Bath Fringe Festival

Festival Location: Bath, England

Festival Type(s): Fringe Festivals, Comedy Festivals, Arts Festivals

Bath is one of those cities you have to visit anyway, Brits just the same as internationals; it's universally acclaimed as just plain PRETTY, a dreamscape of honey-coloured stone in the sunshine, all pavement cafes and posh talent window-shopping.

But it's a much better idea to visit when the Festival's on. Two weeks of anything up to a dozen events a night vying for your attention, Bath Fringe is the longest continually running Fringe Festival in England, and on several recent years has been the biggest - nationally there's only Brighton on the same scale (we won't mention that big one in Scotland you will have heard of). Every local venue does a special programme for the fortnight, there's always a larger-capacity temporary venue (this year again one of those glorious Spegeltents), and open-air events on all three weekends, notably the bedlam fair Street Arts weekend and the end-of-festival party to end them all, Walcot Nation Day, named for the '70s boho community who inspired the whole shebang. This year the Festival boasts not one not two but THREE Fringe Clubs (and a threatened 'Fringe of the Fringe Club' still not confirmed, well it wouldn't be...) to extend your artistic ecstasy deep into the evening.

Specialising in popular (on both senses) arts: music, comedy, theatre, street performance, with a smattering of experimental and new media, it stars not only up-and-coming acts (past hits zoom from Graham Norton to Jamie Cullum, both before anyone much had heard of either of them) but national cult figures and a handful of headlining international acts, mostly in music. A visual arts programme mostly from local artists invades empty shops and offices, and there's always something utterly unlikely and inexplicable lurking in the depths of the programme - which you can find on www.bathfringe.co.uk - events in shop windows and private houses, those giving only a rendezvous or some cryptic directions, and some that no-one has managed to find at all.

There really are few cities quite as pleasant to stagger about in the early hours (or as safe) or with such a concentration of cafes and pubs in which to revive yourself come the morning. It might seem a Toy-town sometimes, but with a Festival on, where better to play?