#leith — Public Fediverse posts

An interesting bit of history of Leith in Scotland.
https://threadinburgh.scot/2026/08/13/darts-and-television-the-thread-about-borlands-of-croall-place/

#scotland #leith #threadinburgh

An interesting bit of history of Leith in Scotland.
https://threadinburgh.scot/2026/08/13/darts-and-television-the-thread-about-borlands-of-croall-place/

#scotland #leith #threadinburgh

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Today’s headlines: New hotel plan for Rennie’s Isle in Leith, schools return as phone ban begins, new Princes St Gardens statue ban proposed + hundreds call for Inverleith Park play park upgrade

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-wednesday-12-august-2026/

#edinburgh #leith #scotland

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Today’s headlines: New hotel plan for Rennie’s Isle in Leith, schools return as phone ban begins, new Princes St Gardens statue ban proposed + hundreds call for Inverleith Park play park upgrade

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-wednesday-12-august-2026/

#edinburgh #leith #scotland

These tables always look very inviting, but I just zigzagged past them today 😂 Teuchters Landing, Rennie’s Isle, #Edinburgh #Leith #Running

These tables always look very inviting, but I just zigzagged past them today 😂 Teuchters Landing, Rennie’s Isle, #Edinburgh #Leith #Running

Leith has been shortlisted as UK "Town of Culture".

"Three Scottish places shortlisted for Town of Culture title."

#Leith #Edinburgh

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20yv646g70o

Leith has been shortlisted as UK "Town of Culture".

"Three Scottish places shortlisted for Town of Culture title."

#Leith #Edinburgh

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20yv646g70o

An excellent post by @cocteautriplets on the troubled history of Leith Central station.

I had no idea the Central bar predated the station - I'd always assumed it had been the station's bar!

As a student some friends and I explored a bit of the station one afternoon in 1984... (I remember nothing except that I went there!)

#Leith #Edinburgh #railways

https://threadinburgh.scot/2026/07/03/the-station-nobody-wanted-the-thread-about-leith-central/

An excellent post by @cocteautriplets on the troubled history of Leith Central station.

I had no idea the Central bar predated the station - I'd always assumed it had been the station's bar!

As a student some friends and I explored a bit of the station one afternoon in 1984... (I remember nothing except that I went there!)

#Leith #Edinburgh #railways

https://threadinburgh.scot/2026/07/03/the-station-nobody-wanted-the-thread-about-leith-central/

“The Station Nobody Wanted”: the thread about Leith Central

Has there ever been a more remarkable railway terminus than Leith Central?

Sandy Mullay, The Station Nobody Wanted, Blastpipe No. 73, Scottish Railway Preservation Society, 1986.

If you stand in the car park of the Tesco supermarket at the foot of Easter Road, you could be forgiven for thinking the mighty walls you are confronted with are the remnant of some long-gone defensive rampart. And you’d be half right; they are a monument to a bitter and protracted corporate conflict waged in 19th century Scotland, a fortification thrown up by one combatant to deliberately keep another out of its territory. For these are the remains of Leith Central Station, about which everything was remarkable: its size, its cost, its short operational life, and the fact it was built by a company that never wanted it.

Leith Central owes its origins to the interminable struggle between Scotland’s two predominant Victorian railways: Edinburgh’s North British and Glasgow’s Caledonian. Wherever the two met, they fought: each built lines to block, circumvent or duplicate the other’s. The eventual result in Edinburgh and Leith was a confused spaghetti of railways that didn’t necessarily serve the travelling public well.

As the final decade of the nineteenth century approached, the North British had the upper hand in the east of the country. The completion of the Forth Bridge approached and the hostilities had somewhat fizzled out for the time being. They might have been forgiven for thinking their position in the city was unassailable; the Caley’s mainline had never got further east than its Edinburgh terminus of Princes Street Station and their route to Leith was by way of a circuitous backtrack of a branch. The NB was content with this situation but the Caley had other ideas and was hatching a plan to upset this status quo. They would build a fourth line to Leith and would do so in the most bold and direct manner: tunnelling east beneath Princes Street to a new underground station at Waterloo Place. From there they would continue staight through the Calton Hill and over London Road before turning towards the heart of Leith. And they wouldn’t stop there, they would press on to connect with their existing line at Newhaven, thus completing a circular suburban line around the north of Edinburgh. This would be a counterbalance to the NB’s suburban circle around the south of the city. The threat to the incumbent did not end there, crucially this scheme would give the aggressor a direct route to Leith docks from the east, wherein lay access to the black diamonds of the Midlothian coal traffic.

Leith Town Council was desperate for better transport links to the burgh and enthusiastically threw its support behind the plans. But the full weight of the Edinburgh establishment was dead set against them: they would defile Princes Street and the disruption would far outweigh any benefits. The city thus sought to scupper the scheme. This was a point not lost on the North British, to whom the Caley’s plan was a direct declaration of war in its own front yard. That railway didn’t really want to build another line to Leith, but came to realise one could be used as a means to ruin the Caley’s eastern aspirations once and for all. More importantly, it could be used as political leverage to get them what they truly desired and desperately needed. The completion of the Forth Bridge had shown the capacity and facilities of Waverley, what should have been their premier station, to be totally inadequate. Transport chaos was reigning there and a complete rebuild and expansion was urgently required.

What would become the Leith Central scheme was not therefore a stand-alone proposal. It was actually just one part of a wider bill, passed as the Waverley Station Extension Act 1891 on August 5th that year. With this the NB got what it wanted; Leith Central was the price it had to pay the Corporations of Edinburgh and Leith for their support. From the very beginning  it was thus an unusual railway, built not because there was any real need for it, or because it would make its operator any money, or because the company even wanted it. It was purely to be built to spite the competition.

The Act gave powers to acquire twelve acres of land in Leith for a new station – a whole block between Leith Walk and Easter Road, bounded by Duke Street to the north. A third of this was to be made available as compensation to the Caley; Leith Town Council remained naively hopeful that the two sworn enemies might come to terms and open a joint station. This area was already well developed and a significant amount of property would have to be acquired and demolished. This included the Central Hall, a billiards emporium that had begun life as a Methodist Chapel, and the Central Bar just around the corner. The railway agreed to provide the proprietor of the latter, John Doig, with a replacement establishment. To this day that remains called the Central Bar and Doig’s name is still to be found within the stained glass panels displayed in its windows.

If Leith thought it would get its new railway any time soon then it was badly mistaken. The NB was focussed on the Waverley redevelopment and so deliberately dragged their heels. Progress was glacial, especially by Victorian standards. They took five years to authorise the start of work, which did not begin until February 1896. It took eighteen more months to complete the plans and submit them for approval of Leith’s councillors. Despite the latter’s chagrin at the pace they were most pleased with what they saw. Their only amendments were to request a prominent public clock on the corner with Duke Street and the raising of the height of the approach bridge over Easter Road by two feet. The railway readily agreed to the first but counter-proposed on the second that the Burgh should instead lower the street level by fifteen inches. This was accepted and to maintain the existing thresholds the pavement was stepped down to the carriageway, something that has long caught out drinkers stumbling out of the Persevere bar.

The appointed engineers were Cunningham, Blyth and Westland of George Street, who had recently completed the new North Bridge and doubled the approach tunnels to Waverley. In September 1898 the Railway Times reported that demolition works had concluded and initial construction begun on the station’s frontage onto Leith Walk (200 feet long) and Duke Street (220 feet). This was the only part of the project completed in any sort of haste: by the summer of 1899 its commercial premises were being let and bringing in valuable rental income. Work did not commence on the actual branch line from Waverley until 1901, a decade after the Act of Parliament. The pace remained positively lethargic and it took two further years to complete that mile of track.

As Leith Central began slowly to rise from the ground though, it was clear for all to see that the scale of it was staggering. It was 830 feet long from end-to-end. Its footprint was 15,900 square metres (about 4 acres), making it almost a quarter the size of Waverley. It was just a smidgen smaller than the Caley’s Princes Street terminus (16,500 square metres) and totally dwarfed Haymarket (8,400 square metres), the NB’s second station in the city.

The concourse and platforms were raised up to first floor level to allow the approach tracks to cross over Easter Road. Offices and waiting rooms were at this level and there was 4,500 square feet of vault space beneath. In sharp contrast to the notoriously low and claustrophobic Waverley, the whole lot was topped off with a lofty glass roof it engineered by none other than Sir William Arrol and Co. who had built the Forth Bridge. Rising above the four storey tenements adjacent, author Alasdair Wham described it as a “huge glass cavern over sixty feet high… which broadened from 100 feet at the Easter Road end to more than double that width”. A Scotsman columnist would later write “when a gale is blowing off the [Forth], the whole roof rattles and groans“. Despite the vast scale though there were only four platforms, although each was 790 feet long. The interior was electrically lit and so was the clock – the latter at the request of Leith Town Council who agreed to pay the meter.

Above the frontage on Duke Street were two further storeys containing flats for railway servants. The rear windows of these looked down upon the concourse and there was a private stairway down to platform level. One of the more notable occupants would be a clerk called George Mathers who in 1935 he was elected as MP for Linlithgowshire. He boasted to the newspapers that his commute to London was unique: he could get from his “own back door” to London Kings Cross without ever stepping out from a station and “getting his feet wet“.

The station was advantageously located at the Foot O’ the Walk with its principal public entrance was on the corner below its clock. Around the corner there was a ramp up to a vehicle entrance on the corner of Crown Place and from Easter Road there was a further entrance giving access through a subway beneath the tracks. (the extreme length of the station however gave a rather long hike to reach trains from this direction.)

To control the complex arrangement of approach tracks and carriage sidings, there was an 81-lever signal box located at track level at the eastern end. This also controlled access to a turntable on the opposite side of Easter Road, used for turning locomotives around at the end of their journey.

As 1903 dawned, Leith Town Council was frustrated that it was still not open. They wrote to the railway in April to enquire when that might change; the reply came that Major Pringle of the Board of Trade would begin his approval inspection on May 30th. This passed off without difficulty and opening was finally set for July 1st. The North British was now confronted with a final bill as monumental as the building: £500,000 (c. £57 million in 2026). This was a huge sum for the time, to put it into context it was a third of what the entire reconstruction of Waverley had set them back. The company had a long-standing reputation for this sort of spendthriftness, much to the frustration of its shareholders.

Yet the North British was also notoriously penny-pinching, and they took this to extremes in the utterly minimal effort they put into the opening of Leith Central. There was little in the way of advance advertising; a stationmaster had not yet been appointed; only a single ticket window was staffed and the refreshment rooms remained shuttered. No ceremony was arranged, and the Town Councils of Edinburgh and Leith weren’t even invited. On the appointed Wednesday morning, the 5:55AM to Waverley simply departed the station as the new timetable stated it would and that was that. The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch likened the little engine that pulled the first train out of the huge station to a “Skye Terrier pup in its four storey kennel“.

Such was the railway’s disinterest that they didn’t even bothered to open the entrances! Instead a single, poorly-signed and half-hidden door served as the only way in or out. This caused problems to members of the public who were trying to find their way in. The Rev. Thomas Crerar of North Leith United Free Church soon wrote to the company to complain that he had been unable to find it and instead “accidentally” found himself in the Central Bar. To begin with the only service offered was a shuttle service to Waverley. This took just 6 minutes from Leith (uphill) and 5 minutes on the return (downhill). These trains were nicknamed Penny Jerks on account of the short, sharp journey, but their frequency – just twice an hour – was poor. The Saturday service was lighter yet, but on the opening week a one-off excursion was run to Portobello and Musselburgh. Come the Sabbath however and the gates remained firmly locked to the travelling public, a precedent that was maintained for the entirety of its working life.

Despite their best efforts to discourage patronage the NB soon found they had a hit on their hands. Almost 16,000 tickets were sold in the first four days. The reason proved obvious – the competing tramway to Edinburgh remained horse-drawn for half the route before a change on to Edinburgh’s cable system; the infamous Pilrig Muddle. Slowly the railway began to respond to the success of their massive investment. Within a month they opened the main entrance beneath the clock, followed shortly thereafter by that on Easter Road. In September a permanent station master was appointed: Alexander Somerville from Abbeyhill. The same month the list of destinations was expanded by making Central the start and end point of the half-hourly “circle” services that ran around the Suburban & Southside Junction line (aka the South Sub). This was an operational benefit to the railway as previously trains had to be held at Waverley for 15 minutes, time instead used for the additional revenue-making run to Leith. Abbeyhill thus became the only intermediate direct stop between Central and Waverley, although space had been left between the tracks for another at Hawkhill. Finally, in December a second ticket window was opened.

The revised circle service proved a success too, having hitherto been rather unpopular. As a result the prices were lowered a new “Zone Ticket System” for regular commuters was introduced. It also allowed the old South Leith Station to finally be closed, its handful of services to and from Midlothian being relocated to Central. Further expansion of the destination list was limited to extending a few Glasgow and Dundee services through from Waverley. Thus for most of its life, Leith Central essentially remained an outsize terminus for weekday local commuters, punctuated by occasional busy spells for holiday, excursion and football specials.

Much of the initial bump of success was at the company’s own expense however: the North British found patronage at their North Leith station on Commercial Street suffered a 20% drop. The truth was that Leith only had so many passengers to offer and while the new station provided the quickest route to Edinburgh they were happy to use it. But the NB seemed content with this arrangement; they had seen off the challenge from the Caley and now they could sit back and profit from the lack of direct competition with minimal further effort.

