The Edinburgh Blog

Well Happy New year everyone! I celebrated New Years Eve last night with the Hogmanay St Party on Princes St. After drinks and nibbles round at a friends house in the Hillside area of Edinburgh we made the 15 minute walk to the East entrance on Princes St. Here we passed through the ticket check area by showing our Street Party wrist bands to the stewards. We arrived about 10 minutes before the 11pm deadline. Two large video screens situated at the East and West end of Princes St were showing footage from the concert in the gardens: namely KT Tunstall.

We’d carried in some pre-mixed vodka and lemonade and some plastic beakers along with a ruck sack full of Carling lager. The stewards were peaking into bags, but no strict screening was in place - so it was easy enough to bring glass into the Street party. Wanting to get a good position near the Castlehill for the midnight fireworks we made our way to the West end of Princes St, leaving behind the live music stage on Waverley Bridge. Disappointingly this meant missing Hard-Fi - although I’m not sure what time they played..?

The weather was excellent, given the time of year, and with the 100,000 or so people the temperature seemed ok. It was a relief for it not to be raining. Generally I found the atmosphere extremely friendly, welcoming and tolerant of others. Many persons, although drunk, were no more harmless than wishing everyone in sight a Happy New Year! It was nice to see such a multi-national gathering of persons in one place to see in 2021. Although the most trouble I saw was two intoxicated idiots fighting on the floor, I can imagine some persons nights would have been ruined by the behaviour of others, I guess this is inevitable with any event like this though. Also, with large queues for the toilets and the need to walk to them away from Princes St itself many persons were relieving themselves against the back of the takeaway food vans. Congestion generally wasn’t too bad, with pushing and shoving only rearing its head about half way down Princes St when we reached gridlock in our walk to the Castle!

Midnight came with a 10 second countdown and a quite marvellous firework display from Castlehill. This was the most intense firework display I’ve ever experienced, and not surprising as I think four tonnes of fireworks were used. I have uploaded some pictures below of the firework display:-

I also have some short video clips of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay fireworks 2021; I will encode and upload these very shortly.

After the short fireworks had ended me made our way out of The Street Party and along Rose Street, to head to another post midnight house party. All in all the Street Party was an enjoyable experience and, for the fireworks alone, was worth the trip. Here’s to a great 2021. Thanks for reading.