Leith gentrification - it's not all trams and Michelin stars

DJ Vic Galloway was standing in this same pub when, in an interview for the Independent published earlier this week, he spoke of “real rebirth” in Leith, and described Leith Walk as Edinburgh’s Las Ramblas.

The article, by Robin McKelvie, told the story of "palpable energy" following the opening of the new tram route from Leith to Edinburgh city centre, and listed some of the great new cultural happenings in the area from the Michelin-star gained by the Shore’s Heron restaurant through to the Port of Leith Distillery and the Mercury-nominated album recorded by local band, the Young Fathers.

My feeling, reading it as a resident of the area (and one that lives on the tramline), was that actually this story of Leith rebirth was deeply familiar. Leith Walk has always been a thrilling avenue to stroll down, whether stopping for a drink at one of its changing bars, or calling in at the greengrocers. It has always fizzed with culture and bars.

But what concerns me when I hear the word 'rebirth' is that’s only a fraction of what I am hearing. Rather, what I'm hearing is uncertainty, questions about whether a flourishing is coming, gripes about the new Low Traffic Neighbourhood and its impact on business, and complaints about the rusty-looking planters decorating the street.

Fife Hyland and Cammy Day at launch of The Red Sandstone building

Not everyone is already getting that rebirth magic. For instance, not far down the road on my street is Destined for Home, a gift shop, run by Karen Greig, who has stubbornly stuck it out through the desolate times of the tramworks.

To her, the street feels dead – and, in part, she blames the Low Traffic Neighbourhood which was introduced not long after the trams started. “We’ve had 3.5 years of our street being closed for the tramworks," she says. "But then what they did was to close the streets for the Low Traffic Neighbourhood so that you can’t get onto the Shore anymore. And then on top of that, they brought in permit holder parking. So I think parts of this area have become a ghost town.”

When she calls the area a 'ghost town', Ms Greig is echoing the words of another local resident, Marshall Bain, who runs the Queen Charlotte Rooms, a venue for weddings and funerals, just round the corner.  In a recent interview, he used the phrase to describe the impact of recent traffic–restricting measures. "Every day is like a Sunday morning," he said. 

Of course, not everyone is suffering. While Destined for Home has been marooned between two tram stops, just down the road is Rocksalt cafe, which happens to now have a tramstop right outside its door, and is buzzing.

Over a quick lunch looking out over a spread of outdoor tables, owner Reyhan Gul describes the metamorphosis: “The whole dynamic of the street has changed. There are a lot more tourists. You see a lot of people with luggage. I love that the street is different now. It feels like we’re somewhere else, somewhere in Europe.”

There are many different ways of telling the story of a changing Leith, and most of them are interlinked. 

We could, for instance, tell a tale through the changing shop and cafescape: how a mobile phone outlet became Logan Malloch gift shop or how an old branch of Santander morphed into the community bookshop, Argonaut books.

We could chart Leith’s history in the comings and goings of Michelin stars. Leith now has the highest concentration of Michelin-star restaurants per square metre outside of London.

We could also tell it through house prices and in Leith they are on the up, have been for some time. The latest ESPC July prices analysis states that in Leith “one-bedroom flats sold for £228,599, an increase of 43.5%” on last year. Compare, for instance, with two-bedroom flats in Edinburgh’s New Town and West End, selling for £468,181, a 0.7% annual rise.

Vicky Allan getting on the first tram to run up Leith Walk

In terms of speed of sale, Leith seems to be coming up trumps too, with, it says, “two-bed flats in Leith Links and Leith” snapped up quickly and “going under offer in nine and 11 days respectively".

The flip side of this is that many families, some of them Leith originals, have been priced out. I’ve lost count of the number of kids from my son’s schools whose parents have at some point found that to afford enough space for an expanding family, or a bit of outdoor space, they have had to move out, or who had to move across town for social housing. This past summer has seen Ukrainian refugee families, once housed on the Victoria cruiseship in Leith Docks, be displaced to new accommodation, some of it found in Leith, others further afield.   