On May 23rd 1915, Leith Central had the grim honour of receiving the first of over 120 local victims who had lost their lives in the Quintinshill Railway Disaster the previous day. These were the remains of the men of A & D Companies, 1/7th Royal Scots, a unit formed largely of volunteers from Leith. Most had departed the same station just a month earlier for Stenhousemuir, where they would complete their basic training before being ordered to the front at Gallipoli. On their return they were taken the short distance to a makeshift morgue in the Battalion’s drill hall on Dalmeny Street. This catastrophe caused an estimated 227 deaths and 246 injuries: the worst rail disaster in British history. The shattered remnants of the regiment would return through Leith Central once more after the war’s end to a heroes welcome.

When peace returned, the NB’s still maintained its competitive advantage on the Leith to Edinburgh traffic, but not for long. In 1922 the Pilrig Muddle was finally resolved after 28 years when Leith was integrated into Edinburgh’s new electric tramway. This caught the railway not just caught napping, but fast asleep: the “cars” served far more destinations, more frequently, were much faster for cross-town journeys and were cheaper.

The effect on Central’s traffic was immediate; it crashed. With its principal source of revenue largely poached, it was now patently obvious to any remaining doubters what Leith Central really was:

A massive White Elephant

W. A. C. Smith, writing about Leith Central in “Edinburgh’s Last Days of Steam”, 2003

The NB has been accused of taking its eye off the ball, however perhaps this can be excused. It was a time of great upheaval in the industry and it was facing a far more existential threat than trams. In 1923 the Government took the drastic action known in as “The Grouping“, which rationalised over one hundred companies into just four in an effort to make them profitable. The NB found itself merged into the new London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). This vast new organisation had much more pressing matters to worry about as than a provincial commuter station (even a very big one). They would therefore refrain from efforts to try and stimulate new sources of traffic on or modernise the Central branch and it remained steam worked until the end.

With not much to do around the place, one of the station master’s principal duties appears to have been holding the keys for the large numbers of flats and shops for let within the station. The railway tried to find uses for the excess of unused space around the place. A number of rooms were given over for training of their volunteer ambulance teams and competitions between the different stations were frequently held here. They also used it for the annual auction of the unclaimed lost property from across their network. The Evening News reported on a real Ali’s cave of bargains up for grabs. Lots ranged from expected items such as watches, golf clubs, tennis rackets, umbrellas, musical instruments, suitcases, spectacles, prams, bicycles and jewellery to the more unusual: deck chairs, a trouser press, a sewing machine, a wheelbarrow, false teeth, a basket of pot lids, a bell tent, sails for a yacht and even a collapsible boat!

For most of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, Central lived the life of a quiet, if vast, backwater. That changed in 1937 when it had its most eventful and unusual year. On June 23rd there was a “melee” outside when a party of Fascists – intent on making a public speech – was met, surrounded and attacked by the Leith Mob. Police who had been waiting for the trouble in the station took some time to restore order. On August 6th a workman, George Fraser of 53 Dumbiedykes Road, was killed when he fell through the station roof onto the platform below. He landed on his colleague Robert Beveridge, also of Dumbiedykes Road, who was seriously injured as a result.

On 29th October there was a serious early-morning fire, which spread from a waiting room and took nine hours to extinguish. Firefighters had to contend with the panes of glass in the roof above shattering in the heat and raining down shards upon them. When the smoke cleared it was found that the timber facings and decking of two of the platforms had been destroyed for a length of 112 yards. Five coaches and three horse vans were also burnt out. Little in the way of permanent damage was done though and services were back up and running the next day at 9AM. The same cannot be said for the resident pigeon population however, most of whom were asphyxiated by the smoke. A further fire in the roof on 30th November was more minor and was brought under control by a single fire engine, causing just £100 of damage.

The station had a relatively quiet war, with services cut back and the Easter Road entrance closed for reasons of economy. The long platforms meant it was regularly used for troop and hospital trains. The sales of lost property were particularly competitive during wartime as eager buyers sought to get items that were no longer readily available, particularly clothing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/47179713432

When peace returned the 1946/47 timetable issued by the LNER would be their penultimate. It shows the Jerks were week days only, with a small number of services working morning, mid-day and evening commuter patterns. There were twelve services per day from Leith. Three in the morning (the first at 5:41); five around mid-day including and four for the evening – the last departing at 18:10. There was a single through-train to Glasgow each day. From Edinburgh there were ten trips in the opposite direction; four for the morning (the first at 7:21), four for the mid-day and two in the evening, the last at 18:55. There were seven departures from Leith a day on the Suburban “outer circle” line, and ten in the opposite direction. As with the Jerks, these were concentrated in morning, mid-day and the early evening. The last train left Central each week day at 18:11, the last arrived at 19:00. On Saturdays the service was lighter yet and on Sunday there remained no service at all.

The following year, the second major change of ownership came and on 1st January 1948 the railways were nationalised. The first timetables issued by the new British Railways basically maintained the LNER’s scant service pattern at the station. An unusual visitor arrived in 1948 when an exhibition of new and unusual rolling stock was put on for the public. The star draw was the Silver Princess, a modern American showcase design built by the Budd company and with a striking exterior finish of polished, corrugated stainless steel.

Nationalisation ushered in a new era for the railways but for Leith Central it meant rationalisation. It was an obvious early candidate for cost cutting and in March 1952 the Scottish Region announced that all services would be withdrawn from April 7th that year: less than fifty years after they began. An alternative but lengthier route from Edinburgh to Leith would be maintained on the former Caledonian line from Princes Street Station to North Leith (which at this time was confusingly renamed Leith North!) Parcels traffic was re-routed to Waverley station and delivered onwards to Leith from there. The Scostman reported “there was a melancholy air of impending dissolution in the Central. A train was being prepared to go out on its journey through the suburbs. There is only one full-scale train a day from the Central – the 12:45 to Glasgow.” In a somewhat appropriate symmetry to the occasion of its opening, there were no ceremonials at closing. Just four years later, the last of the city’s trams would also be withdrawn: they had killed off Leith Central decades before and in turn were killed off by a deliberate policy of “busification”.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49512520986/in/photolist-2irfBuW-2j3H7or-2npqwSM-XVEzW3-2kBmVuA-2orYhB6-2jkWLwJ-2aygLjN-2g4gbQM-SPyAj3-2nCsqbD-2dfiX7F-FwivHN-2jtQsbn-2jw5G61-2nu2SFg-2b4tbsC-2aXH8NC-2kBKrxP-2meizEe-ahQGYA-2iYw7be-2quoJrq-2ipAoMz-2paa5NZ-2kDaDxT-2dpLx5y-2n2zfV2-2mUEF4F-2iUACkS-2o2HJpX-2k8kAxP-G6z1jy-GatKs7-PiB7sG-2gwqdWb-2nhKRBh-2kUDVE1-2fcYeZR-2hjD4kK-QTDKkb-7KdeUY-2jURgV5-2h7TCiT-2jeutfC-2hAwefp-e3wHHc-Q9MAQr-2qyhwf1-ZFF1re

Curiously, despite the removal of all its services, the station actually remained in use and the Outer Circle suburban trains continued to start and finish their journeys there: but the carriages were empty and you couldn’t get on or off! For a few years the place was used for such marshalling of services as well as the storage and cleaning of coaching stock. A new purpose came in 1955 when work began to convert it to a dedicated maintenance facility (code 64H) for the new generation of diesel rail cars. These were taking over Edinburgh’s remaining suburban rail routes and also those to Glasgow. The depot also served as a training school for these new vehicles. It’s somewhat ironic that these were exactly the sort of modern, efficient units that really could have benefited the station when it was in operation.

The new era would prove to be even shorter than the first. Edinburgh’s suburban rail network was cut back to almost nothing over the coming decade, the last services running in 1968, and in 1972 the Glasgow multiple units were replaced by locomotive stock. Much of Leith Central Depot’s work therefore evaporated before it ever really got going and it closed in 1972, its few remaining duties relocated to Millerhill and Haymarket.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49362392322/

A final passenger service had been worked on October 16th 1971, a special put on for enthusiasts, but in April the next year once again Central was closed without ceremony and found itself abandoned. The access bridge over Easter Road was removed within the year, definitely precluding any further railway usage.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/54917798746/

The railways could be a dangerous place to work and there were a number of fatalities at Leith Central and along its branch during its operational life.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/16881499619/

Plans did not take long to materialise for the next phase of Leith Central’s life. In March 1973 the Scotsman reported that Bovis Properties (Scotland) Ltd proposed to clear the site and redevelop it in an £8 million scheme for shops, offices and a 500 space car park. This ultimately came to nothing and in 1974 BR told the same paper they were “re-exploring the possibilities“. “Re-exploration” took four years and it was not until 1978 that Edinburgh District Council announced they were in negotiations to acquire the site and turn it into “Britain’s biggest indoor sports stadium“. This ambitious £6 million proposal would cater for twenty-seven different pursuits and would have included a central multi-purpose main arena with athletics track and further arenas for general sports, carpet bowls and squash. There would be two practice halls, a training gym and even a “projectile range“. The Council purchased the site for £440,000 in 1979 and spent a further £160,000 on planning.

The scheme was proposed by a Conservative controlled council, but in an odd reversal for the usual precedent of British politics it found itself cancelled by pressure from Labour ranks. This happened in April 1982 on account of ballooning costs and a lack of funds. The station had now been abandoned for a decade and was succumbing to the vandals as the authorities tried to work out a future for it.

With their sports centre scheme dead in the water, in 1983 the District decided to dispose of the problem site on the private housing market. There was an initial flurry of interest but only a single, derisory offer was forthcoming, one that less than half what the authority had paid for it. 1980s Leith was severely economically depressed and was already awash with brownfield residential development opportunities. The District reluctantly approved the sale to Barratt Developments but this was blocked in 1984 by an incoming Labour administration.

Once again it was back to the drawing board for Leith Central, which now entered the final and most notorious chapter of its life. Its vast interior was reduced to the haunt of alcoholics and drug addicts and would be immortalised in Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting. The title comes from the chapter “Trainspotting at Leith Central Station“, a sardonic joke on the fact there had been no trains to spot there in twenty years. While the station plays a symbolic part in the story, representative of “a disintegrating and ignored community“. In the prequel, Skagboys, the character Spud will misidentify the former Caley railway bridge crossing Leith Walk as “the auld line ootay Leith Central Station“.

The Labour District Council proposed a new scheme in 1986 that included a 30,000 square foot supermarket to help fund a new leisure centre. This proposal was immediately delayed however when Lothian Regional Council counter-proposed a new Leith Academy secondary school nearby that included community sports and recreation facilities, including a pool. Updated plans were made public the following year for a £12m scheme for a 35,000 square foot supermarket and a leisure pool (“the finest in Scotland“). All but the listed station buildings along Leith Walk and Duke Street, and northern retaining wall, would be demolished. With very limited public funding available, a private sector partner was brought in to finance and build the scheme: Walker Construction (Scotland) Ltd of Livingston.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52809440@N03/37552337810

Work was due to begin in October 1988 but an eleventh-hour spanner was thrown in the works when the Council was told that their intended leaseback financing for the pool was not viable. A revised financial package was approved in December; they would instead borrow £3m to build the shell of the pool themselves and Walkers would finance the interior fit-out and plant, which would be leased back. The Scottish Development Agency (SDA) contributed £1.4 million to clear and level the site, with the Supermarket being financed entirely privately.

The Trainspotting years came to an end in January 1989 when Dalton Demolition moved in and got to work. In March two passers-by were hospitalised and three cars were written-off when a 63 foot section of the station wall collapsed onto Duke Street. The contractors salvaged the station’s dressed stone and offered it for sale. Some pieces were acquired by the Scottish-Italian artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi who had been born next door in Crown Place. He incorporated them into the planting around his Manuscript of Monte Cassino sculpture outside St Mary’s Cathedral on Picardy Place. These stones were later relocated to London Road Gardens when the roads and public realm here were changed during the redevelopment of the St James Centre area. The statues were returned but the stones still languish forgotten and out of context there, with a nearby plaque commemorating the former Picardy Place roundabout!

In March 1990 Scotmid Co-operative were announced as the operators of the new supermarket and opened their doors on July 31st 1991. The leisure pool, by now Christened Leith Waterworld, was somewhat delayed and did not open until May 1992. In August that year, the final part of the station redevelopment began when the gap in the tenements on Easter Road, where the railway tracks had once burst through at first floor level, was filled with a new 5-storey block of flats. If you look closely at the façade of this block you will notice large pieces of sandstone inserted in it – these come from the station.

Much like its railway predecessor, Leith Waterworld was a grand facility that had taken a long time and a lot of money to build. It too was initially highly popular with the public but was also was unlikely to have ever been profitable. It operated at a deficit from day one and by 2004 was losing £1,500 a day. In was an all too familiar tale, its operators cut back opening hours to reduce losses, but this made it ever-harder for it to pay its way. Like the station before it, the leisure pool proved to have a similarly short service life. It closed after just 20 years in 2012 despite a spirited campaign to keep it open (and re-open it as a community-owned facility afterwards). It was bitter compensation to future generations that its closure was used to finance the refurbishment of the diving facilities at the Royal Commonwealth Pool ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

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“The Station Nobody Wanted”: the thread about Leith Central

Has there ever been a more remarkable railway terminus than Leith Central?

