Edinburgh gets them in for the world's biggest Hogmanay party
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Your support makes all the difference.Edinburgh has taken pole position in the race to be the place to party on the last night of the millennium.
The festivities in the Scottish capital are now so popular that more than half a million people will be there this new year's eve. The end-of-year party, now promoted under the title "Edinburgh's Hogmanay", will be the biggest new year's celebration in the world.
The event has grown at a phenomenal rate since its inception three years ago and it now dwarfs the festivities in New York's Times Square and the rather muted celebrations in Trafalgar Square. Edinburgh's tourism chiefs are hoping to boost interest to such an extent that it will be first choice for partygoers on 31 December 1999.
Demand for hotel rooms in the city is so great this year that tourism officials have had to place visitors in accommodation up to 50 miles away in Glasgow, the Border towns and Kirkcaldy in Fife - a pounds 45 taxi ride home from the party.
New year's crowds in Edinburgh are now double those in New York (200,000) and five times those of Trafalgar Square (75,000). The new fashionability of Scottish history and the recent return to Scotland of the Stone of Scone is expected to enhance the attraction of a tartan-wrapped new year's eve.
The event is dominated by students and young professionals, with nearly 80 per cent of revellers coming from the upper social groupings. While a quarter of last year's crowd came from England and a tenth were from overseas, others flocked in from all over Scotland.
The street party is the culmination of a five-day festival which begins today. When the event began in 1993, the final street party attracted a relatively modest 70,000. Last year's event is estimated to have generated pounds 23m in spin-off revenue for the city and pounds 32m for Scotland as a whole. The 1999 figure will be much higher.
Organisers are concerned, however, that the city's capacity for entertaining revellers in comfort is already stretched. This year Princes Street, which runs through the centre of the city and is at the heart of the street party, will be packed.
Abigail Carney of Unique Events, the organisers of the festival, said: "We want Edinburgh to become the millennium city but we want the event to remain interesting, high-quality and cutting-edge.
"We don't want to expand to the point where people stop enjoying themselves." Edinburgh's success in reclaiming New Year's Eve as a peculiarly Scottish celebration is based on a tradition dating back to the Protestant reformation of 1560.
Protestant elders insisted that "Christ's Mass", with its associations with Catholicism, should be just another working day. The pre-Christian ritual of celebrating the new year consequently took on greater significance.
Och aye the knee, Real Life
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