Private rent in the area is high, as it is across most of Edinburgh – in the region of £1000 for a one-bedroom flat. 

One solution to some of these housing problems is, of course, more housing, and  Leith is in another building phase. 53 “affordable homes” built by Barratt on Salamander Street, 43 of which are available for social rent. 41 Cala Homes built in Ocean Drive. Goodstone Living began the construction of 338 build-to-rent homes. But will that do anything to slow the ever-expanding housing bubble? 

The story some are telling right now is that the new tram route is delivering a fresh kick to the process of gentrification in Leith, driving it forward one craft beer at a time, but, as Dominic Hinde, a writer who lived in the area for 11 years, points out, the reality is much more complex.

"There’s a myth,” he says, “that has built up that it’s the tram that has been the driver of gentrification, but I would argue that it’s not that simple.”

In the period in which he lived in the area, he says, he witnessed flats “literally doubling in value.”

Problems with the housing supply, the rise of Airbnb, and speculation, all combined to create a perfect storm. Young professionals were moving to rent properties on Leith Walk because they were being priced out of the city centre and traditionally nice areas of town. But, he observed, often they would then stay and buy in the area, “having realised the area wasn’t as bad as the rep”.

“The fact is that the rise in private rents in Scotand is astronomical, and as Edinburgh has got more expensive, Leith has benefitted from that. The funny thing now is you’ve got flats in Leith that are more expensive than flats in town because it’s a place that people want to live and it’s got a rep.”

Hinde is not saying that the trams have no impact at all on gentrification, rather that the businesses that have benefited from trams have generally been those who have “conformed to classic gentrification models”.

There are, of course, other stories to tell about Leith - and one of these regards deprivation. The most recent map of Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation is now three years old but is unlikely to have changed much. One of the things I was struck by the very first time I saw the SIMD map of Leith is how patchworked it is. I have seen no other area with so many different pockets in such proximity, from the deepest red of deprivation of the Banana Flats through to the deep blue wealth of the Shore.

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Among those who are acutely aware of the struggle of those in the deeper red areas of the map is Willy Barr, manager of the Citadel Youth Centre, and a man who has seen Leith change since he first started working as a project worker in 1995.

For many people who live in Leith, he points out, the trams aren’t immediately relevant. “For a lot of people who live there, certainly the ones we work with, they’re not really making a difference to their lives.

Depressingly, he says, that since the time he started working at the Citadel, inequality has "not got any better, in fact, it’s worse".

“Leith has changed a lot. You've seen changes in housing, cafes, restaurants and bars, variety of opportunities, but there is still a hard core of families who are actually worse off now than they were when I first went to the Citadel.”

These days, he says, he even finds himself handing out fuel vouchers, or meals, which was never a necessity in the past, and among his concerns is the ability of young people to find housing in the area they have grown up in. 

Also aware of some of these struggles is Evie Murray, CEO of environmental charity, Earth in Common, which recently opened its new building and coffee shop on the corner of the Links, where it serves as a social hub for the local area attached to the thriving community garden called the Croft.

Murray is one of the people who straddle the different worlds of Leith, having grown up there and started the charity originally as a scheme for growing food in pots. She is particularly keen that improvements in people’s lives aren’t also disparaged under the name of gentrification.

"As a kid who grew up in Leith in the 80s and 90s, I can assure you nobody in their right mind would want it to have stayed the same. Drugs filled the streets, many lives were destroyed and violence appeared to be all around me.”

“I think," she adds, "the question is how we change, who do we bring with us as we go, and crucially who has been left behind? The truth is we have left too many people behind; we have closed people out and we have failed in our mission to integrate the various quarters of Leith.”

Real rebirth, in other words, is about more than having another Michelin-starred restaurant on your doorstep or a top band recording an album, though I’m not knocking any of that. Let’s have that renaissance, but not without bringing everyone along.