Sandy Mullay, The Station Nobody Wanted, Blastpipe No. 73, Scottish Railway Preservation Society, 1986.

If you stand in the car park of the Tesco supermarket at the foot of Easter Road, you could be forgiven for thinking the mighty walls you are confronted with are the remnant of some long-gone defensive rampart. And you’d be half right; they are a monument to a bitter and protracted corporate conflict waged in 19th century Scotland, a fortification thrown up by one combatant to deliberately keep another out of its territory. For these are the remains of Leith Central Station, about which everything was remarkable: its size, its cost, its short operational life, and the fact it was built by a company that never wanted it.

Leith Central owes its origins to the interminable struggle between Scotland’s two predominant Victorian railways: Edinburgh’s North British and Glasgow’s Caledonian. Wherever the two met, they fought: each built lines to block, circumvent or duplicate the other’s. The eventual result in Edinburgh and Leith was a confused spaghetti of railways that didn’t necessarily serve the travelling public well.

As the final decade of the nineteenth century approached, the North British had the upper hand in the east of the country. The completion of the Forth Bridge approached and the hostilities had somewhat fizzled out for the time being. They might have been forgiven for thinking their position in the city was unassailable; the Caley’s mainline had never got further east than its Edinburgh terminus of Princes Street Station and their route to Leith was by way of a circuitous backtrack of a branch. The NB was content with this situation but the Caley had other ideas and was hatching a plan to upset this status quo. They would build a fourth line to Leith and would do so in the most bold and direct manner: tunnelling east beneath Princes Street to a new underground station at Waterloo Place. From there they would continue staight through the Calton Hill and over London Road before turning towards the heart of Leith. And they wouldn’t stop there, they would press on to connect with their existing line at Newhaven, thus completing a circular suburban line around the north of Edinburgh. This would be a counterbalance to the NB’s suburban circle around the south of the city. The threat to the incumbent did not end there, crucially this scheme would give the aggressor a direct route to Leith docks from the east, wherein lay access to the black diamonds of the Midlothian coal traffic.

Leith Town Council was desperate for better transport links to the burgh and enthusiastically threw its support behind the plans. But the full weight of the Edinburgh establishment was dead set against them: they would defile Princes Street and the disruption would far outweigh any benefits. The city thus sought to scupper the scheme. This was a point not lost on the North British, to whom the Caley’s plan was a direct declaration of war in its own front yard. That railway didn’t really want to build another line to Leith, but came to realise one could be used as a means to ruin the Caley’s eastern aspirations once and for all. More importantly, it could be used as political leverage to get them what they truly desired and desperately needed. The completion of the Forth Bridge had shown the capacity and facilities of Waverley, what should have been their premier station, to be totally inadequate. Transport chaos was reigning there and a complete rebuild and expansion was urgently required.

What would become the Leith Central scheme was not therefore a stand-alone proposal. It was actually just one part of a wider bill, passed as the Waverley Station Extension Act 1891 on August 5th that year. With this the NB got what it wanted; Leith Central was the price it had to pay the Corporations of Edinburgh and Leith for their support. From the very beginning  it was thus an unusual railway, built not because there was any real need for it, or because it would make its operator any money, or because the company even wanted it. It was purely to be built to spite the competition.

The Act gave powers to acquire twelve acres of land in Leith for a new station – a whole block between Leith Walk and Easter Road, bounded by Duke Street to the north. A third of this was to be made available as compensation to the Caley; Leith Town Council remained naively hopeful that the two sworn enemies might come to terms and open a joint station. This area was already well developed and a significant amount of property would have to be acquired and demolished. This included the Central Hall, a billiards emporium that had begun life as a Methodist Chapel, and the Central Bar just around the corner. The railway agreed to provide the proprietor of the latter, John Doig, with a replacement establishment. To this day that remains called the Central Bar and Doig’s name is still to be found within the stained glass panels displayed in its windows.

If Leith thought it would get its new railway any time soon then it was badly mistaken. The NB was focussed on the Waverley redevelopment and so deliberately dragged their heels. Progress was glacial, especially by Victorian standards. They took five years to authorise the start of work, which did not begin until February 1896. It took eighteen more months to complete the plans and submit them for approval of Leith’s councillors. Despite the latter’s chagrin at the pace they were most pleased with what they saw. Their only amendments were to request a prominent public clock on the corner with Duke Street and the raising of the height of the approach bridge over Easter Road by two feet. The railway readily agreed to the first but counter-proposed on the second that the Burgh should instead lower the street level by fifteen inches. This was accepted and to maintain the existing thresholds the pavement was stepped down to the carriageway, something that has long caught out drinkers stumbling out of the Persevere bar.

The appointed engineers were Cunningham, Blyth and Westland of George Street, who had recently completed the new North Bridge and doubled the approach tunnels to Waverley. In September 1898 the Railway Times reported that demolition works had concluded and initial construction begun on the station’s frontage onto Leith Walk (200 feet long) and Duke Street (220 feet). This was the only part of the project completed in any sort of haste: by the summer of 1899 its commercial premises were being let and bringing in valuable rental income. Work did not commence on the actual branch line from Waverley until 1901, a decade after the Act of Parliament. The pace remained positively lethargic and it took two further years to complete that mile of track.

As Leith Central began slowly to rise from the ground though, it was clear for all to see that the scale of it was staggering. It was 830 feet long from end-to-end. Its footprint was 15,900 square metres (about 4 acres), making it almost a quarter the size of Waverley. It was just a smidgen smaller than the Caley’s Princes Street terminus (16,500 square metres) and totally dwarfed Haymarket (8,400 square metres), the NB’s second station in the city.

The concourse and platforms were raised up to first floor level to allow the approach tracks to cross over Easter Road. Offices and waiting rooms were at this level and there was 4,500 square feet of vault space beneath. In sharp contrast to the notoriously low and claustrophobic Waverley, the whole lot was topped off with a lofty glass roof it engineered by none other than Sir William Arrol and Co. who had built the Forth Bridge. Rising above the four storey tenements adjacent, author Alasdair Wham described it as a “huge glass cavern over sixty feet high… which broadened from 100 feet at the Easter Road end to more than double that width”. A Scotsman columnist would later write “when a gale is blowing off the [Forth], the whole roof rattles and groans“. Despite the vast scale though there were only four platforms, although each was 790 feet long. The interior was electrically lit and so was the clock – the latter at the request of Leith Town Council who agreed to pay the meter.

Above the frontage on Duke Street were two further storeys containing flats for railway servants. The rear windows of these looked down upon the concourse and there was a private stairway down to platform level. One of the more notable occupants would be a clerk called George Mathers who in 1935 he was elected as MP for Linlithgowshire. He boasted to the newspapers that his commute to London was unique: he could get from his “own back door” to London Kings Cross without ever stepping out from a station and “getting his feet wet“.

The station was advantageously located at the Foot O’ the Walk with its principal public entrance was on the corner below its clock. Around the corner there was a ramp up to a vehicle entrance on the corner of Crown Place and from Easter Road there was a further entrance giving access through a subway beneath the tracks. (the extreme length of the station however gave a rather long hike to reach trains from this direction.)

To control the complex arrangement of approach tracks and carriage sidings, there was an 81-lever signal box located at track level at the eastern end. This also controlled access to a turntable on the opposite side of Easter Road, used for turning locomotives around at the end of their journey.

As 1903 dawned, Leith Town Council was frustrated that it was still not open. They wrote to the railway in April to enquire when that might change; the reply came that Major Pringle of the Board of Trade would begin his approval inspection on May 30th. This passed off without difficulty and opening was finally set for July 1st. The North British was now confronted with a final bill as monumental as the building: £500,000 (c. £57 million in 2026). This was a huge sum for the time, to put it into context it was a third of what the entire reconstruction of Waverley had set them back. The company had a long-standing reputation for this sort of spendthriftness, much to the frustration of its shareholders.

Yet the North British was also notoriously penny-pinching, and they took this to extremes in the utterly minimal effort they put into the opening of Leith Central. There was little in the way of advance advertising; a stationmaster had not yet been appointed; only a single ticket window was staffed and the refreshment rooms remained shuttered. No ceremony was arranged, and the Town Councils of Edinburgh and Leith weren’t even invited. On the appointed Wednesday morning, the 5:55AM to Waverley simply departed the station as the new timetable stated it would and that was that. The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch likened the little engine that pulled the first train out of the huge station to a “Skye Terrier pup in its four storey kennel“.

Such was the railway’s disinterest that they didn’t even bothered to open the entrances! Instead a single, poorly-signed and half-hidden door served as the only way in or out. This caused problems to members of the public who were trying to find their way in. The Rev. Thomas Crerar of North Leith United Free Church soon wrote to the company to complain that he had been unable to find it and instead “accidentally” found himself in the Central Bar. To begin with the only service offered was a shuttle service to Waverley. This took just 6 minutes from Leith (uphill) and 5 minutes on the return (downhill). These trains were nicknamed Penny Jerks on account of the short, sharp journey, but their frequency – just twice an hour – was poor. The Saturday service was lighter yet, but on the opening week a one-off excursion was run to Portobello and Musselburgh. Come the Sabbath however and the gates remained firmly locked to the travelling public, a precedent that was maintained for the entirety of its working life.

Despite their best efforts to discourage patronage the NB soon found they had a hit on their hands. Almost 16,000 tickets were sold in the first four days. The reason proved obvious – the competing tramway to Edinburgh remained horse-drawn for half the route before a change on to Edinburgh’s cable system; the infamous Pilrig Muddle. Slowly the railway began to respond to the success of their massive investment. Within a month they opened the main entrance beneath the clock, followed shortly thereafter by that on Easter Road. In September a permanent station master was appointed: Alexander Somerville from Abbeyhill. The same month the list of destinations was expanded by making Central the start and end point of the half-hourly “circle” services that ran around the Suburban & Southside Junction line (aka the South Sub). This was an operational benefit to the railway as previously trains had to be held at Waverley for 15 minutes, time instead used for the additional revenue-making run to Leith. Abbeyhill thus became the only intermediate direct stop between Central and Waverley, although space had been left between the tracks for another at Hawkhill. Finally, in December a second ticket window was opened.

The revised circle service proved a success too, having hitherto been rather unpopular. As a result the prices were lowered a new “Zone Ticket System” for regular commuters was introduced. It also allowed the old South Leith Station to finally be closed, its handful of services to and from Midlothian being relocated to Central. Further expansion of the destination list was limited to extending a few Glasgow and Dundee services through from Waverley. Thus for most of its life, Leith Central essentially remained an outsize terminus for weekday local commuters, punctuated by occasional busy spells for holiday, excursion and football specials.

Much of the initial bump of success was at the company’s own expense however: the North British found patronage at their North Leith station on Commercial Street suffered a 20% drop. The truth was that Leith only had so many passengers to offer and while the new station provided the quickest route to Edinburgh they were happy to use it. But the NB seemed content with this arrangement; they had seen off the challenge from the Caley and now they could sit back and profit from the lack of direct competition with minimal further effort.

On May 23rd 1915, Leith Central had the grim honour of receiving the first of over 120 local victims who had lost their lives in the Quintinshill Railway Disaster the previous day. These were the remains of the men of A & D Companies, 1/7th Royal Scots, a unit formed largely of volunteers from Leith. Most had departed the same station just a month earlier for Stenhousemuir, where they would complete their basic training before being ordered to the front at Gallipoli. On their return they were taken the short distance to a makeshift morgue in the Battalion’s drill hall on Dalmeny Street. This catastrophe caused an estimated 227 deaths and 246 injuries: the worst rail disaster in British history. The shattered remnants of the regiment would return through Leith Central once more after the war’s end to a heroes welcome.

When peace returned, the NB’s still maintained its competitive advantage on the Leith to Edinburgh traffic, but not for long. In 1922 the Pilrig Muddle was finally resolved after 28 years when Leith was integrated into Edinburgh’s new electric tramway. This caught the railway not just caught napping, but fast asleep: the “cars” served far more destinations, more frequently, were much faster for cross-town journeys and were cheaper.

The effect on Central’s traffic was immediate; it crashed. With its principal source of revenue largely poached, it was now patently obvious to any remaining doubters what Leith Central really was:

A massive White Elephant

W. A. C. Smith, writing about Leith Central in “Edinburgh’s Last Days of Steam”, 2003

The NB has been accused of taking its eye off the ball, however perhaps this can be excused. It was a time of great upheaval in the industry and it was facing a far more existential threat than trams. In 1923 the Government took the drastic action known in as “The Grouping“, which rationalised over one hundred companies into just four in an effort to make them profitable. The NB found itself merged into the new London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). This vast new organisation had much more pressing matters to worry about as than a provincial commuter station (even a very big one). They would therefore refrain from efforts to try and stimulate new sources of traffic on or modernise the Central branch and it remained steam worked until the end.

With not much to do around the place, one of the station master’s principal duties appears to have been holding the keys for the large numbers of flats and shops for let within the station. The railway tried to find uses for the excess of unused space around the place. A number of rooms were given over for training of their volunteer ambulance teams and competitions between the different stations were frequently held here. They also used it for the annual auction of the unclaimed lost property from across their network. The Evening News reported on a real Ali’s cave of bargains up for grabs. Lots ranged from expected items such as watches, golf clubs, tennis rackets, umbrellas, musical instruments, suitcases, spectacles, prams, bicycles and jewellery to the more unusual: deck chairs, a trouser press, a sewing machine, a wheelbarrow, false teeth, a basket of pot lids, a bell tent, sails for a yacht and even a collapsible boat!

