Foot of the Walk: Where Leith Begins

Why is it significant?

You are standing where Leith Walk finally runs out of slope, at a jumble of bus stops, traffic lights and a bronze Queen Victoria who has watched this junction since 1907. Behind you the long, straight road climbs back towards Edinburgh.

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You are standing where Leith Walk finally runs out of slope, at a jumble of bus stops, traffic lights and a bronze Queen Victoria who has watched this junction since 1907. Behind you the long, straight road climbs back towards Edinburgh. In front of you begins another town, with its own accent, its own harbour and, for most of its history, its own grudges. Start with the street itself, because it began as a weapon. In 1650, with Oliver Cromwell's army marching on Scotland, the Scottish commander David Leslie had a long earth rampart thrown up between Calton Hill and Leith, a wall of soil to keep the English away from the capital and its port. The danger passed, the bank stayed, and people began to walk along the top of it. The rampart became a footpath, the footpath a gravel promenade, and the promenade the broad road you just came down. Leith and Edinburgh were never equals. In 1329 Robert the Bruce granted the harbour to the burgh of Edinburgh, and for centuries the capital's merchants kept the port's trade firmly in their own hands. Leith did the heavy lifting, the loading, the shipbuilding, the fighting off of fevers and fires... while the profits climbed the hill. That resentment lasted so long that plenty of people here will still tell you they live in Leith, not in Edinburgh. Now glance at the tall clock tower right beside the junction. It belonged to Leith Central station, opened in 1903 and closed to passengers in 1952. For decades its vast, empty train hall stood derelict, a shelter for pigeons, drinkers and worse. Irvine Welsh set a scene of his 1993 novel Trainspotting in that abandoned station, and the book takes its title from a bitter joke made there... a reminder that this neighbourhood's story is not all tall ships and royal visits. Ahead of you runs the Kirkgate, once Leith's crowded medieval high street. Most of it was flattened in the 1960s for a shopping precinct, but a few old survivors still hide behind the concrete, and they are the reason you came. Walk north into the Kirkgate, and within a couple of minutes you will see a Gothic church tower rising out of a graveyard on your right.