A beginner's guide to the Hidden Door festival
How to get the most out of Edinburgh's upstart celebration of grassroots arts
It’s that time of year again. On Wednesday, Hidden Door will once again fling open a mysterious disused building for five days. There will be music, dance, poetry, art, food, drink, and basically everything cool that ever existed under our city’s ancient, beautiful, but slightly stuffy, veneer.
This year the festival is bringing an old paper factory to life. A launch event in November introduced audiences to a corner of the former Saica paper mill. The full five-day event promises the opportunity to appreciate more art, in more of the venue, and in the broad daylight of Scotland’s long summer evenings.
The festival has a great history of bringing together established talent with up-and-coming creators - famously hosting Young Fathers and Anna Meredith as their careers were beginning to explode. The festival has also helped to catapult some of the defining literary voices of the decade, including Harry Josephine Giles and Iona Lee. But for those of us who don’t turn in artsy, musical, grassroots circles, it can be difficult to know how to navigate the five-day setlist and venues map filled with names we’ve never heard.
So if you’re wondering where to start, you’ve come to the right place. This beginner’s guide is far from a full review of the Hidden Door line up - the 15.5 acre site will host a vast number of artists, poets, dancers and musicians; far too many to fit into this article. We can, however, provide some starters.
Music
There will be three music stages this year and dozens of musicians. The best known names include Snapped Ankles, the London-based post-punk band who will headline the opening night on Wednesday; Thursday’s SPRINTS who have been described as “one of the most exciting young rock bands in the world” by online music magazine Stereogum; or BBC Scotland’s singer-songwriter of the year Mike McKenzie (performing Friday). The city’s extraordinary Tinderbox Orchestra - who count pop superstar Ed Sheeran, as well as swathes of Edinburghers, among its fans - will also be making an appearance on Friday.
There will also be ten new, Scotland-based acts who have been selected from more than 200 applicants to the festival’s Music Open Call. This allows festival organisers to discover and promote local emerging talent - which has always been a core goal of the festival.
Among the ten are The Era (Saturday), whose electric harp music will leave you with a totally new appreciation of the instrument; young post-punk group San Jose (Sunday) who bring an appropriate level of cheek and rage in their witty lyrics; and Edinburgh-based alt-pop music from racecar (Thursday), which layers Izzy Flower’s vocals over an array of upbeat, synthy, musical backdrops.
One of the most exciting of these ten is new “gutter pop” group Night Caller (Saturday) - a new grouping of established names such as Callum Easter (who closed this year’s Tradfest), and members of Neon Waltz, The Stagger Rats and The Merrylees.
As we might expect from a mixed arts festival, there are a handful of combined visual and musical performances. These range from the ludicrous and raucous Hens Bens (Wednesday), whose music is as unapologetically weird as it is loud, to samwooddoowmas (Saturday) whose electronic music has been played live from a Leith pub toilet, and often includes a bass guitar played by a bicycle, and a microphone swinging from a ladder. Mermaid Chunky (Wednesday) are another audio-visual performance duo blending electronic music with what the Guardian describes as “weaponised weirdness”.
It’s not all loud, shouty, dubby, dancey tunes though- for those looking to chill out a bit, Esther Swift (Wednesday) will be delivering a beautiful trad-folk inspired performance with harp and vocals. Mike MeKenzie, racecar and Pearley are just a few of the more indie-pop artists in the lineup. And if you’re looking for something a bit more jazzy, Danish trio Smag På Dig Selv will be performing their upbeat saxophone-drum combo on Wednesday, while Ishamel Ensemble (Sunday) gives us new-style jazz with enough beat to boogie to.
Spoken word and poetry
In quieter nooks of the enormous factory you’ll be able to see a selection of performances by established writing talent and new exciting voices. On Thursday, Charles Lang will read from his new collection of Glaswegian-dialect poems, and Hugh McMillan will remake an ancient Welsh epic. Poet, comedian and musician Josh Cake (Sunday) will stop off at Hidden Door before performing at Glastonbury later in the year.
Several of the spoken word performances aren’t just poetry either - Fever Peach (Friday) have toured festivals with their musical comedy-spoken word fusion and are currently semi-finalists in the 2025 Musical Comedy Awards. Playwright-poet Imogen Stirling (Wednesday) will be performing alongside musician Sonia Killmann in a piece called “The Boulders We Carry” which explores mythology and mental health.
Through the festival’s commissioned collaborations, visitors to Hidden Door have the chance to see completely new, potentially unique, performances. At 10pm every night, the team behind “Production Line of Dreams” will create a production line of dance, music, and visual art; all surrounded by the paper factory’s own abandoned machinery.
Art (and other things to look at)
The live performances of Hidden Door are made all the more spectacular by what audiences can see around them - the festival has always featured visual art pieces, but this year promises to go bigger and better.
Hidden Door 2025 will be the host to the new Edinburgh International Mural Festival - a new organisation which aims to support and platform street art around the city. Those who attended the launch party in November will remember a giant pigeon mural (paying homage to the many feathered inhabitants of the factory who were necessarily shoo-ed out to make space for the festival). In the months since, several mural artists have been commissioned to create more huge art pieces around the factory - there will also be new, surprise murals popping up throughout the week.
This kind of art project is possible because, for the first time, Hidden Door has had access to the venue for several months. This has allowed any of the festival’s visual artists to build their artwork around the space, and to display more intricate, purpose-built pieces. Some art pieces will be impossible to miss - there are a good number of ceiling height banners and projections, as well as art made of the old Helter Skelter from Montgomery Street Park, and reclaimed materials from the Leith tramline works - you might have to look a little harder to find the shoreline of stranded jellyfish, though.
And of course, even without such an array of art, the festival space itself is a thing to marvel at. With the largest venue in the festival’s history, a veritable army of volunteers and staff have been working on clearing as much of the former Paper Factory as possible for incoming guests. Rather than arriving at the back (under the pigeon) in the launch party, this time guests will arrive through a winding maze of receptions and offices, before landing in the wide expansive factory floor. Guests will also be able to explore the former locker room, production line halls and several nooks and crannies, which still hold many pieces of equipment, standing ominously as they were left.
If for nothing else than to see inside this huge and beautiful venue, a trip out west to Hidden Door is well worth the journey. You don’t even necessarily have to pay for the pleasure - entry before 6pm is free of charge. The full line up, tickets, and details of how to travel to the venue can be found here.
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