For most of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, Central lived the life of a quiet, if vast, backwater. That changed in 1937 when it had its most eventful and unusual year. On June 23rd there was a “melee” outside when a party of Fascists – intent on making a public speech – was met, surrounded and attacked by the Leith Mob. Police who had been waiting for the trouble in the station took some time to restore order. On August 6th a workman, George Fraser of 53 Dumbiedykes Road, was killed when he fell through the station roof onto the platform below. He landed on his colleague Robert Beveridge, also of Dumbiedykes Road, who was seriously injured as a result.

On 29th October there was a serious early-morning fire, which spread from a waiting room and took nine hours to extinguish. Firefighters had to contend with the panes of glass in the roof above shattering in the heat and raining down shards upon them. When the smoke cleared it was found that the timber facings and decking of two of the platforms had been destroyed for a length of 112 yards. Five coaches and three horse vans were also burnt out. Little in the way of permanent damage was done though and services were back up and running the next day at 9AM. The same cannot be said for the resident pigeon population however, most of whom were asphyxiated by the smoke. A further fire in the roof on 30th November was more minor and was brought under control by a single fire engine, causing just £100 of damage.

The station had a relatively quiet war, with services cut back and the Easter Road entrance closed for reasons of economy. The long platforms meant it was regularly used for troop and hospital trains. The sales of lost property were particularly competitive during wartime as eager buyers sought to get items that were no longer readily available, particularly clothing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/47179713432

When peace returned the 1946/47 timetable issued by the LNER would be their penultimate. It shows the Jerks were week days only, with a small number of services working morning, mid-day and evening commuter patterns. There were twelve services per day from Leith. Three in the morning (the first at 5:41); five around mid-day including and four for the evening – the last departing at 18:10. There was a single through-train to Glasgow each day. From Edinburgh there were ten trips in the opposite direction; four for the morning (the first at 7:21), four for the mid-day and two in the evening, the last at 18:55. There were seven departures from Leith a day on the Suburban “outer circle” line, and ten in the opposite direction. As with the Jerks, these were concentrated in morning, mid-day and the early evening. The last train left Central each week day at 18:11, the last arrived at 19:00. On Saturdays the service was lighter yet and on Sunday there remained no service at all.

The following year, the second major change of ownership came and on 1st January 1948 the railways were nationalised. The first timetables issued by the new British Railways basically maintained the LNER’s scant service pattern at the station. An unusual visitor arrived in 1948 when an exhibition of new and unusual rolling stock was put on for the public. The star draw was the Silver Princess, a modern American showcase design built by the Budd company and with a striking exterior finish of polished, corrugated stainless steel.

Nationalisation ushered in a new era for the railways but for Leith Central it meant rationalisation. It was an obvious early candidate for cost cutting and in March 1952 the Scottish Region announced that all services would be withdrawn from April 7th that year: less than fifty years after they began. An alternative but lengthier route from Edinburgh to Leith would be maintained on the former Caledonian line from Princes Street Station to North Leith (which at this time was confusingly renamed Leith North!) Parcels traffic was re-routed to Waverley station and delivered onwards to Leith from there. The Scostman reported “there was a melancholy air of impending dissolution in the Central. A train was being prepared to go out on its journey through the suburbs. There is only one full-scale train a day from the Central – the 12:45 to Glasgow.” In a somewhat appropriate symmetry to the occasion of its opening, there were no ceremonials at closing. Just four years later, the last of the city’s trams would also be withdrawn: they had killed off Leith Central decades before and in turn were killed off by a deliberate policy of “busification”.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49512520986/in/photolist-2irfBuW-2j3H7or-2npqwSM-XVEzW3-2kBmVuA-2orYhB6-2jkWLwJ-2aygLjN-2g4gbQM-SPyAj3-2nCsqbD-2dfiX7F-FwivHN-2jtQsbn-2jw5G61-2nu2SFg-2b4tbsC-2aXH8NC-2kBKrxP-2meizEe-ahQGYA-2iYw7be-2quoJrq-2ipAoMz-2paa5NZ-2kDaDxT-2dpLx5y-2n2zfV2-2mUEF4F-2iUACkS-2o2HJpX-2k8kAxP-G6z1jy-GatKs7-PiB7sG-2gwqdWb-2nhKRBh-2kUDVE1-2fcYeZR-2hjD4kK-QTDKkb-7KdeUY-2jURgV5-2h7TCiT-2jeutfC-2hAwefp-e3wHHc-Q9MAQr-2qyhwf1-ZFF1re

Curiously, despite the removal of all its services, the station actually remained in use and the Outer Circle suburban trains continued to start and finish their journeys there: but the carriages were empty and you couldn’t get on or off! For a few years the place was used for such marshalling of services as well as the storage and cleaning of coaching stock. A new purpose came in 1955 when work began to convert it to a dedicated maintenance facility (code 64H) for the new generation of diesel rail cars. These were taking over Edinburgh’s remaining suburban rail routes and also those to Glasgow. The depot also served as a training school for these new vehicles. It’s somewhat ironic that these were exactly the sort of modern, efficient units that really could have benefited the station when it was in operation.

The new era would prove to be even shorter than the first. Edinburgh’s suburban rail network was cut back to almost nothing over the coming decade, the last services running in 1968, and in 1972 the Glasgow multiple units were replaced by locomotive stock. Much of Leith Central Depot’s work therefore evaporated before it ever really got going and it closed in 1972, its few remaining duties relocated to Millerhill and Haymarket.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49362392322/

A final passenger service had been worked on October 16th 1971, a special put on for enthusiasts, but in April the next year once again Central was closed without ceremony and found itself abandoned. The access bridge over Easter Road was removed within the year, definitely precluding any further railway usage.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/54917798746/

The railways could be a dangerous place to work and there were a number of fatalities at Leith Central and along its branch during its operational life.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/16881499619/

Plans did not take long to materialise for the next phase of Leith Central’s life. In March 1973 the Scotsman reported that Bovis Properties (Scotland) Ltd proposed to clear the site and redevelop it in an £8 million scheme for shops, offices and a 500 space car park. This ultimately came to nothing and in 1974 BR told the same paper they were “re-exploring the possibilities“. “Re-exploration” took four years and it was not until 1978 that Edinburgh District Council announced they were in negotiations to acquire the site and turn it into “Britain’s biggest indoor sports stadium“. This ambitious £6 million proposal would cater for twenty-seven different pursuits and would have included a central multi-purpose main arena with athletics track and further arenas for general sports, carpet bowls and squash. There would be two practice halls, a training gym and even a “projectile range“. The Council purchased the site for £440,000 in 1979 and spent a further £160,000 on planning.

The scheme was proposed by a Conservative controlled council, but in an odd reversal for the usual precedent of British politics it found itself cancelled by pressure from Labour ranks. This happened in April 1982 on account of ballooning costs and a lack of funds. The station had now been abandoned for a decade and was succumbing to the vandals as the authorities tried to work out a future for it.

With their sports centre scheme dead in the water, in 1983 the District decided to dispose of the problem site on the private housing market. There was an initial flurry of interest but only a single, derisory offer was forthcoming, one that less than half what the authority had paid for it. 1980s Leith was severely economically depressed and was already awash with brownfield residential development opportunities. The District reluctantly approved the sale to Barratt Developments but this was blocked in 1984 by an incoming Labour administration.

Once again it was back to the drawing board for Leith Central, which now entered the final and most notorious chapter of its life. Its vast interior was reduced to the haunt of alcoholics and drug addicts and would be immortalised in Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting. The title comes from the chapter “Trainspotting at Leith Central Station“, a sardonic joke on the fact there had been no trains to spot there in twenty years. While the station plays a symbolic part in the story, representative of “a disintegrating and ignored community“. In the prequel, Skagboys, the character Spud will misidentify the former Caley railway bridge crossing Leith Walk as “the auld line ootay Leith Central Station“.

The Labour District Council proposed a new scheme in 1986 that included a 30,000 square foot supermarket to help fund a new leisure centre. This proposal was immediately delayed however when Lothian Regional Council counter-proposed a new Leith Academy secondary school nearby that included community sports and recreation facilities, including a pool. Updated plans were made public the following year for a £12m scheme for a 35,000 square foot supermarket and a leisure pool (“the finest in Scotland“). All but the listed station buildings along Leith Walk and Duke Street, and northern retaining wall, would be demolished. With very limited public funding available, a private sector partner was brought in to finance and build the scheme: Walker Construction (Scotland) Ltd of Livingston.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52809440@N03/37552337810

Work was due to begin in October 1988 but an eleventh-hour spanner was thrown in the works when the Council was told that their intended leaseback financing for the pool was not viable. A revised financial package was approved in December; they would instead borrow £3m to build the shell of the pool themselves and Walkers would finance the interior fit-out and plant, which would be leased back. The Scottish Development Agency (SDA) contributed £1.4 million to clear and level the site, with the Supermarket being financed entirely privately.

The Trainspotting years came to an end in January 1989 when Dalton Demolition moved in and got to work. In March two passers-by were hospitalised and three cars were written-off when a 63 foot section of the station wall collapsed onto Duke Street. The contractors salvaged the station’s dressed stone and offered it for sale. Some pieces were acquired by the Scottish-Italian artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi who had been born next door in Crown Place. He incorporated them into the planting around his Manuscript of Monte Cassino sculpture outside St Mary’s Cathedral on Picardy Place. These stones were later relocated to London Road Gardens when the roads and public realm here were changed during the redevelopment of the St James Centre area. The statues were returned but the stones still languish forgotten and out of context there, with a nearby plaque commemorating the former Picardy Place roundabout!

In March 1990 Scotmid Co-operative were announced as the operators of the new supermarket and opened their doors on July 31st 1991. The leisure pool, by now Christened Leith Waterworld, was somewhat delayed and did not open until May 1992. In August that year, the final part of the station redevelopment began when the gap in the tenements on Easter Road, where the railway tracks had once bursty through at first floor level, was filled with a new 5-storey block of flats. If you look closely at the facade of this block you will notice large pieces of sandstone inserted in it – these come from the station.

Much like its railway predecessor, Leith Waterworld was a grand facility that had taken a long time and a lot of money to build. It too was initially highly popular with the public but was also was unlikely to have ever been profitible. It operated at a deficit from day one and by 2004 was losing £1,500 a day. In was an all too familiar tale, its operators cut back opening hours to reduce losses, but this made it ever-harder for it to pay its way. Like the station before it, the leisure pool proved to have a similarly short service life. It closed after just 20 years in 2012 despite a spirited campaign to keep it open (and re-open it as a community-owned facility afterwards). It was bitter compensation that its closure was used to find the savings to finance refurbishment of the diving facilities at the Royal Commonwealth Pool ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

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Funny how some terrorists acts on minority communities go almost completely unnoticed....

https://searchlightmagazine.com/2026/06/farage-and-reform-uk-to-blame-for-horror-knife-attacks-edinburgh-marchers-told/

#Terrorism #Islamophobia #Edinburgh #Leith #AntiRacism #NigelFarage #Farage #FarRIght #Fascism #TommyRobinson

Funny how some terrorists acts on minority communities go almost completely unnoticed....

https://searchlightmagazine.com/2026/06/farage-and-reform-uk-to-blame-for-horror-knife-attacks-edinburgh-marchers-told/

#Terrorism #Islamophobia #Edinburgh #Leith #AntiRacism #NigelFarage #Farage #FarRIght #Fascism #TommyRobinson

☔️  Good morning Edinburgh. Tuesday’s headlines: Armed robber gets laughed out of Gorgie shop, rain for royals’ Holyrood Garden Party, Morningside Makers' Market today + up close with Leith yellow giants

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-tuesday-30-june-2026/

Photo by: Colin Cohen

#edinburgh
#scotland
#leith

☔️  Good morning Edinburgh. Tuesday’s headlines: Armed robber gets laughed out of Gorgie shop, rain for royals’ Holyrood Garden Party, Morningside Makers' Market today + up close with Leith yellow giants

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-tuesday-30-june-2026/

Photo by: Colin Cohen

#edinburgh
#scotland
#leith

Another week, another protest march...

This time it was Stand Up To Racism - Edinburgh "Reclaim The Streets", in opposition to last week's racist knife attacks in Edinburgh and in support of our neighbours.

There were lots of placards of course. But I particularly liked this one, which summed up the mood well. (Other photos will follow. Sometime.)

#StandUpToRacism #Edinburgh #Leith #NaePasaran #NaeNazis

Another week, another protest march...

This time it was Stand Up To Racism - Edinburgh "Reclaim The Streets", in opposition to last week's racist knife attacks in Edinburgh and in support of our neighbours.

There were lots of placards of course. But I particularly liked this one, which summed up the mood well. (Other photos will follow. Sometime.)

#StandUpToRacism #Edinburgh #Leith #NaePasaran #NaeNazis

#OwenJones

#AntiMuslimAttack #Leith

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Ob3ZZD9Sc&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1HQg

#Media #MediaCoverage #Islamophobia #Racusm

#OwenJones

#AntiMuslimAttack #Leith

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Ob3ZZD9Sc&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1HQg

#Media #MediaCoverage #Islamophobia #Racusm

Please attend if you can to show that racism and islamophobia is unacceptable in #Leith or Edinburgh.

