SANDY Bell’s is a pub of stories. Proudly declaring itself to be the ‘home of world-renowned folk music’, plenty of other people are better placed than I am to tell you of the history of the pub, particularly its associations with the folk music revival.

The premises are a former corner shop on the ground floor of an imposing Edinburgh Old Town tenement.

Despite some tough times, it remains a convivial mix of locals, students and tourists.

Online reviews are usually excellent with a few folk highlighting the downsides of cramming lots of people into a small space, with limited facilities and, as a ‘wet’ pub, no bar meals.

This couthy place doesn’t suit everyone, but I loved it from the first time I came to Edinburgh.

Now, it has become place for good tunes and memorable encounters.

It’s not for the architectural merit that this is my favourite building in Edinburgh.

I play music there and have done so regularly for over 25 years. I’ve had a birds-eye view of the ebb and flow. As people come and go, I’ve had conversations and played music with all sorts of people that I wouldn’t otherwise have met.

There are, of course, people who take lots of photographs, fail to buy a drink and leave.

We often get fellow musicians from out of town looking for a tune and, just recently, we were sketched at play by a couple of young women from the Netherlands off the next day on the North Coast 500.

Tourists come in all guises. Canadians, Americans (some disguised as Canadians) and Australians looking for their ancestors and good whisky. A couple from the USA who were befriended by our late departed concertina player remain good friends and regular visitors, wistfully looking to decamp to Edinburgh, full-time.

Recent times have been memorable, sometimes wild, at others rather poignant.

The Italians on a works outing from an Irish bar in Turin will not forget their trip to Edinburgh. The same night there were some international students from London.

Steel drums are not a traditional instrument in Scottish or Irish music, but one of them did a great job of joining in. Unconventional and joyous.

We had great tunes with some musicians over in Edinburgh from Ireland for a funeral.

Their singer, formerly of a ‘raucous, fun and captivating’ Irish band was coaxed to sing a beautiful ballad by our piano player. Another time, they graciously gave up their seat to a New York jazz pianist who had a go and decided better of it.

We’ve had other stars here too. Some lie low or stay at the bar. Local friends who know the ropes might make sure to get them the right seat.

For many people, live music is a rare treat. But many talented people come to Scotland to hear music and, in the process, share their own. Luckily for us, a fieldtrip to study unaccompanied Gaelic psalm singing in the Hebrides might well start in Sandy Bells.

Fascination with the banjo led a young Moroccan woman to share clips of Berber music played on the same instrument.

Pubs like this are a great shared space. Room for spontaneity, connection and learning about each other and what we share. They show the best of what a city can be. And when I’m a tourist myself, I remember that.

Dr Cathy Sharp had an early career as a housing and planning policy researcher and was once the research manager at Scottish Homes. She founded Research for Real in Edinburgh in 2002 and now draws on her experience to write Grow as We Go. She is recognised in the UK and internationally for work that challenges thinking and practice about leadership, participation, research, learning, and evaluation. She is an Honorary Professor in the School of Health at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.

Image details: copyright Mike Wilson; text copyright Cathy Sharp

I’VE had a connection with the King’s Theatre, which is currently being renovated, for many years; and not just because of the blast that I’ve had - with Allan Stewart, Andy Gray and, now, Jordan Young - with the annual pantomime.

It’s a connection that goes back to my high school days, in the early 1980s.

When I was at school, there was no question that drama was my favourite subject, and I was involved in as many school drama productions as I could.

Friday afternoon’s at James Gillespie’s High School - back then - meant having to hop down to its annex, on Gilmore Place, and of course that meant passing the King’s Theatre.

I was that boy, faced pressed up to the window, staring at the production shots of the show that was on that week. And I was also that boy dreaming of what it would be like to actually get to do that for a living.

I have to admit, it was something of a hammer blow, when - after I finished school - my various attempts to get into drama school all failed. On one occasion - at Edinburgh’s very own Queen Margaret College, as it was then - I was told I had got down to the final two. Ooh, that hurt. And back then, I never really thought of re-applying and trying again.

I just tried to take it on the chin.

You could say my first proper job was working as a police officer, for four years.

But - thanks to fate, a chance conversation, someone looking out for you; call it what you will - I somehow ended up working in children’s TV, which then led, in 1993, to an approach to do panto, at that other famous King’s Theatre, Glasgow’s.

The year after, I was then asked to do panto with the legendary Cannon and Ball, at Edinburgh King’s Theatre, which meant I finally got my photo inside that famous glass window on Leven Street.

In those days, pantos often travelled from one city to another and I went with Tommy and Bobby to Glasgow again, where I stayed for three years before coming back to Edinburgh.

With the exception of the 1999/2000 season and Covid, I’ve done panto in Edinburgh every year since.

One of the things that intrigued me, when I was doing those drama productions at James Gillespie’s is how much rehearsing you’d have to do, compared to how many nights you performed. You basically rehearsed for months to perform for three nights only, the first night usually consumed by nerves.

A panto, by contrast, goes on for weeks, and it’s therefore no surprise that a panto cast can become very close-knit. You become genuine friends with each other, which can translate to a real magic on stage.

Conventional theatre is performed, usually, to how it was intended by the playwright.

