Leith: From Red Light District to Restaurant Row

Leith’s economy was built on its docks, and the docks produced a neighbourhood that supported the men who worked them. Warehouses, chandlers, cheap lodging houses, pubs that opened at 6am for the shift workers, a red light district around the Shore that was visible and functional and absolutely not discussed in polite Edinburgh society. The dock labour was hard and poorly paid and the area reflected the reality of that. When containerisation arrived and the docks declined from the 1960s onwards, what was left was a post-industrial neighbourhood with high unemployment, poor housing stock and a city that largely looked the other way.

The regeneration of Leith’s Shore – the street running along the Water of Leith where it meets the docks – began in the 1980s and accelerated through the 1990s. The warehouses that had stored goods from the ships became restaurants and bars. The Shore became Edinburgh’s first restaurant destination outside the city centre. The decision to put good food here, in a working dock neighbourhood, was the opening move in a transformation that took thirty years to complete.

Tom Kitchin opened his restaurant on Commercial Quay in Leith in 2006. He had trained under Pierre Koffmann and Guy Savoy in Paris and London and returned to Scotland with a philosophy – “from Nature to Plate” – built around Scottish seasonal produce cooked with French classical discipline. The Kitchin won a Michelin star within six months of opening and it has held it continuously since. The decision to open in Leith rather than the city centre was deliberate. The neighbourhood was cheaper, the character was more interesting, and the proximity to the fish markets at Newhaven was a practical advantage. It changed the perception of what Leith could be as a restaurant destination.

Leith in 2026 is Edinburgh’s most interesting neighbourhood by some distance. The Shore is restaurant row – Kitchin, The Plumed Horse (also Michelin-starred), The Shorehouse, The Vintage, and a density of quality eating that the New Town cannot match. The wider neighbourhood has retained its character while acquiring coffee shops, galleries, independent shops and the social infrastructure of a gentrified area. The tension between the old Leith and the new one is visible in the price of a flat on Great Junction Street versus what it was in 2005.

Gentrification is a word that gets used about Leith with the same mixture of accuracy and oversimplification that it gets used everywhere. The neighbourhood is better resourced than it was. It is also more expensive. The people who were born there and whose families built the docks have, in significant numbers, moved out because the rents rose. The restaurant row on the Shore sits in a neighbourhood that is not quite sure what it is now, and that uncertainty is what makes it the most honestly interesting place in Edinburgh.