Award-winning garden opens in Edinburgh after community campaign https://www.allforgardening.com/1838492/award-winning-garden-opens-in-edinburgh-after-community-campaign/ #CityOfEdinburghCouncil #EdinburghCouncil #florist #garden #Leith #yorkshire

Award-winning garden opens in Edinburgh after community campaign https://www.allforgardening.com/1838492/award-winning-garden-opens-in-edinburgh-after-community-campaign/ #CityOfEdinburghCouncil #EdinburghCouncil #florist #garden #Leith #yorkshire

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Monday’s headlines: Five injured in 'anti-Muslim' attacks, 'Pride teaches us that hate will never win', airport back to normal after 'bomb' scare + orcas spotted in the Forth

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-monday-22-june-2026/

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#scotland
#leith

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Friday’s headlines: Update on bid to ban new data centres, 'Leith Legends' walk 3,000 miles, new Irvine Welsh documentary + your weekend guide

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-weekend-edition-12-14-june-2026/

Photo: @TomDuffinPhotos

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🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Friday’s headlines: Update on bid to ban new data centres, 'Leith Legends' walk 3,000 miles, new Irvine Welsh documentary + your weekend guide

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-weekend-edition-12-14-june-2026/

Photo: @TomDuffinPhotos

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🪩 In this week’s Edinburgh Culture Minute newsletter: Kate Adie at Fringe by the Sea, free St Andrew Sq cinema this weekend, Leith Festival + a big summer for local mums' podcast

📬 Landing in paying subscribers' inboxes now and available online here: https://www.edinburghminute.com/edinburgh-culture-minute-2026-copy/ #edinburgh #leith #scotland

Rails to Trails: the thread about how North Edinburgh got its cycle paths

On this day (June 1st) 40 years ago, to the tune of the pipes, a councillor cut the ceremonial ribbon and opened a section of cycle path in the north of Edinburgh. This was a rather special bit of cycle path; it was the result of direct action. Over the course of a single week it had been reclaimed from the trackbed of an old railway by a group of spade-wielding and wheelbarrow-pushing volunteers. Wind the clock forward four decades and from these humble beginnings has grown a network of almost 20km (12 miles) of such paths in this part of the city. The credit for this sits almost entirely with the relentless (and often thankless) hard work of a single, slightly anarchic organisation. This thread is the story of how the North Edinburgh Path Network came to be.

Railways arrived in Edinburgh in 1831 with the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway (better known as “The Innocent”) which approached a terminus at St. Leonard’s from the south. In the following decade four other lines converged on the city from the points of the compass. In 1842 the Edinburgh & Glasgow arrived from the west as far as Haymarket and the first section of the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven approached from the north to link the city with the Forth ports and from there north to Fife. In 1846 the North British blasted its way through Calton Hill from the east and in 1848 the Caledonian arrived at Princes Street from the southwest. These last two companies came to dominance, the NB in particular on the east coast. Over the next fifty or so years they fought a protracted and at times exceedingly bitter war with each other for traffic, routes and rights of access and Edinburgh was just one of the battlefields of this war. In particular each sought to corner the lucrative dock and industrial traffic of Leith and Granton, sprouting a tangled web of rival lines and counter-lines as they vied for supremacy.

Most of these lines offered passenger services but many proved to be marginally profitable from the outset and as a result stations began to be closed as early as 1905. Wartime economies in 1917 saw further closures; some were temporary but others such as Powderhall were for good. These continued during the lean economic years of the 1920s. A few new suburban halts were built as the city began to sprawl outwards in the 1930s but in the years following WW2 closures began again. Most lines remained busy with freight traffic at this time but by the dawn of the ‘Sixties, the times were a-changin’. Shifting government priorities, industrial decline and the move of passengers from rails to the roads precipitated a rapid run-down and closure of nearly all the railways in the north of the city.

This left many miles of disused railway infrastructure in the north of the city, which for generations of local government and Scottish Office planners offered an irresistible blank canvas on which to build new roads. Much of it therefore found itself reserved in strategic plans for schemes such as the Western Approach Road or the Ferry Road Relief Road. Edinburgh Corporation and its successors began to acquire the land for this purpose. It is therefore ironic that it was this car-brained official thinking that would preserve these routes from other development until an alternative use presented itself.

One such alternative use was first mooted way back in 1968 when Colinton Amenity Association approached both Edinburgh and Midlothian with a view to acquiring the abandoned Balerno Branch railway for conversion into a “unique walkway” along the Water of Leith. This would ultimately become part of the Water of Leith Walkway. The first such railway path – the term then in vogue for such schemes – in Scotland was an 860 yard route opened at Victoria Park in Glasgow in June 1970. Neither of these schemes were cycling routes however. The first planned from the outset as such in the UK was the High Peak Trail in Derbyshire, which began in 1971. In Edinburgh it was 1975 when such a proposal was first made as part of a £90m local development and regeneration plan for Leith. This referred to the formation of “footpath[s] and cycleway[s]” on former railway lines, suggesting routes between Warriston and Coburg Street and from Pilrig to Seafield.

The Leith Local Plan was published at a time of great change in Scottish local government. That year the old unitary authority of the Corporation of the City of Edinburgh was abolished (along with all the old burgh, town and county councils in the country) to be replaced by a two tier system – Edinburgh District Council and Lothian Regional Council. While the Region had transport within its remit (thus, in theory, cycle paths) the District was responsible for recreation and regeneration and therefore also had them within its remit.

In 1977 Lothian Region published its first transport strategy in its inaugural Structural Plan. Detailed in its many pages there were multiple major road schemes but not a single mention of cycling. This mobilised members of Friends of the Earth in Edinburgh who formed SPOKES, the Lothian Cycle Campaign that year specifically to represent against the plan and to lobby in upcoming council elections.

To ensure that council policies actively encourage cycling and make full provision for it, as part of an overall strategy through which all members of the public can enjoy cheap, safe and efficient travel for work and leisure

The second of Spokes’ two founding objectives, from Spokes Newsletter no. 1, early 1978

The campaign group got off to a good start with the unlikely assistance of Conservative District Councillor Ralph Brereton. His irate letter to The Scotsman about their campaign to permit cycling across the Meadows provoked an unintended backlash that garnered significant free publicity and support for his intended target:

Parks are for quiet, decent people. SPOKES can get lost and take its Commie friends with it. Who wants a proletarian dictatorship anyway? Not me, and not Marchmont.

Ralph Brereton, “Conservative Councillor for Marchmont, and proud of it”. The Scotsman, May 8th 1978

In 1979 further campaign pressure was applied on the Region by the Scottish Association for Public Transport who recommended turning old railways in Edinburgh into cycle paths where there was not the money to turn them into a metro or tram system. This lobbying proved effective and in December 1979 council officials were instructed to investigate further. In 1980 a price of £305,000 was agreed with British Rail for former railways to Granton and North Leith (marked G and L in red on the map below). The overlapping remits of the two authority tiers for implementing cycle paths might have found them either either working in isolation or at cross purposes. But with remarkable foresight, Spokes had used the Structure Plan consultation to insert a policy on cycling that obliged the Region and District to co-operate in this area.

The District therefore separately began acquiring former railway routes in North Leith (marked N in blue on above map) and also between Easter Road and Seafield (marked W in red). This was financed by the Scottish Development Agency (SDA) which had jointly inherited the 1975 Leith Local Plan and its cycle path proposals. The SDA had actually been trying to get this land off of British Rail since 1976 but had found itself in the “ludicrous situation” of two public bodies squabbling amongst themselves over something of relatively inconsequential financial value. The SDA wanted a quick and cheap sale of the land valued as derelict, BR was holding out for the higher price it could get for industrial development sites.

With the two council tiers now dipping their toes deeper into path schemes, Spokes saw the opportunity to coordinate their efforts towards a coherent, contiguous, off-road cycling network for the north of the city. To this end in January 1981 they published the report Rails to Trails, which detailed a vision to “provide safe and convenient commuter links between the northern suburbs and the city centre“. This was the genesis of what would become the North Edinburgh Path Network (NEPN). Although its focus was obviously on cycling it was made clear from the outset that nothing should “conflict with the needs of pedestrians using the routes“.

In May 1981 the Secretary of State for Scotland, George Younger, gave Lothian Region permission to set aside £610,000 over five years to convert its railway trackbeds in Edinburgh into paths for cycling and walking. They also sought permission to formally abandon the road schemes planned for these same lines but the Secretary of State refused to allow them to be removed from the Structure Plan. A threat thus hung over these paths before they were even begun that they might find themselves turned into roads. On July 6th that year the Region formally adopted its cycling policy statement, one which was remarkably similar to the second of Spokes ‘ founding objectives!

It is the policy of the Regional Council to allow greater freedom of movement to pedestrians or and cyclists and to encourage more people to walk and cycle for work and leisure journeys (Structure Plan – paragraphs 76 and 13l4(a)).

Lothian Regional Council circular from the Director of Highways P. J. Mason, 1981

In October the Region put its proposals – which looked awfully similar to those sketched out by Spokes in Rails to Trails – out to public consultation. The race was now set between them and the District to complete Edinburgh’s first railway cycle path. The latter won, just, and on June 15th 1982 the mile and a half route between Warriston Crescent and Couper Street in Leith was opened by Lord Provost Tom Morgan. It had cost £250,000, a significant amount of money on account of the retaining wall of the river bank and four bridges needing to be repaired. John McCracken of the SDA handed the route over to the city and said it would “make a significant contribution to the agency’s environmental improvement programme which is rapidly transforming Leith“. A further £110,000 was spent on landscaping the old coal yard at Junction Bridge into the Coalie Park area and in the November the project was awarded a Civic Trust Awards commendation.

From the outset this new route was part of the nascent Water of Leith Walkway and was signed as such. At this time it was strictly speaking two separate paths, the railway between Powderhall and Granton was still in active use and cut it in half at the Bonnington Level Crossing. This resulted in a detour through the allotments at Warriston, beneath the active line. As a result each half of the path got a separate name; from Coalie Park to the level crossing it is the Water of Leith Path and further west it becomes the Warriston Path. Initially the surface was compressed whindust and cycling was only officially “tolerated” at policy level rather than formally recognised by signage. In 1984 Spokes took the authorities to task over this ambiguity after one of its members was stopped by the police for daring to cycle here. Since then blue permission signs have appeared along these and other paths to this effect.

Lothian Region were not far behind and the first section of their Innocent Path in the southeast of the city opened on 11th August 1982, running about a mile between Duddingston Road West and the Wells o’ Wearie. Here it terminated at the entrance to the Innocent Tunnel which remained closed at this time. Again the surface was compressed whindust, making it suitable for use as a bridleway but rather useless for cycling in the winter, and as it was felt to be a rural setting no street lighting was provided. Information boards on the history of the railway here were provided, this is something has been widely repeated for other railway paths in the city. The £40,000 project budget included £27,000 provided as labour by the Manpower Services Commission (MSC).

The ribbon was cut by Lynda Chalker MP, Under-Secretary of State for the Department of Transport. Spokes attended this ceremony “in force” to “confront the Minister” over the fact that Government policy towards cycling in Scotland was lagging far behind England and Wales. They charged that there were no central studies for turning disused railways into paths, the Scottish Office had no technical or policy documents in this area, had no cycling officer and made no grants available to Councils for cycling schemes. After a consultation in 1985 on options to extend this route into the city far as St Leonard’s work commenced in 1987 to refurbish the tunnel and it was reopened in 1989.

The Innocent however can not be considered part of the North Edinburgh routes and it was September 1982 when the Region approved the laying of a whindust surface and adding street lighting for its two lines that forked north from Craigleith to Davidsons Mains and to Crewe Toll. The former section was opened on 21st November 1983 by Tony Gaffney of the Institute of Civil Engineers having cost £63,000, three quarters of it as labour provided by the MSC. The section to Crewe Toll followed the next year, as did work on the former Corstorphine branch from Balgreen. At this time Liberal councillor and Spokes member (the late) Donald Gorrie was able to push for the adoption of a 3 metre-wide tarmac surface as a standard for future work. This was best practice developed by the forerunner of Sustrans for the Bristol & Bath Railway Path, on which they had been working since 1979.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/15255410973/

The District at this time began work on their path from Quarryholes on Easter Road to Seafield and Leith Links. They specified this as a “trim track“, with numerous pieces of wooden exercise equipment added along the route. The original 1975 plans connected this route all the way to Pilrig Park but the bridges that carried it across Easter Road and Leith Walk had been demolished in 1980. The Restalrig Railway Path has therefore always been somewhat cut off from the rest of the railway path network. Its surface was the usual whindust, seasonally impassable, it had no street lighting and most of its access points were narrow steps. This was a situation not improved upon until 2009.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/beqi/3282799986/

Meanwhile back in North Leith, the District Council and the SDA had been infilling the railway cutting that ran through Victoria Park and between Gosford Place and Connaught Place. As this work approached its conclusion a path was approved to connect with the new path along the Water of Leith. This scheme was adopted by the Leith Boys’ Brigade to mark their centenary in 1983 and they raised £1,000 towards the cost of the landscaping of this section. It would be named Stedfastgate in their honour (from the traditional spelling of their motto of Sure & Stedfast) when it was opened on October 8th 1983.

