Brown’s of Leith: Edinburgh Pride Weekend 2026

From the 18th until the 21st of June, Brown’s of Leith will be open for the weekend of Pride Edinburgh, Scotland’s longest-running free celebration of the LGBTQIA+ community. Brown’s of Leith and GRAS continue to advocate for LGBTQIA+ voices in architecture, with GRAS architect and accessibility specialist Kirsty Watt actively involved in that community. Kirsty is a trustee of Open Plan Scotland, an LGBTQIA+ support network for architecture; producer of Femmergy, a queer femme night space in Edinburgh; and the organiser of events such as Queer Frontiers, an exhibition in Architecture Fringe’s 2025 Open Programme.

Queer Frontiers, developed by Kirsty Watt, Samuel Stair and Andy Summers, was an interdisciplinary project to explore the corporate capture of ‘queer’ and to liberate ‘queerness’ within architecture from the confines of aesthetics. They instead visualised queerness as a philosophical framework, of everything and nothing. By consistently questioning our imposed commonality, our understanding of a queer aesthetic is revitalised, becoming one that is ever-changing, rarely static, and never settled once and for all. To be queer, and ‘to queer’, is not to subscribe to a binary or destructive antithesis, but to exist in flux and subversion, between the cracks and within the pervasive voids of the normative.

The exhibition, supported by the Edinburgh Architectural Association, was the result of an open call to Scottish practitioners and students working in architecture, engineering and landscape architecture. It totalled thirty pieces across a range of subjects, from speculative university projects through illustration and film to leatherwork. The event demonstrated the diversity of, and appetite for, LGBTQIA+ architecture.

Four artworks from Queer Frontiers will be displayed at Brown’s of Leith for Pride Edinburgh weekend 2026, alongside notes on how the contributors feel their work engages with queerness, and how they see it extending beyond aesthetics. In turn, we invite our community to come and see the work, show their support, and consider how their own perceptions of queerness might adapt in these changing times.