Monopoly Events has issued a formal response following widespread complaints about severe overcrowding at Comic Con Scotland, held on 24 and 25 October 2026 at the Royal Highland Centre in Ingliston, Edinburgh. Attendees reported jammed walkways, slow queues, and gridlock around celebrity signing areas, prompting organisers to address how future editions will manage hall traffic.
The update comes after ticket holders voiced frustration on social media, with popular comments demanding that organisers shift the convention west to Glasgow. However, moving the event across the central belt ignores the root cause of the congestion and overlooks the fact that Glasgow venues face identical problems when running large pop-culture shows.
Royal Highland Centre operations and layout management
The Royal Highland Centre is Scotland’s largest indoor exhibition venue and routinely handles major trade showcases and multi-day hobby gatherings. Geek Native spoke with industry sources who organise other geek conventions at the Ingliston complex, and they consistently praised the on-site staff and venue operations.
Indoor congestion at commercial fan conventions is rarely a venue-level failure. Instead, bottlenecks happen when floor plans place high-demand autograph queues too close to general shopping aisles. When organisers allocate too many tickets for a single hall footprint without providing dedicated queue pens, walkways seize up regardless of hall size.
| Operational Factor | Comic Con Scotland (Monopoly Events) | Typical Tabletop & Hobby Conventions |
| Primary Attraction | Celebrity guests, photo ops, commercial traders | Open gaming, independent roleplaying games, creators |
| Movement Pattern | Static autograph queues and dense foot traffic | Dispersed table seating and continuous hall flow |
| Main Bottleneck | Signing tables and major prop photo sets | Tournament check-in desks and stage areas |
| Floor Solution | Wide separation barriers and exterior queuing | Wide aisles and separated trade zones |
The Edinburgh and Glasgow convention divide
Calls to move the gathering to Glasgow tap into an old inter-city rivalry, but the grass is not greener on the Clyde. Glasgow already hosts several pop-culture gatherings, including shows run by independent outfits like the Big Glasgow Comic Page. In addition, rival promoters have previously run conventions using the Comic Con Scotland name or regional variants in the west.
Changing cities does not solve poor crowd control. Past comic conventions held at the SEC (formerly the SECC) in Glasgow suffered from the exact same overcrowding, packed aisles, and endless queues. Swapping an Edinburgh exhibition hall for a Glasgow arena just moves the queue to a different postcode. If an organiser sells past comfortable floor capacity or tightens stall spacing, visitors will face gridlock anywhere in the country.
The monolithic Scottish brand
The situation also highlights how national promoters treat Scotland as a regional monolith. When Monopoly Events, led by Andy Kleek, runs shows across England, the company titles them after their home cities: Comic Con Manchester, Comic Con Liverpool, and Comic Con Northeast.
In Scotland, organisers simply brand the show Comic Con Scotland. This happens even though the company also runs Comic Con Scotland (Aberdeen) at P&J Live. Using Edinburgh as an umbrella label for the whole country is lazy branding that irritates fans in both cities. It encourages attendees to blame the host city rather than event layout choices when halls become uncomfortably full.
Running a smooth convention requires firm caps on hourly admissions and floor designs that keep autograph lines away from main retail walkways. The Royal Highland Centre offers the square footage and an experienced team. To fix the problem, promoters need to adjust their floor allocations rather than packing bags for Glasgow.