In 1983 the Scottish Office, after continuous pressure from Spokes, started to play catch-up with what was happening in England. They commissioned a national feasibility study on re-opening old railway lines as cycle routes – the Scottish Railway Path and Cycle Route Project – led by John Grimshaw of Bristol-based Cyclebag (the direct predecessor of Sustrans, now the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust). Again the MSC provided the labour for this project; ten unemployed professionals were engaged as surveyors and draughtsmen and their tasking included photographing every disused railway bridge in the country! At the same time Grimshaw was also contracted by Lothian Region to undertake a similar exercise within their territory. The reports for both of these projects would be published in 1985 and would propose more than 800 kilometres of routes, 250km of which were in Edinburgh and the Lothians.

1986 proved to be a very productive year for the path network in the north of the city. The Region had been pressing on with its projects and these were now coming to fruition. An extending of the path south from Craigleith, begun in 1984, was opened by Councillor Tom Ponton on May 5th as far as the former Murrayfield Station. The District Council contributed £14,000 in labour by youths on their Special Measures Programme. The viaduct over the Water of Leith here caused problems at first, with objects being thrown from it onto houses and parked cars below. Metal barriers were installed along the parapets but a proposal by local residents to completely enclose the bridge in a wire cage was rejected. Soon afterwards the section east from Crewe Toll to the former Granton Road station also opened. The latter site proved something of an obstacle to future progress however as the trackbed had become heavily flooded and turned into something of a quagmire.

Spokes was not however content with the pace of change and decided to take matters directly into their own hands. In March 1986 they publicly announced a project to mark European Road Safety Year – they would clear and resurface a mile-long section of path north of Crewe Toll all by themselves. They gave themselves just seven days to complete this ambitious scheme, coinciding with National Bike Week from May 24th to 31st. Around fifty enthusiastic volunteers signed up to work under the supervision of John Grimshaw. Lothian Region provided a mechanical grader to strip the surface and 1,000 tons of hardcore and 250 tons of whindust dressing were laid, much of it moved by hand. These materials had been paid for by the Region who had also arranged the lease on the land from British Rail and committed to laying a tarmac surface and installing lighting within three years. Pupils from nearby St David’s R.C. Primary School helped to plant trees along the route with the Lord Provost.

Work was completed in time for the planned opening on June 1st and the ribbon was cut by Councillor Ron Muir, Vice-Chair of Lothian’s Transportation Committee, to the accompaniment of the Nor’ Loch Highland Pipe Band. However it very nearly didn’t happen: an administrative disaster almost befell the project at the 11th hour when council lawyers decide it required the same legal consent as a road project but that they were much too busy to deal with it. It took crucial inside assistance from long-time supporter Councillor Donald Gorrie for the necessary paperwork to be rushed through and the statutory neighbour notifications were delivered by bicycle in the nick of time. Completion of this route was seen as a missing link connecting the paths to the Silverknowes Promenade, a cycling ban on which had been lifted in 1985 after lobbying by Spokes.

That same May the Labour Party won a resounding victory in elections for Lothian Region and took majority control. One of the first actions of its new Transport Chairman – the late Alistair Darling – was to fulfil an election promise and cancel the Western Relief Road. On May 21st, just days before Spokes started work on the Pilton Path, a special meeting voted to cancel that multi-million pound road scheme once and for all. This finally removed the threat it had posed to a number of sections of recently laid railway paths. (Incidentally, the Roseburn Corridor has always remained reserved in planning as a potential public transport corridor and it was not until February 2024 where its status as an active travel path was also so affirmed.) The year was rounded off with a final victory for Spokes when both council tiers agreed in October to throw out a housing development proposed by Safeway behind their supermarket at Davidson’s Mains and to safeguard the railway trackbed there as a path (which was eventually surfaced with tarmac within the last few years).

1986 was also the year that the final sections of abandoned tracks were lifted on the railways north of Powderhall; the last regular trains having run to an oil depot at Granton along the Lower Granton Road embankment in 1984. This delay in lifting the tracks had a knock-on effect on the timescale for the acquisition of the trackbed here by Lothian Region, something that would not complete until 1989.

https://flickr.com/photos/117983829@N03/13893423695/in/album-72157643950735923

While the growth of the path network in the north of the city had progressed reasonably well, Spokes remained critical of the Regional Council’s ability to deliver such projects in a consistent manner. This was due to a lack of dedicated resource they estimated up to £400k per annum, almost three quarters of the available budgets, was going unspent as a result. To remedy this, in 1987 another Labour Party manifesto commitment that Spokes had campaigned for was enacted and the authority’s Highways Department established a dedicated, three-member cycle team. This was headed by Richard Williams and with an annual budget of £300k maintained a centre of focus and knowledge within the labyrinthine, roads-focussed organisation. This team would prove remarkably adept at also making use of the underspends in other parts of the organisation at the end of the financial year; there was always tarmac to be laid somewhere.

Come 1988 and there were now six sections of railway paths and the Region’s councillors sat down to agree on what to call them. It was decided they should be named after the neighbourhoods through which they ran and that they should no longer be called railway paths. Just paths was fine, Councillors Neil Lindsay and Donald Gorrie had felt the established practice was “daft” and so for instance the path between Roseburn and Craigleith became the Roseburn Path, etc. These remain the official names as adopted by Edinburgh Council in their statutory list of roads and paths. A fuller list of the various path names and their chronology can be found in Table 1 at the foot of this post.

The paths network in the north of Edinburgh city continued to grow in 1988. At Roseburn, the bridge over busy Roseburn Terrace was refurbished and the path extended south across it to a new access point down the embankment at Russell Road. £64,000 was also spent to improve walking and cycling routes around Trinity Academy, there having been a dozen road accidents in just 3 years involving its pupils. This resulted in the path through Victoria Park to Stedfastgate being improved and also in a westward extension from there towards the quagmire at Granton Road. A major issue began to impact cycling paths projects across the UK that year however when the MSC’s Community Programme was abolished by the Government. The sudden loss of access to funded labour precipitated a national crisis in the voluntary sector that had grown up around this resource.

In 1989 Lothian Region and Lothian Health Board published a booklet of sixteen runs and cycles across the city as part of a healthy living campaign. The Evening News commissioned Richard Peploe, Scottish 12 hour Mountain Bike champion, to ride one of these and report back. Richard cycled from Roseburn to Trinity and his observations give us an insight into what the paths were like to use almost thirty years ago – and to compare with how they are now. He commended the gentle gradients and segregation from traffic, but criticised that access was “through a jungle of metal” (at this time the access points had obstructive barriers designed to stop motorbikes; sometimes laid directly across the paths themselves), the graffiti, “bags of rubbish and abandoned sofas” and an “enormous amount of broken glass“.

You come across all types of people: families out on bikes, young lovers out for a stroll, a group of teenagers, people walking their dogs. And dogs. Lots of dogs – and lots of dog dirt.

Users of the Roseburn Path, described by Richard Peploe. Edinburgh Evening News, 29th July 1989

Peploe noted that the tarmac of his route ran east as far as Granton Road, beyond which it was passable by bike “only with great difficulty“. He finished with a call to the newspaper’s readership to go and explore the paths for themselves:

If you live anywhere near one of the many access points to the paths, you may have seen the blue and white signpost. Go and investigate them one day, and you will see parts of Edinburgh you’ve never seen before!

Users of the Roseburn Path, described by Richard Peploe. Edinburgh Evening News, 29th July 1989

It was not just the benefits of paths to human health that were being recognised. That same year a study by Lothian Region highlighted the biodiversity value of the wildlife that had made its home along the embankments. In 1990 a management scheme and annual budget was approved to fund volunteer groups to help maintain and improve this habitat.

Come 1991 Sustrans’ engineer in Scotland, Dave Holladay, told the Scotsman that “Lothian stands out in front of the whole of the UK“. There were by this time a total of thirty miles of railway paths across the region, although much of this was outwith Edinburgh. A survey that year found 100 cyclists a day were using the path between Craigleith and Crewe Toll, half during commuter rush-hour. In an effort to better publicise the growing network in October that year Spokes published the second, improved edition of their cycling map of the city. These maps continue to be updated and published to this day and have become an exemplar standard of the genre.

Completion of the section between the “impassible” quagmire at Granton Road Station through to Victoria Park that Peploe had commented upon had been delayed by years – something blamed by Spokes on the intransigence of British Rail. The actual work itself took a mere couple of weeks in 1994 after the final bureaucratic obstacles had been overcome. The drainage situation at Granton Road proved so severe that a more pragmatic solution was found to just leave it flooded and to run the path up and over the old railway platform – something that endures to this day.

With this missing link completed, Spokes now felt that their vision of a traffic-free cycling route through north Edinburgh was sufficiently complete that it constituted a network, describing it at the time as “a 7km path almost half around the city… and on 3m width tarmac”. To celebrate this achievement they distributed 50,000 of their maps via the Herald & Post paper to all houses in Trinity and Leith. On May 29th the North Edinburgh Path Network was formally inaugurated in a ceremony during Environment Week. After the ribbon was cut by Malcolm Chisholm MP there was a novelty bike ride through Victoria Park. Spokes put its success in bringing its vision to reality down to “consistent pressure, year-by-year” and recommended that all its members who had spent the last 13 years lobbying and letter-writing should now get out on their bikes and enjoy riding these paths.

In the next few years incremental additions and improvements would be made to the network. In 1995 Spokes arranged for the path east of Craighall Road to Hawthornvale – passable only on foot and with some difficulty – to be opened up in conjunction with the arrival of the Cutty Sark Tall Ships in Leith. Over a long weekend, ten volunteers armed with a mini digger, roller and materials supplied by the Regional Council cleared and surface-dressed this quarter of a mile link.

The following year, 1996, the volunteers were again out in force on the Pilton Path to extend it along the trackbed all the way to Granton Square (although this section has now been largely built over by a new roads and paths, or fenced off and has become totally overgrown.) A significant setback had come on April Fools’ Day however when a new unitary system of local government replaced Lothian Region and its cycle team (and also Edinburgh District Council) with the new City of Edinburgh Council (CEC). With the cycle team went decades of combined professional experience. The organisational upset caused by such a huge restructure and the emergence of new political priorities would now substantially set back the pace of progress on the path network.

Inherited projects were initially continued with by CEC; in 1997 the path from Fiveways to Canonmills was surfaced, known as the Goldenacre Path for much of its length. This was followed in 1998 by the section north through Trinity Tunnel: the Trinity Path. New Council priorities however also soon brought a serious challenge to the continuity of the NEPN. In 1997 plans were announced to build a road over the Pilton Path (that built by Spokes back in 1986) and to demolish the bridge over the junction where it met Ferry Road, severing the Telford Path. This was to create a new access route for the Granton Waterfront regeneration. Initial plans replaced the bridge with a multi-stage road crossing and with these CEC was about to get its first real taste of Spokes’ ability to energetically apply political pressure. A vigorous counter-campaign ensued that would result both in a shared use path built alongside the new road and – most importantly – a new bridge being built across the junction. The Red Bridge as it has come to be known was opened in 1999 and the late Sandy Scotland, a Spokes stalwart, has been given much credit for this achievement.

1999 was also the year that Sustrans launched its Millennium National Cycle Network (NCN). Sections of the North Edinburgh paths were incorporated and branded into the NCN at this time into Routes 1 (the North Sea Cycle Route along the entire east coast of the UK) and 75 (the Clyde to Forth Cycle Route from Edinburgh to Kintyre). This brought with it funding for improvements such as better access and signage, and of course Sustrans’ trademark ornamental fingerposts.

With most of the former railways of north Edinburgh now converted to paths expansion naturally slowed in the 21st century. Further progress was not helped by shifting political priorities, allocation of resources by central government and endless pressure on council budgets. The mismatch between capital and revenue budgets continued to be a problem; maintenance went wanting but money was occasionally found for big-ticket items. In 2009 a substantial improvement was made by connecting the NEPN south to the New Town and Stockbridge by re-opening the blocked Rodney Street tunnel. This was something first suggested by Spokes over a decade before. The ceremony was performed on July 21st by then transport convenor Councillor Gordon Mackenzie.

In 2011 the poorly-surfaced and unlit Chancelot Path was tarmacced, signed and given lighting, upgrading it from something of a dog toilet and vandalism hot-spot to a useful route. Along the foreshore towards Wardie, where the railway embankment along Lower Granton Road had been demolished in 1989, a proper crossing was provided to the McKelvie Parade promenade in 2014. The path was finally extended all the way along the foreshore to Granton Square in 2019, opened on September 4th by then transport convenor Councillor Lesley Macinnes.

The last big addition to the NEPN was opened on December 9th 2024 when a long-campaigned-for link to (almost) the Union Canal opened; Roseburn to Union Canal or R2UC. This 800m stretch of 4m wide path had cost an eye-watering £17m due to substantial engineering challenges; a huge embankment had to be cut down, a significant new bridge laid across an active mainline railway, the embankment widened alongside the West Approach Road and a further bridge built across Dalry Road. A new crossing was installed on the West Approach Road to avoid the awkward Telfer Subway and environmental improvements such as a new park and planting were undertaken. As a result of all this work the NEPN was no longer isolated in the north of the city and the groundwork was laid to ultimately connect it to the city’s other key cycling corridors.

