 companies their venue had shifted to the other end of George Street. Assembly Festival announced that its two outdoor spaces would not be standing on George Street this August at all. Those spaces are the Spiegeltent-style Bijou and the container venue Front Room. They are going up in St Andrew Square Gardens instead, with a temporary bar and box office bolted on beside them – that’s the bit of grass with the Melville Monument in the middle and nowhere within half a mile to leave a van full of set.

The reason is a burnt-out department store about 300 metres away. The former Debenhams building on Princes Street caught fire on 9 July. The road has been shut between Frederick Street and South Charlotte Street ever since, with buses pushed round onto George Street. That diversion is what killed the plan. You cannot run a festival road closure on a street that is currently carrying every bus that used to run along Princes Street.

William Burdett-Coutts, Assembly’s artistic director, put the timing in his statement, which is the part working performers will read twice:

“This has had a significant impact on our artists with only a week to go until their shows kick off, and we are working to support and minimise disruption for them. But it is extremely positive news that all 17 of these shows will still be able to go ahead, after the huge amount of work our artists have already put into them.”

Where are Bijou and the Front Room this year?

Both venues are in the southeast corner of St Andrew Square Gardens, at the eastern end of George Street. Assembly Festival’s season runs 6 to 30 August. Existing tickets stay valid for the new location, and Assembly says ticket-holders will be contacted by whichever point of sale they bought from. Nobody needs a refund. That puts this a long way clear of the Sandringham mess, where the show went and the money took its time following.

Indoor programming at the Assembly Rooms on George Street carries on unchanged. The venue you had in your diary for the 10pm one is still the venue. Assembly Festival now lists seven hubs for 2026. They are Roxy, Rooms, Hall, George Square, George Square Gardens, George Square Studios, and the new Assembly @ St Andrew Square. Building an eighth-of-a-hub from scratch in ten days is not a thing most operators would volunteer for. I’d love to see the invoice for the temporary bar.

The Debenhams shell that shut a road

The building that started all this is owned by Criterion Capital and was earmarked for conversion into a 300-bed hotel. Since the fire, tram services between the city centre and Newhaven have been suspended. The council has said the aim is to make the building safe while keeping as many historic features as possible, with reopening measured in weeks rather than months. Nobody has put a date on it.

The knock-on that matters for the Fringe is broader than Assembly Festival’s two tents. According to The Tab’s reporting, the council cancelled the usual George Street closure for the festival period entirely. Bars and restaurants along it cannot spill out into the roadway the way they have in previous Augusts. That strip is normally one of the busiest bits of casual, walk-past trade in the city during the Fringe, and this August it is carrying the diverted Princes Street buses while the trams to Newhaven sit idle. Add Edinburgh’s new visitor levy, which we covered when it came in this month, and August on that street is a different trading proposition. The roadway seating those bars put out every other year is staying stacked wherever they keep it.

Eight in the Spiegeltent, nine in the container

The Bijou list runs: 70s Jukebox by The 60 Four, 1954: Ella, Etta, Eartha, Best of Burlesque, In Pour Taste: A Comedy Wine Tasting Experience, Frisky’s Remix Roulette, Midsummer!, Scaramouche Jones and Smashing Shakespeare: Brave Macbeth. The Front Room takes A Haunted House, The Van Gogh Shogh, Arachne / Athena, The Problem, A Play on Words, 44 Minutes, Cricket & The Freebugs, Becoming Dr Ruth and Ludwig: Unfinished Business.

Read down that and the pure stand-up hour is conspicuously absent. This is a cabaret, theatre and music strip, which is what those two structures were always programmed for. The clearest comedy billing among the 17 is In Pour Taste, in which Sweeney Preston and Ethan Cavanagh plus a guest wine expert run an 80-minute show at 18:30 daily. Tickets start at £18.25 on Assembly’s own site. It’s a five-tastings-and-some-jokes format, and I’d bet the glassware logistics of moving it were more of a headache than the jokes were.

What none of those companies get is a slice of anything to cover the disruption. There’s no relocation pot in the Fringe’s funding landscape. The Keep it Fringe grants went to 16 of 402 applicants at £2,500 each. The Gilded Balloon’s own fund handed £2,000 to five shows. Both were decided months ago, on programmes that assumed a venue would be where the brochure said it was.

The listing that still says 54 George Street

Assembly’s own website had In Pour Taste updated to “Assembly @ St Andrew Square, Bijou” within a day. Third-party listings are slower. As of this morning, the What’s On Edinburgh page for the same show still gives the venue as Assembly Rooms, 54 George Street, Edinburgh New Town EH2 2LR. That’s for the full 6 to 30 August run at 6:30pm.

That gap is the actual cost of a late venue move, and it lands on whoever has to stand in the street at 4pm correcting a punter holding a printout with the wrong postcode on it, which in my experience is the performer rather than anyone drawing a festival wage. Every aggregator page, every What’s On listing, every posted flyer and every A-board with a map on it now carries the wrong address. It leads to a building where a different show is happening. The Fringe brochure went to print long before 9 July. Nobody is reprinting it.

Two flights of stone steps down from St Andrew Square there’s a bus station where a lot of touring acts arrive with a suitcase and a rail of costumes. At least the new pitch is not hard to find. If I were one of the nine companies in the Front Room, I’d want to know one thing. Who is paying for the reprint of 3,000 flyers with the old venue on them?