THE City Art Centre, Edinburgh's principal municipal art gallery, is located in a handsome building in Market Street immediately south of Waverley Station. It houses the city's permanent fine-art collection and it is also the venue of a varied programme of temporary exhibitions. It is unique among British art galleries in that visitors are carried to the upper floors by escalator.

The City Art Centre

The building dates from 1899, when it served first as a store for newsprint and later as a warehouse for fruit. In 1980, however, having been acquired by the City of Edinburgh, the building was beautifully and carefully converted to its present use.

The city's permanent fine-art collection comprises some 3,000 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, mostly by Scottish artists, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present. A.E. Hornel, J.H. Lorimer, J.D. Fergusson, S.J. Peploe, Sir W.G. Gillies, Anne Redpath, Sir Robin Philipson and Elizabeth Blackadder are among those represented.

Many of the works came as a gift in 1964 from the Scottish Modern Arts Association, or have been purchased with the aid of a bequest made by the late Miss Jean F. Watson.

Many illustrious temporary exhibitions have been held here. Outstanding among these were the Emperor's Warriors, from Xian, China (one of Edinburgh's twin cities), and Gold of the Pharaohs, from Egypt. These two exhibitions attracted a combined total of almost three-quarters of a million people. The attendance at each of them set a record for any exhibition held in the United Kingdom outside London.

The City Art Centre also contains studios for working artists and those working in the crafts, as well as a multi-purpose room for lectures, films and demonstrations. There is a licensed cafe. The centre enjoys the support of an independent society, the Friends of the City Art Centre and Museums, which exists to promote interest in these institutions. A programme of 'open space' exhibitions offers a venue to local art groups.

Across the street is the Fruitmarket Gallery, an independent gallery subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council and the City of Edinburgh. Its policy is to show a challenging programme of national and international contemporary art, design and architecture. It is also concerned to exhibit the best work of Scottish artists and leading artists from abroad.

Further up the hill, at no. 21 Market Street, are the headquarters of the Edinburgh Festival Society, the body which runs the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama. The Festival, founded in 1947, is held annually during three weeks in August and is now the largest arts festival in the world. The finest musicians, singers, actors, writers and artists are to be found in Edinburgh at Festival time.

The Edinburgh International Festival

From its earliest years the Festival also attracted to the city more and more amateur and professional groups, who were happy to perform outwith the official Festival, on the fringe of the main event. It was not long before this peripheral activity was formalised as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, and today literally hundreds of shows are presented under its aegis. The range of endeavour on the Fringe is extraordinarily wide and occasionally bizarre. The Fringe is noted for adventure, a ferment of ideas and an irrepressible spirit - a combination that has made an invaluable contribution to arousing public interest in the arts and thus advancing the objectives of the worthy founders of the Festival almost half a century ago. The offices of the Festival Fringe are at no. 180 High Street, a short distance down the hill from St Giles'.

Edinburgh is known far and wide as 'the Festival City'. During the International Festival period there has been since the very first a concurrent International Film Festival. There is also in the course of the year an International TV Festival, an Edinburgh International Jazz Festival, and an Edinburgh International Folk Festival. Now there is an Edinburgh International Science Festival. The festivals proliferate, as more and more people discover that Edinburgh's pleasant environment is an ideal backcloth for any cultural event. Edinburgh is the city that likes to be visited.

Hogmanay, celebrated by Scots on 31 December to mark the passing of the old year, is the oldest of the city's festivals since its origins predate Christianity. So durable and popular is the Hogmanay tradition, bringing large crowds out into the streets at midnight, that in recent years the city authorities have drawn up a programme of festivities for the end of December. The entertainment includes events such as a torchlight procession, street carnivals, concerts, street parties, dancing and fairground fun for all ages.

The city's international links are also fostered regularly through its formal twinning agreements with no fewer than eight other cities - Munich, Florence, Nice, Dunedin, Vancouver, San Diego, Xian and Kiev.

On the corner of Waverley Bridge and Market Street are the offices of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which is one of the most stirring spectacles of the Festival. More than 40 years of the Tattoo have proved that there is something thrilling and compelling about performances by military and pipe bands under floodlight, especially when presented against the incomparable backdrop of the illuminated castle. More than 350,000 people from every country in the world see the Tattoo during three weeks of performances on the Castle Esplanade.

Also on Waverley Bridge is an information and ticket centre operated by Lothian Region Transport. Tickets may be purchased here for a wide range of bus excursions, not only in Edinburgh but further afield also. In the same building, the Tattoo public counter sells tickets for the theatre shows in Edinburgh - and also (by computer) for theatres in London, Paris and New York!

In Jeffrey Street is Old St Paul's Episcopal Church, which has an interesting interior. Though the present building is nineteenth century, the congregation's roots run deeper: on this spot stood a wool store which the Episcopalians adopted as their place of worship in 1689, after they had been banished from St Giles' for refusing to acknowledge the sovereignty of William of Orange.