Irvine Welsh was born in Leith in 1958 and grew up in the Muirhouse housing estate on the north-western edge of Edinburgh. He moved to London in his twenties, lived in various parts of Britain and the United States, and was living in Edinburgh again in the late 1980s when he began writing the stories that became Trainspotting. The novel was published by Secker and Warburg in 1993, having been rejected by several publishers who considered it uncommercially obscure and difficult.
It is set in Leith and Muirhouse in a period that corresponds roughly to the late 1980s, during the heroin epidemic that affected Edinburgh more severely than almost any city in Britain. Edinburgh in the mid-1980s had the highest per capita rate of heroin use in Europe; Leith and Muirhouse were among the areas most severely affected. The novel was not reporting from outside this experience.
The Real Locations
Renton’s flat in the novel is on Montgomery Street in Leith – a specific address that Welsh identified in interviews. Montgomery Street in the 1980s was the kind of working-class tenement street that has since been substantially gentrified; the properties are now considerably more expensive than they were when the novel was set there. The street still exists.
The Leith Central Station, which gives the novel its title, was a real place. The station opened in 1903 and closed in 1952; the building was derelict through the period the novel covers, used as a sports centre by local teenagers. The title’s full irony turns on the trainspotting scene – Renton and his friends haunting a disused station, waiting for trains that never come, occupying themselves with futile observation – which functions as the novel’s central metaphor for a generation with nowhere to go.
The Port Sunshine pub, the Juice Bar, the schemes of Muirhouse and Leith – these are either real places or composites of real places. Welsh’s method was documentary in texture if not in literal fact. The characters are composites rather than portraits, though people in Leith who knew Welsh in the 1980s have identified originals for most of them.
The Writing of It
Welsh has described the novel’s composition as happening quickly – the stories that became its chapters were written in intense bursts – and the form reflects this. Trainspotting is not a conventional novel: it is a sequence of stories, monologues and sections with multiple narrators, some chapters written in Scots dialect and some in standard English, with no consistent narrative voice. The formal fragmentation mirrors the subject matter.
The manuscript was submitted to publishers in the early 1990s and was acquired by Robin Robertson at Secker and Warburg after rejections elsewhere. The initial print run was 3,000 copies. The novel won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award and generated word-of-mouth sales that eventually made the Danny Boyle film adaptation in 1995 commercially significant enough for a major studio to fund.
What It Means for Edinburgh
Trainspotting is Edinburgh’s most internationally recognised literary artefact after Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, which is a comparison that would have seemed improbable in 1993. It represents a version of Edinburgh – Leith and Muirhouse, not the New Town or the Festival, not the castle or Holyrood – that Edinburgh’s tourism industry has largely avoided incorporating into its official self-image, while the city’s actual population has largely claimed it as accurate.
Leith has changed beyond the recognition of anyone who knew it in the 1980s. The Shore, which was a working port district, is now the most expensive restaurant strip in Edinburgh. The gentrification that Welsh has commented on wryly in interviews has transformed the physical setting of the novel into something the novel could not have anticipated. The trainspotting scene at Leith Central is now a Weatherspoon’s pub. This is either an irony or a metaphor or both.
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