Parenting & Family Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

Edinburgh isn’t being praised here as a postcard city; it’s being claimed as an ecosystem. Carol Ann Duffy’s “favourite” lands with the casual confidence of someone who knows how culture actually gets made: not just in grand venues or festival headlines, but in the steady traffic between children’s theatre, galleries, and whatever ordinary day wraps around them. The sentence works because it’s almost disarmingly practical. Instead of rhapsodizing about beauty or history, Duffy lists activities - and in that list you can hear her values.

Children’s theatre is the tell. It signals an investment in beginnings: imagination as public infrastructure, art as something you learn by being in a room with other people. Pairing it with “galleries” widens the frame from participatory performance to curated looking, from noise to stillness. The subtext is a quiet argument about what a good city owes its residents: access, variety, and a sense that culture isn’t a luxury product but a daily option.

Context matters, too. Edinburgh is one of the UK’s loudest cultural brands, defined globally by its festivals. Duffy sidesteps the obvious namecheck and instead gestures toward the year-round feeders beneath the spectacle. Coming from a poet - and a public-facing one, used to defending the arts in policy-adjacent spaces - the line reads like soft advocacy: this is what we’ll “be doing,” because this is what should be possible. The affection is real, but it’s also strategic, anchoring love in use.