Leith's first harbour was built immediately after 1710, expanded between 1800 and 1817, and supplemented by Newhaven's L-shaped pier basin in 1825. The trades reflected the sea-going life: bonded warehouses for incoming wine and whisky, glass kilns to bottle them, sugar refineries, fishing fleets, whaling ships, soap-makers boiling down whale oil, plumbers casting lead pipe, and shipyards launching everything from Forth ferries to ocean-going liners. Newhaven, just to the west, was the fishermen's village - its distinctive cottages have outside stairs to first-floor living quarters, with the ground floor reserved for nets. The Citadel survives off North Junction Street, one of the network of stubby gun towers thrown up around Britain in the 1790s in fear of a French invasion that never came. King James IV had created the harbour for warships back in 1504, when Scotland needed vessels too big for the existing wharves.

In the 19th century the Royal Navy needed lime juice in quantity and unspoiled - scurvy on long voyages killed more sailors than enemy action. Lauchlan Rose of Leith solved the preservation problem by patenting a method based on Louis Pasteur's work, and won the navy contract. He used limes from the British West Indies. Because British sailors now drank limes instead of lemons or oranges, foreign navies began calling them limeys. Rose then noticed that the same product worked as a soft drink for sober landlubbers, and effectively launched the global non-alcoholic mixer industry. His patents are now held by Coca-Cola. Rose's Lime Cordial, which made Leith part of the global drinks trade, still costs around 2 pounds 50 a litre in any supermarket - the same product that once kept the Royal Navy at sea.

East of the historic core lies Leith Links, a broad green that sat outside the medieval town walls until building closed in around it from 1770. 'Links' in old Scots meant rough sandy ground where the original Edinburgh-rules golf was played - the local five-hole course, played twice for ten holes, gave the world some of golf's earliest written rules, later adopted by the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews. Golf was banned on the Links from 1905 because the surrounding houses meant a tee shot might brain a passing toddler. Two grass-covered humps at the western end, Giant's Brae and Lady Fyfe's Brae, are thought to be 16th-century artillery positions from the English siege. Beneath the green grass lie two plague pits dug in 1645 to bury the dead of the bubonic outbreak. A dovecote in nearby Lochend was repurposed as a furnace to burn the victims' clothes.

Leith Central station, built lavishly in 1903 to handle the suburban passenger boom that never quite materialised, closed to passengers on 7 April 1952. It remained a railway depot until 1972, then fell derelict, becoming a haunt of drinkers and drug users. Irvine Welsh set a key scene of Trainspotting (1993) there: Begbie has come into the ruined station for drugs, and from the shadows an alcohol-ravaged tramp jeers that he must be there for train-spotting. Begbie realises the tramp is his father. The site is now a Tesco supermarket at the foot of Leith Walk - in literary terms, a more banal ending than Welsh imagined. Across the docks, the Royal Yacht Britannia has been moored permanently at Ocean Terminal since 2001, the centrepiece of a regeneration that transformed Leith from tatty to gastropub-trendy across the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

From 1920, electrified Edinburgh trams linked the city up the hill with the port for the first time without the incompatible-systems problem that had plagued the merger debates. The lines were ripped out in 1956. For almost 70 years Leith depended on buses and the slow walk down the cobbled mile of Leith Walk. Then in June 2023 the Newhaven extension of the new Edinburgh Trams reopened - sleek CAF Urbos 3 vehicles trundling down Leith Walk past Foot of the Walk to The Shore, then west to Ocean Terminal and Newhaven. The microbreweries arrived too: Pilot, Newbarns, Moonwake, Lost in Leith, Jump Ship. The Dreadnought in Newhaven - a gay pub with a celebrated cask-ale list - sits a stone's throw from the harbour that once stank of whaleblubber. The voting tally of 1920 still stands, unreversed. But the trams are back.