Smash Hits, Sir Grayson Perry’s retrospective, is at the Royal Scottish Academy [Nick Mailer photography]

“WALTHAMSTOW Tapestry” is a work that makes one wonder why Grayson Perry spent so much of his artistic career focused exclusively on pottery.

The arts have been awash with reflections on multicultural, gentrifying districts of London which seek to depict their “underbelly”. Where the Clerkenwell-based artist stands out is that he depicts an overbelly too.

Awash with brand names, Perry’s tapestry manages to still avoid textual overload through a narrative pull that rivals that of his inspiration, the Bayeux. Our eyes are drawn upwards from a majestic Butlin’s and a trashy Armani down below to the likes of Gazprom above, while an enticing yellow ramp invites us to worship at the church of Starbucks.

Smash Hits, Perry’s show at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy, is a retrospective of his work from art school in the early 1980s to the present day, and is probably the biggest draw of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival.

Many of its exhibits are both overtly political and deeply personal – such as The Vanity of Small Differences, which adapts William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress in a narrative of a tech billionaire who “dies like a teenage joyrider despite his education and wealth”, reflecting Perry’s own inner conflict about his journey from Essex council estate to knighthood and national treasure status.

But Perry is just one of a number of north London artists to be exhibiting at this year’s festival. One is Plum Cloutman, who only graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2018. Dreamer’s Eye, at the city’s Arusha Gallery, brings together her work with that of Zayn Qahtani, a young artist from Bahrain, and Georg Wilson, a painter affiliated to Fitzrovia’s Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery. Cloutman’s claustrophobic paintings, which combine oils, pastels and watercolours, focus on interiors and the human form, playing with scale and dismemberment to disrupt our expectations.

At the French Institute, you’ll find another north London-based practitioner in Sean Burns. His film Dorothy Towers explores two social housing blocks in Birmingham that became a haven for the city’s LGBT communities.

It explores queer memory and recollections of the Aids crisis through residents’ testimonials, and is providing the basis for a series of workshops and discussions on Edinburgh’s queer history.

A walk down the Royal Mile and along South Bridge will take you to Dovecot Studios, a world-renowned tapestry workshop and gallery where you’ll find Camden connections in an unlikely show. Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception features exemplary works by the likes of Joan Eardley, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Anne Redpath.

Also on display is Glasgow style painter and designer Jessie Marion King’s 1907 illustrated edition of Isabella, the narrative poem by Hampstead’s own John Keats. The Uncivilised Cat reflects the Vorticist influences Ayrshire-born Agnes Miller Parker took on board while living in London in the 1920s.

There are two haunting prints by the Glaswegian artist Hannah Frank, whose work was influenced both by the Glasgow style and her Jewish heritage. Though her own work doesn’t feature, there are paintings inspired by the Dundonian Catherine Read, thought to have been Scotland’s first professionally trained woman artist, who lived in St James’s Place and Jermyn Street. She died at sea near Madras in 1778.

For a journey about as far from Edinburgh – and north London – as you can get while staying within the festival’s remit, head to Jupiter Artland in the country estate of Bonnington House, West Lothian.

Here, Lindsey Mendick’s “confessional” installation SH*TFACED recreates a boozy night out in a twisted nightclub interior to explore intoxication and shame.

Then again, you could be back at Madame Jojo’s. Only this time you end up in the ballroom of a Jacobean stately home, your tequila shots transformed into goblets of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

• Edinburgh Art Festival runs from August 11-27, though many exhibitions continue into the autumn. For more details visit edinburghartfestival.com