At the time of writing the NEPN has almost completely rehabilitated all former railway trackbeds in north Edinburgh, with one glaring omission. Until 2016 a section of railway (marked A in red on the previous map) remained in use as far as Powderhall, where the Council’s waste transfer station sent landfill by rail to East Lothian once a week. That depot was demolished in 2019 but beyond its security fences there still lies three kilometres of technically active railway track – and the opportunity for a significant extension of the path network to the southeast. This would provide a further bridge across the Water of Leith and take you through the most densely populated neighbourhood in Scotland all the way to Meadowbank (and beyond?) Despite regular political support (such as inclusion in the SNP’s 2026 election manifesto for the Scottish Parliament) and enthusiastic noises from the Council there has been disappointingly little progress in the decade since the last train ran. Not for the first time does an arm of local government find itself in Kafkaesque legal and financial wrangling with a state-owned railway agency over disused tracks in Edinburgh… And not for the first time has a group of interested citizens felt the need to try and get things moving again with this opportunity.

This thread would not have been possible without significant help from others. Chris Hill provided many of the photos and facts and months of motivation. Leslie Hills was most insistent on proof-reading it multiple times and gave much honest and constructive feedback. Dave du Feu trawled the back-catalogue of Spokes Bulletins to pin down missing dates. And of course Spokes, who have made a vast repository of almost fifty years of historical material freely available on their website.

Table 1. Chronology of Former Railways turned into Paths

Table 2. List of principal closed former railway lines in Edinburgh

1. The line closed progressively between 1960-68. A section to Granton oil depot remained in use until 1980, accessed from the former Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven lines that were lifted in 1986 ↩︎

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I went for a walk up Arthur's Seat, returning over Salisbury Crags. The top of Arthur's Seat was busy - I usually avoid Holyrood Park at the weekend - but it was easy to avoid people for most of the walk.

The turbine infrastructure at Leith Docks dominated the views. There was a ship carrying the large yellow pylons in the Forth, though I couldn't tell whether it was heaving for Leith or out to the wind farm in the North Sea!

This picture is from Salisbury Crags.

#Edinburgh #Leith #WindFarm

I went for a walk up Arthur's Seat, returning over Salisbury Crags. The top of Arthur's Seat was busy - I usually avoid Holyrood Park at the weekend - but it was easy to avoid people for most of the walk.

The turbine infrastructure at Leith Docks dominated the views. There was a ship carrying the large yellow pylons in the Forth, though I couldn't tell whether it was heaving for Leith or out to the wind farm in the North Sea!

This picture is from Salisbury Crags.

#Edinburgh #Leith #WindFarm

Problèmes à Gogo: the thread about the Bonnington Bridge Bar

If you take yourself along the Water of Leith Walkway then, where you meet Newhaven Road, you will come to the burnt out shell of a building. It’s been this way for the best part of a decade: doors and windows boarded up, now covered in graffiti; a roof open to the elements, now sprouting saplings. Look below the parapet of the adjacent bridge and you might notice a mysterious plaque for Uranus Art Garden. Perhaps this is a gentle joke at the expense of Jupiter Art Land? Who knows, but if you look down through the overgrowth you will see a tiered patio down to the river. Is, or was, this that art garden? If so, how did it come to be here? And just what is the story with this ruinous structure?

What you have been pondering was once the public house known as The Bonnington Bridge; a small, neat building – barely a single room – at 74-76 Newhaven Road. It was built around 1868 when an application for a licence to sell excisable liquors was made to the Burgh of Leith by the appropriately named Theresa Beveridge. The premises at this time were also known as The Bonnington Bridge. This appellation obviously refers to the adjacent bridge of that name, allegedly first built in 1812 but clearly marked in 1804 maps and referred to in newspapers of that time. They stand on a plot of land that had hitherto been the garden of a house called Bridge Place and were let from Mr Miller of Bonnington Old House.

Bonnington had long been a centre of milling and was progressively industrialised throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Its population was swelled by workers who provided a ready clientèle for an enterprising publican. In 1880 the licence transferred to Thomas Henderson then in 1890 to William Blyth. In the latter case it was granted on the proviso he “undertook to keep eatables such as sandwiches and bread and cheese and such like for the supply of customers“. In 1894 the vast Chancelot Mill opened nearby and the pub became a favoured haunt for its thirsty workers. Come the new century there license changed hands again; in 1902 to H. S. McKay and in 1904 to J. M. Clark.

Between 1902 and 1903 the adjacent bridge was rebuilt and widened at the joint expense of the Corporations of Edinburgh and Leith. The boundary between these municipalities ran down its centre (see the dotted line in the above map) and therefore each was liable for a half share of the costs.

The pub’s licence was taken over in 1909 by David Bennet, who would keep it for fifteen years. By this time it had become a tied house of George Mackay & Co., who brewed on the Southside at St Leonard’s Street. Post Office Directories list it at this time as trading under the name of the Bonnington Bridge Tavern. Bennet suffered an elaborate burglary in June 1913 when slates were removed from the pub’s roof and a hole 15 inches square was cut in the sarking boards below to allow entry into the bar. The thieves failed to gain entry to the safe but made off with 18 Shillings from the till.

The next licensee was Mrs Jane Macintyre Whyte who was granted it in October 1925. It then transferred in 1938 to William R. W. Whitson, who would extend the premises to the rear. By the time Durward Moncur took over in 1963 the brewery was New Mackay Taverns. This latter change was the result of Mackay’s being taken over by the English brewer Watney Mann two years previously. The new owners put their Scottish tied houses into this subsidiary and used them to introduce the novelty of keg beer into the country; Watney’s Red Barrel.

In March 1965 a loyal customer of fifty plus years, seventy three year old John Black, sued bar manager John Ward for £500 for loss of earnings. Black claimed he had been ejected from the premises – after cracking a joke about being overcharged – with such force that he required hospitalisation and seven weeks off work. The newspapers did not report if his claim was successful. Ownership changed again in 1969 when it was moved to Waverley Taverns (Scotland) Ltd, another Wattney Mann holding company. This was the result of a further takeover, merging the former Mackay’s premises with those of Drybrough’s of Craigmillar.

The decline of heavy industry in the district in the 1960s and 70s saw the pub’s demographic drift away from being a humble howff for the working man. By the early 1980s it had forged itself a new reputation as offering the latest opening times in Leith – 2AM every weekday – and always being good for a “lock in“. To keep the punters entertained there was live Jazz on Thursdays, country night on Fridays and a Golden Oldies disco on Saturday. And Go-Go dancers. Go-Go dancers every lunch time, late on weeknights and all day Friday and Saturday. Sunday was the Lord’s Day and therefore there would be no dancers and no drinking: the doors remained firmly closed.

When the author of 1987’s Leith Pub Guide‘s – the appropriately named Derry Beer – visited he recorded it being known locally as either The Bonny or The Bridge. In his opinion the place “really comes to life at night” and was a favourite spot for stag nights and rowdy bowling club celebrations. The landlord at this time was John Murray, who also ran a print shop over the road.

The 1990s saw a series of landlords come and go. In 1992 it passed to John Moriarty, who also ran the Alhambra Bar on Leith Walk (one wonders if he was a relation of the famous Mary Moriarty who ran the Port O’ Leith). In 1995 it was taken over by Michele Marr and in 1998 transferred to Gary Reid and James Gourlay. These latter owners changed the name to the Newhaven Inn, a somewhat odd choice given the fact it lies a kilometre south of that particular village. The name stuck despite the geographic anomaly and was retained when it was taken over in 2003 by Ian and Moira Brown. By this time the trading hours had moved with the times, the doors opening on Sundays but with the late nights pared back; midnight on Thursdays and 1AM on Friday and Saturdays.

In 2006 a further change came to the little pub when it found itself in the vast portfolio of national operator Punch Taverns. This was the result of an extended and convoluted series of takeovers in the pub trade. Wattney Mann was taken over by Grand Metropolitan in 1972, who sold their tied houses to Courage in 1991. The latter was bought by Scottish & Newcastle in 1995 who sold their tied houses to Punch in 2003. The new owners were granted planning permission to build a small extension for a new kitchen and add a raised outdoor seating deck overlooking the river. This was possibly a response to the ban of smoking in enclosed public spaces in Scotland year (has it really been 20 years?) At this time the name was also sensibly changed back to its original Bonnington Bridge.

The Bonny hit the news in May 2009 for the wrong reasons when a cannabis farm was discovered in its basement. Police officers searching for stolen property there found more than 350 plants, valued between £50-150,000, behind a series of locked doors in the cellar. They were being tended by an undocumented immigrant, 40 year old Ming Lee, who told them he had been paid £100 a week to tend them. Lee claimed to have been locked downstairs for two weeks and had only been allowed out once to buy food. At this time the owner was still Punch, who denied any and all knowledge of what had been going on.

Punch shuttered the pub and would never re-open it. Obviously deciding it was time to call last orders they put it up for sale later in the year. Planning permission was granted at that time to turn it into a fireplace showroom and that might have been that for our story had it not been for a company called Nocturnal Aviators Limited. Formed as Malsen Limited in 2001, the company was dormant until it bought the pub for £120,000 in April 2010. It planned to return it to its original use, having been granted planning permission to thoroughly expand and modernise it. Its goal was to take advantage of the position overlooking the Water if Leith and pivot the business from traditional boozer to a family-friendly, food-centric bistro. The man behind this was the company’s sole shareholder and director; former Scotland Rugby international turned publican and businessman, Norrie Rowan. After making a name for himself on the Murrayfield turf in the 1980s, he remade it in the 1990s by excavating The Vaults and The Caves out of the cellars and arches beneath South Bridge. In doing so he forged a reputation for doing things his way, digging first and asking questions later, repeatedly coming into conflict with city planners and engineers along the way.

Like his previous schemes, Rowan once again intended to expand downwards. In the basement he would create a restaurant and second bar, from where a new patio terrace on the river bank would be accessed through folding glass doors. Work began, but repeatedly appears to have stalled and never reached a conclusion. Once again one of Norrie Rowan’s schemes brought him into conflict with the Council and there are a series of enforcement actions and appeals detailed in official records (summarised in the table at the foot of this post). And yet again he also managed to upset the city’s Roads Engineers, who charged he had been digging into cellars beneath the bridge without permission. Rowan contended these were within the curtilage of his property and that they had not proved otherwise.

If one looks back using Google Streetview then – from the outside at least – it work appears to have been nearing completion in 2012. At that time however a full new planning application was taken that further altered and extended the place. The defining feature of this updated scheme was a large steel-framed, south-facing, glass dormer that sought to bring more daylight down into the building. It was somewhat at odds with the traditional masonry façade and wood-clad alterations at the side and was was initially rejected at planning. Rowan decided to build it anyway and managed to have it approved retrospectively on appeal.

Further complaints against him during this time were that we was flytipping on the riverbank – he claimed instead he was cleaning up the mess of others – and that his property was unkempt. Another claim was made that walls were being built on the riverbank without permission and there were two that he was undertaking unauthorised works beneath the bridge structure. No action was ever taken against any of these complaints. It should be noted however that the various walls that were built on the riverbank bare no relation to anything shown on any planning drawings. They do however denote this area as containing raised beds for “planting and sculpture“. Is this the Uranus Art Garden? One wonders if this was something of a wry joke on Rowan’s part after having so many unfounded complaints raised against his scheme.

By 2016 the pub had been closed for seven years and finally appeared – from the outside at least – to be approaching a state of completion (again). Disaster struck however on August 15th when the building was gutted by a fire, which was sufficiently intense to have been photographed by visitors to Edinburgh Castle. The Broughton Spurtle – self-described stirrer of local news – reported “when we spoke to Police Scotland on 18 August, the cause of the fire had not been established, and enquiries were ‘ongoing.’” They ended with “Let’s hope the owner was insured.” Planning documents submitted to the Council on his behalf in 2019 noted “a lengthy insurance case was being contested“.

It’s not clear if a cause for the fire was ever established. Rowan wrote a letter of reply to the Spurtle in which he detailed his version of the difficulties encountered by the project. He concluded “these delays have led to the situation we now find ourselves in. What could have been an attractive and vibrant access point to the walkway looks likely to remain an eyesore for several more years“.

A less determined individual might have just given up after so much time and the disastrous fire, but in 2018 another of Rowan’s company – Termshield Ltd – sought a 5-year consent with a view to rising from the ashes. This rising was quite literal and involved extending upwards by two-storeys using six shipping containers, welded together. This proposal was refused and an appeal was rejected in 2019. The premises’ licence expired that year and given the site appear to all intents and purposes to have been abandoned since then, they have never been renewed. At this time Norrie Rowan decided to turn his hand to local politics, with limited success.

Seven years on from this last activity, if you manage to look through a gap in the rotting boards across the doors or windows you will see a sad site within; bare walls, burnt roof timbers and a filling of flytipped tyres and building waste being slowly overtaken by the Buddleia. Accounts for Nocturnal Aviators Ltd filed with Companies House indicate this ruin remains the company’s sole tangible asset. In its filings for 2025 they are recorded as a “potential development site owned by the company“. One imagines that after a catastrophic fire and a decade open to the elements, demolition and redevelopment might one day at last make a return on this troublesome investment.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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Walking the Walk

https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55290117956/in/photostream/lightbox/

Leith Walk in sunlight and shadow

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #architecture #LeithWalk #Leith #batiment #immeuble

Walking the Walk

https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55290117956/in/photostream/lightbox/

Leith Walk in sunlight and shadow

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #architecture #LeithWalk #Leith #batiment #immeuble

#COOKU #WITH #COMALI #SEASON 7 advanced-search.headlines-world.com/advanced-sea... #JAMES #LEITH #MOODY multi-search-tag-explorer.allgraph.ro/advanced-sea... www.paypal.com/donate?busin... aePiot: Sparking the Web 4.0 fire. Build nodes and rule SEO.

