Choose Life Choose Leith by Tim Bell sampler

21
Introduction
…the greatest artists conjure an everywhere
out of a highly specific somewhere….
Howard Jacobson
shortly after my arrival in Edinburgh in 1980 from my native rural
Northumberland, I made half a dozen offers to buy a house for my family,
and bought the first to be accepted. Enthusiastically I told my work
colleagues we had somewhere to live. They were pleased for me. ‘Where?’
they asked. ‘Leith’. Middle class Edinburgh eyebrows went through the ceiling,
incredulously, pityingly. They never went to Leith. They had their reasons,
of course. To them, Leith was a decayed port town, always rough and
tough, now reduced to a gap site. It was the best move I ever made, and I’m
still here with no plans to move.
I worked as a social worker with a non-statutory agency, going from
professors’ houses in the Grange to itinerant families in Muirhouse in the
same afternoon. Briefly I was a part time lay chaplain in a prison, then a
port chaplain in Leith, meeting seafarers on board ships. Imported Russian
coal for nearby Cockenzie power station was stacked near the hoist that up
to very recently had transferred local coal for export. This little cameo illustrates
the collapse of Leith as the traditional port and working class town of
which Irvine Welsh was writing. Now that the power station is demolished,
both the hoist and the coal yard are unused and are surrounded by offshore
vessels tied up during the slump in North Sea oil; a cameo that illustrates
the further changes in Leith since Welsh’s book Trainspotting was published
in 1993.
I have only a dim memory of Leith Central Station, so important in
Welsh’s story. All I remember is the eastern gable end towering and glowering
over the bottom of Easter Road. Talking it over with many others who
lived in Leith during the 1980s, I realise that I am not alone in not registering
the significance of this once mighty landmark edifice which had lost its
power of attraction.