'It’s no for us now son': Why real Leithers despair over what's happened to the place
A pop-up store selling empty crisp packets, odd socks and used biros would do a roaring trade in today’s Leith, says Stephen Jardine
If anywhere sums up Leith nowadays, it is the old engineering works on the Shore. Just a couple of years ago, men in boiler suits toiled, hammering and fixing bits of ships. Now blokes with their pants on show struggle with the Sisyphean task of how to make the perfect cortado.
Perhaps in a nod to the past, they even serve tins of sardines with toast for £13. Peeling back the lid is the only heavy metal work going on in these parts nowadays.
We have officially reached peak Leith. Long gone are the days when Tom Kitchin had to step over a drunk Lithuanian deckhand who’d missed his ship home just to open his restaurant’s doors.
The sailors are long gone, although you may well encounter a digital designer in a Breton fisherman’s top accessorised with Doc Martens and a ferret on a string.
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Free cronuts for life?
A few long-established businesses cling on, desperately hoping to avoid some social media influencer hustling through the doors and offering to feature them as #SHHH, the hidden Leith gem no one knows about, in exchange for free cronuts for life.
Alongside them are the new arrivals. Shops selling hamster-hair jumpers for £300, art galleries that never seem to be open and the kind of office where everyone drinks coconut water but nobody knows what they actually do to make money.
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Last week Harry Enfield was onstage in Edinburgh, reviving characters like his great 80s creation who cynically sold any old tat to gullible yuppies from a shop called “Saw You Coming”.
I’m pretty sure a pop-up store in Leith flogging empty crisp packets, odd socks and used biros would do a roaring trade right now as long as the owner is called Mati and changes their/them pronouns every week.
Outposts of normality
But there is hope. Leith has survived the decline in shipbuilding, the Trainspotting years and even the Proclaimers, so the passing obsession of some people who live their lives according to what social media prescribes shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.
Plus there are brave outposts of normality like the Port O’ Leith bar. Tom Kitchin still serves the best food in Scotland and Barry Fish has introduced a new audience of normals who like delicious seafood on plates, not in miniature wheelie bins alongside Negronis featuring live goldfish.
The lovely nearby stretch of the Water of Leith footpath was a truly bucolic scene last weekend, except for the bunch of 30-year-old man-boys who’d set up DJ decks and a speaker to aggressively play jazz funk at the passing swans.
My heart sank but then soared again as I spotted two massive rats scurrying from the bushes into the weeds. You can fill the streets with matcha tea shops, tofu bars and hairdressers where the main product sold is blue dye but Leith’s oldest residents will always stubbornly defy gentrification.
Which begs the question, where have all the real Leithers gone? Elsewhere seems to be the answer.
I met two on the tram recently, heading from Slateford down to the Ocean Terminal bingo and talking in an Edinburgh way you so rarely hear nowadays. As we passed the area where they’d grown up, they said “It’s no for us now son.”
Leith’s loss is ours also.
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