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And here's a closer zoom - you can see these enormous wind farm structures sitting on a huge ship, ready to be taken offshore
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55259592330/in/photostream/lightbox/

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #GreenEnergy #WindFarm #Leith #LeithDocks #Ship #Beateau #Engineering

And here's a closer zoom - you can see these enormous wind farm structures sitting on a huge ship, ready to be taken offshore
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55259592330/in/photostream/lightbox/

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #GreenEnergy #WindFarm #Leith #LeithDocks #Ship #Beateau #Engineering

Looking towards Leith and the Forth, from Calton Hill
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#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #architecture #Leith #CItyscape #CaltonHill #BlackAndWhitePhotography

Looking towards Leith and the Forth, from Calton Hill
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#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #architecture #Leith #CItyscape #CaltonHill #BlackAndWhitePhotography

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Wednesday’s headlines: £15.5m to tackle homelessness, victory for campaign against Shore holiday flats, Tollcross clock to return, Water of Leith camera warning + local mum wins lunch with George Clooney

⏰ Read today’s newsletter: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-wednesday-29-april-2026/

Photo by: @TomDuffinPhotos

#edinburgh #leith #scotland

Brown’s of Leith / Timber Bush.

#leith #edinburgh #scotland #photography #FensterFreitag

Brown’s of Leith / Timber Bush.

#leith #edinburgh #scotland #photography #FensterFreitag

Paradox Nexus: KT @ Palais - External Event - 16 Apr feat. KT, Leith, sEmoa

#SESH #Leith #sEmoa

https://sesh.sx/e/1969418

We are at Leith Walk Police Box today! Pop in and play our game, and get a face sketch!!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Art #IndieGames

Leith Docks back in March. Mostly Gormley... ;)

#Edinburgh #Leith #photography

https://patrickhadfieldphotography.wordpress.com/2026/04/11/at-leith-docks-march-2026/

Walking to Leith last month.

#Leith #Edinburgh #photography

https://patrickhadfieldphotography.wordpress.com/2026/04/11/leith-march-2026/

The thread about the excavation of parts of Edinburgh’s old cable tramway system from beneath Leith Walk, what the various pieces of ironmongery were and how it all worked

This thread was originally written and published in bits and pieces between 2000 and 2022 as bits of tramway came out of the ground. It has substantially re-written here to create a coherent story.

In a previous post I covered how (and why) Edinburgh came to use cable-hauled trams in the 1880s and why Leith didn’t, and also some basics of how that system worked.

The principal of operation of a cable hauled tramway is quite simple. Between the tram tracks is a slot, in which there runs an endless loop of moving cable. The cable is powered by steam engines in a winding house, from where it runs around the system under the streets on an ingenious (and complex) series of pulley wheels. The tram car is fitted with a pair of grippers which slide into the slot; to move forward it grabs the cable with a gripper and to stop it releases the cable and applies its brakes. To move across junctions, between different cables or to pass subterranean obstructions such as pulley wheels, it can perform an elaborate ceremony whereby it grabs and releases different cables with the front or rear grippers – often with a little bit of gravity assistance.

One of the most common finds has been sections of old tramway rail. A tramway rail differs from a railway rail in that the rail has a flat top with a groove in the middle of it for the flange of the wheel to run in; a railway rail has a domed top and the wheel flange hangs over the side. The rails were relaid when the move was made from cable traction (or in Leith’s case, horse) to electric, so none of the dug up rail sections will be from cable days.

The next most common item that was seen during excavations were the U-shaped cast iron “chairs” that formed the supporting base of the conduit structure in which the cable ran beneath the street surface. To better understand what were are looking at (and for, underground), a cross-section of a cable tramway is helpful, I can’t find one for Edinburgh so one from San Francisco will do as the two were fairly similar. The chairs are coloured yellow, and sat on the concrete base of the conduit.

The Edinburgh system did not use the orange cast slot shown below; it used old rails laid on top of the cast iron chairs to form the slot. Additionally it did not have the small pink cable support pulleys; it used larger, 14inch diameter pulley wheels spaced every 50 feet.

The picture below shows a pile of these iron chairs dug out from beneath Leith Walk, plus sections of old rail that had been used to form the horizontal ties. Notice the chairs are caked in old concrete, as they were set into the conduit when it was being poured.

None of the cast iron chairs are complete; all are missing their top sections; cut and cracked off. However it was not the excavation works of 2021 that caused this, it were those of 1921! A a book kindly provided to me by Chris Wright has a photo of Hanover Street, c. 1921, on the cover. In this scene, a crowd watches workmen digging up the old cable conduit system during the switch over to electric traction (which was apparently the first use of pneumatic drills in the city). The caption explains that for ease, the workmen only removed the top section of the conduit chairs when removing them; the lower sections were left concreted into their bases. There are a couple of broken sections of chair in the pile of rubble below the boy with the cricket bat.

The cables themselves were driven from the four winding houses at each of the tramway depots; Henderson Row, Tollcross, Portobello and Shrubhill (off Leith Walk). We see the Shrubhill winding house interior in the images below. The engines, each with two cylinders and producing 500hp, are in the foreground. They are connected to the cable system by the ropes strung between the pairs of enormous drums. The larger drums, in the back ground, were connected to the 10 foot diameter cable-driving pulleys.

The cables were tensioned on weighted pulleys hung from the wall of the winding house, before exiting the building down a long tunnel from the winding house off Dryden Street at the northern end of the site to Leith Walk. The below photo shows the remains of one of these tunnels being demolished in the 1960s during works outside Shrubhill.

These tunnels ran to large brick chambers beneath the road surface and ran off up and down Leith Walk. Each cable required two pulleys; one for it on its outbound journey and one for it returning back to the winding house. Shrubhill drove two cables, so required two sets of these pulleys in chambers below Leith Walk. The diagram below shows the State Street Cable Car power station in Chicago. The winding engines are in yellow and drive 4 sets of cables. The red and blue cables head off right and left out of the power station. The two green cables are for different lines; they travel to the start of those lines “blind” (i.e. not pulling trams), which is why they are running in between the two sets of tracks, rather than between the rails like the red and blue cables. Each cable reaches the end of its line where it turns around and comes back to the power station. Shrubhill was very similar to this but drove only two cables; one for St. Andrew Square and Leith Walk, which also served the branch to Abbeyhill, the other for the Bridges to Newington.

The illustration below shows a cross section of those cables coming to and from the winding house down the tunnels, running around the pulleys in their chambers and then off around the network. The chambers are brick built, with arched steel plate roofs. This is a conceptual railway, but has two driven cables, rather like Shrubhill. Notice the return pulley is inclined so as to be able to sit underneath the outward pulley.

The below images show the destruction of the brick walls of one of the Shrubhill pulley chambers under Leith Walk. The dark patches are not tunnels, the one on the left is a recess in the chamber walls and the other seems to be a previous collapse that had been filled in with concrete.

The image below, taken of the same overall excavation hole as those above, shows the huge steel roof section of the chamber – the frame is almost identical to drawings of one for the terminal pulley of one of the Henderson Row cables. There is a supporting structure of steel I-beams that would have sat on the brick walls and foundations, and the metal sheet sections forming the roof on which the road surface lay. The large pulleys that directed the cables in and out of the tunnels to the winding house sat directly below this.

These chambers, and others around the system (particularly where there were junctions) were manned to make sure the cable was running properly. Children were in the habit of tying a can to a piece of string, then dropping the loose end into the slot in the road, where it would catch the cable and be dragged off up the road creating an amusing racket. If there was any snag or derailment of the cable, they would phone back to the powerhouse, who would disengage the cable until it could be reset or re-spliced, or the offending item untangled from it.

The excavations here also uncovered the structure of the railway tunnel under Leith Walk, where the North British Railway passed beneath. This was incredibly close to the surface (as a result of the tunnel being built after the road surface, and the Town Council refusing to allow the road level to be raised where it passed overhead); the outer skin of the tunnel is about only 30cm or a foot below the surface. Indeed, a special system had to be devised here to support the new tramway as there was not enough space to fit the standard concrete track slab. You will notice a large trough in the tunnel structure here. This, I think, is where the cable for North Bridge to Newington ran, as it was not used for traction purposes here and is described as “running blind” as far as Picardy Place, where it came in to use to go up Leith Street.

The shallowness of this tunnel totally precludes the urban myths of any tunnels under the road running up Leith Walk towards Elm Row from Shrubhill. Those tunnels are actually a single passageway, just large enough for a man to walk up, that ran under the pavement from Mcdonald Road up to Picardy Place, which was to carry the first electricity cables into the city from the McDonald Road Power Station.

When Edinburgh moved to replace its entire horse-drawn tramway with the cable system across the city, for various reasons Leith declined. Up until the last minute, it had been hoped and assumed that a compromise could be reached and that Leith would join; but it declined to do so. The Shrubhill winding house had a third winding drum for a cable round the Leith rails, but it was never used. Instead, the cable ran from the winding house at Shrubhill, turned left down the hill to the municipal boundary at Pilrig Street, and then ran back up the hill towards Edinburgh again. This meant that passengers had to change onto a Leith tram to proceed any further north (and vice versa). This 24 year inconvenience became known as the Pilrig Muddle. In the below photo, an Edinburgh cable car loads its passengers at the terminus of the line at Pilrig Street. In the background, the electric cars of the Leith system wait for the exchange of passengers heading the other way. exactly where this pit is.

There was another one of these awkward interchanges on the network, at Joppa, which I like to call the Joppa Jumble. Here the cable line from Portobello met Musselburgh’s electric system and again a change had to be made for through travel. But this was at least at the network end, not the middle of a principal route, and traffic here was much lighter

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnmightycat/5967127413

The terminus of the cable car lines was always on a short, single line siding of track on a slight incline. If the terminus was a downhill incline; the car would disengage from the cable and run by gravity into the siding, where it would pick up the cable running back the other way with its other gripper. The process was reversed for an uphill terminus; it ran into the siding on the cable, and ran out of it by gravity to the return cable. This was required as the cable could not be gripped where the it ran around the huge terminal pulley to change direction. This is shown by the diagram below, where the terminal pulley is in blue, inclined so as to fit below the street surface. The cable (red and white dashed line) is guided to and from it by the orange pulleys.

Much excitement erupted at the Pilrig Muddle in August 2021 when unexpectedly (considering this shoul dhave been discovered way back during the first round of tram works), an almost completely intact terminal pulley chamber was uncovered, with not one but two huge pulleys, each totally complete and in remarkable condition. Both were still sitting on their original bearings, just as they had been left almost exactly 100 years before when they were covered up and forgotten about!

The Pilrig Muddle pulleys are unusual for two reasons. Firstly, they are mounted vertically, usually they were horizontal. Secondly, they are back to back, which makes little sense for the terminus of the line. I suspect they are vertical as the street is narrower here, so there was less room to fit them in horizontally. And I think there are two back to back in anticipation of the cable being extended down Leith Walk into that burgh (which of course never happened). The red pulley on the right would have returned the Edinburgh red cable back up Leith Walk to Shrubhill. The blue one on the left would have returned the blue Leith Walk cable back down to the Foot of the Walk. If the cable had been extended to Leith, at Pilrig trams coming uphill from Leith would have swapped from the blue to the red cable here as they crossed the civic boundary. Because Leith was never added to the cable system, if I am correct the blue pulley would therefore never have been used.

The below animation shows how a car would have swapped cables here. A car travels with its front gripper engaging the cable. As it approaches the end of the cable, it is released before the gripper gets dragged into the pulley. To move onto the next cable it can either use its momentum (known as a “fly shunt”), can use gravity if it is running down hill, or it can push itself off the cable onto the next one by using its rear gripper. When the front gripper is over the next cable, it can be re-enaged and the car sets off again. This was a laborious (and potentially hazardous) process, so by design a cable car network keeps junctions and switching between cables to a minimum.

If you look closely to the left of the archaeologist squatting on the ground peering into the chamber you can see the conduits for electrical wires on the wall along with a box. This is either for electric lighting or the communication telephone.

Pilrig was not “de-muddled” until 1922 after the amalgamation of the Burgh of Leith and its Tramway into that of the City of Edinburgh. Edinburgh quickly decided to adopt the electric system of Leith and rapidly converted one to the other. The picture below shows the Muddle being converted. A cable car has reached the terminus at Pilrig Street and is about to return back up the hill. You can see the slot between the tracks for the cable. The tracks on the right are being relaid for the electric trams and a new junction to connect down the Leith Corporation tracks on Pilrig Street is being incorporated. The centre poles for the overhead wires are already in place. I suspect the reason that the Pilrig pulley chamber was left in such good condition, with its pulleys still in situ, was the speed with which the switchover was made. There was no time to demolish the chamber, remove its pulleys and infill it. The new tracks were simply built over it and connected together one night to allow for running of the electric trams the next day.

When Leith Corporation rebuilt its horse tramway for electric traction in 1904-1905, it constructed a large new depot on Leith Walk. This later became the Leith Depot of Edinburgh Corporation Tramways. Sadly the depot structure was demolished for no good reason about 4 years ago now, but the depot office building remains. During excavations at the rear of this, the brick outlines of inspection pits appeared, where the running gear could have been checked and maintained without having to lift the tram body off of it. The tram rails would have run along the top of these walls, see the lower picture for an example.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.