When the people of Leith voted in 1920 on whether to merge with Edinburgh, they said no by 26,810 to 4,340. The merger went ahead anyway. A century later, Leith was named the fourth coolest neighbourhood in the world by Time Out magazine. That arc, from defiant burgh to absorbed suburb to revived destination, is the story of every port city that outlived the trade that built it. Leith was a town long before it became a postcode. Mary of Guise ruled Scotland from here. The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers wrote the rules of golf on the Links in 1744. The Sunshine on Leith record made the Proclaimers famous. Trainspotting was set in its tenements. The Royal Yacht Britannia is permanently moored in its docks. The Walk that connects it to Edinburgh ends, like so many things in Leith, with a story.
The first documentary reference to Inverlet, later Leith, is in the 1128 charter founding Holyrood Abbey. By 1449 a French royal bride, Mary of Guelders, was arriving here to marry James II. By 1503 Leith merchants like James Makysone were supplying tapestries to James IV. In 1543 the Earl of Hertford burnt the town on Henry VIII's orders, in retaliation for Scotland rejecting the Treaty of Greenwich. Then in 1560, Mary of Guise, the regent ruling for her teenage daughter Mary Queen of Scots, moved the Scottish court to Leith and installed a French garrison. Scottish Protestant lords attacked, reinforced by English troops and artillery. The best documented day of the siege was 7 May 1560, when the attackers charged the walls with ladders that turned out to be too short; John Knox recorded Mary of Guise's delight, and English sources counted 1,000 casualties. The regent died in June. The Treaty of Leith ended the siege.
In 1645 plague struck Leith. Over half the population of the southern district died. An archaeological dig in 2016 at St Mary's RC Primary School uncovered a mass grave of 81 bodies from that outbreak. Many were buried in their clothes with money still in their pockets, evidence that survivors were too afraid to handle the dead. These were people, families with names, dying in a port town that had not asked for the disease the ships brought. In 1779 a Scot named John Paul Jones, sailing for the new American Navy, planned to take Leith and hold it for ransom. A gale at the mouth of the Firth on 16 September turned him away. The scare prompted the hasty construction of Leith Fort in 1780. The brick-built officers' quarters were nicknamed London Row, because nothing in Edinburgh looked as English. The fort survived in some form until 1955.
For centuries Leith led Scottish industry in glass, soap, sugar, wine and whisky, ropes, ships, and lead. The Leith Glassworks made up to a million wine bottles a week; the parallel-sided, narrow-necked Leith pattern bottle is still the dominant shape in the wine trade. Around 1770 the same site branched into lead crystal under the name of the Edinburgh Crystal Company, despite never actually being in Edinburgh. Wine storage in the Henderson Street Vaults dated to the early 1500s. When European wine harvests collapsed in the 1880s, the warehouses pivoted to whisky blending; William Sanderson's Vat 69, John Crabbie's green ginger wine, Macdonald & Muir's Glenmorangie all passed through. Rose's Lime Juice was founded on Commercial Street in 1868 to give sailors vitamin C. Henry Robb's shipyard launched 42 ships for the Royal Navy in the Second World War and repaired nearly 3,000 more, one ship a day for the duration.
Leith Central Station closed. Henry Robb's yard closed in 1983. The last bond on Water Street closed around 1995. The Kirkgate, Leith's historic centre, was lost to slum clearance in the 1950s. For decades the docks were a place people stopped going. Then the Shore picked up, with the first Malmaison hotel taking over a seamen's mission, restaurants colonising the warehouses, the Water of Leith walkway opening along banks that had been industrially polluted. The Scottish Office sited offices in Leith Docks in 1994. The Royal Yacht Britannia berthed at Ocean Terminal as a tourist attraction. The Edinburgh Trams extension to Newhaven finally opened on 7 June 2023. The Port of Leith Distillery, the UK's only vertical whisky distillery, now operates here. Leith Academy is one of Scotland's oldest schools. Leith School of Art works out of a former Norwegian church. Hibernian FC plays at Easter Road. The port that the Romans never reached has been quietly reinventing itself for nine hundred years and shows no sign of stopping.
55.97 N, 3.17 W, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, immediately north of central Edinburgh. From altitude, the harbour basins and Ocean Terminal complex are clearly visible, with the Royal Yacht Britannia moored alongside. Edinburgh Airport (EGPH) is about 12 km west-south-west; standard approaches keep traffic clear of the harbour area but the Forth is a busy shipping zone. Recommended viewing altitude 2,000-4,000 ft. The contrast between the port's modern dockside and the old tenements rising up Leith Walk toward Calton Hill is one of the most distinctive urban views in Scotland.