Panto, by contrast, can go in all sorts of random directions, usually depending on what the first wise crack is, often something from the audience.

The Edinburgh team grew organically in front of the audience. I had worked with Allan, and also with Andy, and they had also worked together without me in 2000; but there we were - all on the poster together for the very first time - and that was how it started.

We had fun on and off stage and the audience enjoyed our unscripted moments as much as we did and so they came back, year after year. Sadly, we lost Andy in 2021, but the fun continues and this is thanks to now having Jordan as part of the team.

If there is a real family feeling among the cast of a panto, there is a similarly close-knit group behinds the scenes. Some of the stage crew have been around for ages, they just love their jobs that much.

I have no doubt the theatre would have had to close had it not been for the decision to refurbish it - with an expected opening in July.

Structurally, it required so much doing to it; had it been left untouched, it would have had to be closed, probably permanently, on health and safety grounds.

That said, when the audiences pitch up for the first shows in the refurbished building, they might wonder what all the fuss has been about. The renovation has been so delicately handled, every effort has been made to retain the original look and feel.

So, apart from a bit of sprucing up, the main auditorium will probably feel pretty much as it was before the building was closed for the renovation.

However, you wouldn’t recognise the place behind the scenes and front of house.

All this new heavy engineering has been installed, it means there won’t be a theatre production in the UK or abroad that can’t do a show there. It is now that sophisticated.

I’ve been in the building probably about four times since the renovation work began, the last time in January, and it is remarkable what they - the architects, engineers and the construction firm - have done.

I hope to be part of the opening events in July, but - failing that - it will soon be my home from home, in my next panto, which we are about to begin rehearsing for: The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Grant Stott is a broadcaster, actor and ‘pantomime villain’. He has been a regular member of the King’s Theatre panto cast since 2000 and is soon to resume his afternoon presenting role on BBC Radio Scotland.

Image details: copyright Mike Wilson; text copyright: Grant Stott

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I GREW up in Edinburgh and would often travel by bus to The Royal Scottish Museum in Chambers Street where I would spend the afternoon wandering about looking at the displays that encompassed science and technology, natural history, and world cultures.

There were stuffed animals from all over the world, scientific equipment, steam locomotives, engines (some neatly cut in half to show how they worked), and human-made objects and artefacts of all kinds.

It was quite simply the most exciting place I had ever seen.

By the end of primary school, I had decided that the natural sciences were what I found most interesting and here was an extraordinary treasure house, right on my doorstep.

I was sure that this was somewhere I could learn everything that was worth knowing about.

In modern vernacular, I had found my happy place.

I often entertained the idea that, one day, I might hide somewhere when the closing bell was rung in order to get myself locked in for the night.

I would be prepared with sufficient food and a torch and didn’t even consider what would actually happen if I ever made my daydream a reality.

The inevitable search party, police involvement not to mention anxious, then increasingly irate, parents.

Fantasies of what might happen in museums after dark have since been the subject of very successful books and films, and organised sleepovers are de rigueur. I really missed out.

The building was designed by Francis Fowke, the Irish engineer and architect.

It started life in 1861 and was partially opened in 1866.

It has a Renaissance-style façade with a glazed roof supported by cast iron pillars and arches that rise the full height of the building.

Before the building underwent a major refurbishment, reopening in 2011, you would ascend the wide steps from Chambers Street to the massive double doors and into the light-filled space of the grand central hall, as if climbing to receive wisdom from the high altar of learning.

Nowadays, street level access takes you through what were once storage cellars - a little less grand.

At the western end of the building was a huge Canadian red cedar totem pole, its painted animals staring out over the great glass-covered hall where there were two large shallow tiled fish ponds into which visitors would toss coins for good luck.

The ponds have gone and the totem pole, which had been carved in 1885, was rightly returned to the Nisga’a people of British Columbia, three years ago, having been taken from them around 1930.

Another of the displays I remember from my childhood visits to the Royal Scottish Museum was the mesmerising Foucault Pendulum suspended from a very long wire fixed to the roof.

The pendulum was invented in 1851 by French physicist, Léon Foucault, to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth and, although Edinburgh has lost this little bit of scientific wonder, Foucault pendulums are still swinging elsewhere in the UK.

Francis Fowke, who was also involved in the design of the Royal Albert Hall, died suddenly of an aneurysm at the age of 42, not long after the Chambers Street museum was fully opened.

Before he died, he had won a competition for the design of the Natural History Museum in London, which was later remodelled and completed by Alfred Waterhouse and it was here that I studied for my Doctorate.

Later, I was employed in the Entomological Collections of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History where, as an academic, I worked for a quarter of a century before leaving to go into broadcasting.

This handsome Neo-Gothic building was designed by another Irish engineer and architect, Benjamin Woodward, who like Fowke, died at the height of his career.

Tuberculosis took him at the age of 45, only one year after the museum opened in 1860.

I consider myself very fortunate indeed to have had two dream jobs in my life and my early visits to Chambers Street Museum were the initial inspiration for the development of both.

George McGavin is an entomologist, author, academic, television presenter and explorer. His TV programmes include Oak Tree: Nature's Greatest Survivor, After Life: The Strange Science of Decay and The Lost Land of The Volcano.

Image details: copyright Mike Wilson; text copyright: George McGavin

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