Which UK city is the most creative? Edinburgh?

Edinburgh: UK’s Cultural Capital Contest (What, you mean someone actually thinks there are other contenders?)

Ever since Tony Blair shot his wad with the Millennium Dome, that empty monument to New Labour’s hidden shallows, every other city in the UK has fancied its chances. But even without anything like Ken Livingstone’s £10million recent sub to Creative London, surely Edinburgh takes the crown. I don’t need 500 words to prove this. Here we go:

James Hutton walks over Arthur’s Seat in 1786 and invents geology. This attracts Charles Darwin who follows Hutton to Edinburgh, wanders down to Wardie Bay in Granton with his shrimp net and starts writing the Theory of Evolution. James Craig and Robert Adam create airy boulevards with beautiful plazas either end.

David Hume creates freedom of thought by being the first man to say he doesn’t believe in God without being hung for it.

A single mum with her bairn in a pushchair ekes out her coffee in a Southside café. She invents Harry Potter and inside three years a gazillion children round the world put down their Gameboys and start reading books again.

I pop in to the National Gallery and there’s a class of nursery kids, that’s right, nursery kids, at the Andy Warhol exhibition learning to draw bananas!

Leith, home to brawling sailors and battle-scarred strippers in the Seventies and the heroin capital of Europe in the Eighties is transformed by visionaries like Martin Wishart, Irvine Welsh, Tony Mowbray and Rockstar Games into the coolest riverbank hangout since the South Bank and the Left Bank. Kylie, along for the MTV Awards, thinks so too.

Danny Macaskill gets on his stunt bike and turns the whole city into a giant stunt park. 8 million hits on YouTube tells us we have the world’s undivided attention.

Oh, did I forget the Embra Festival, the biggest arts festival ON THE FUCKING PLANET? And the Fringe, with a piddling 18,901 performers this year alone.

Did I mention that the centre of pop gravity has shifted east too with live venues like Cabaret Voltaire, Sneaky Pete’s and The Voodoo Rooms? And bands like The Aliens, Found and Come On Gang?

Or that Hollywood comes to Holyrood for our Film Festival every year?

Have I missed out the fact we were first to join Unesco’s Creative Cities network and that we’re home to Dancebase, Scotland`s national dance centre?

Should I add how our banks have proved we have the most creative accountants in the world? Er, probably not. I’ll stop there. We win. Na na na-na na.

(Photography courtesy of Ssoosay, Flickr)

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