The long walk’s history dates back to the 15th C. From a rough pathway to today’s 1.2-mile paved artery incorporating carved out mini-streets (Picardy St, Gayfield Place, Crighton Place), the Walk has witnessed a shifting landscape of commercial and residential fronts mapping out Leith’s storied history. Preparation for the laying of the tram lines uncovered evidence of a centuries old cobble-lined roadway. Leith Walk is a street beneath and above a street, a place with many names.

As a West coast immigrant to this proudly independent enclave of Auld Reekie, Leith’s dogged outsider status provided a gravitational pull of its own. The Walk’s winding seam links the Shore to Edinburgh’s East end. Its history has been shaped by struggle (from the 1913 docker’s dispute to the 1926 General Strike and Save Leith Walk campaign) and its unique location as a portal to the Firth of Forth beyond the city walls. The mists that often cloud its streets conceal the ghosts of Russian sailors, travellers, immigrants and emigrants seeking sanctuary or escape. For incomers looking for a place to rest their bones, Leith Walk has been the road that leads to home.

The plebiscites of 1920 saw a majority of Leithers vote to reject amalgamation. The memory remains emblematic of a thrawn defiance. I am probably guilty of anthropomorphising, but the Walk has a character resistant to homogenising efforts, despite a chain store creep where supermarkets and Starbucks represent a colonising vanguard of corporate blandness.

The gentrification of the Walk and the arrival of the trams displaced some but not all of the Walk’s eccentrics. From the man I used to see marching purposefully between Pilrig church and the old social work building announcing the time from his wrist watch, to Arthur William’s quietly noble vigil, Leith remains a home to subterranean characters familiar to urban outposts the world over. I’ve seen prone addicts inject heroin behind the police box, now redesigned for pop up street food stalls. I’ve been assaulted by pissed up older men, given myself license to ill between parked cars after staggering home from an Ice T gig (too much of this and too much of that), and watched Covid strip the Walk of its customary bustle and static. I’ve spilled out of more pubs than is strictly okay, yet the Walk has faithfully guided me home in every condition and all weathers.

It is precisely its perceived ‘edginess,’ monetised and appropriated by developers, that attracts so many to the Walk’s embrace. An unfamiliar affluence has made its cultural presence felt in artisan cafes, bespoke shop fronts and pubs-that-do-not-show-the football (the horror!), elbowing out the old nooks and crannies which made the Walk such an exciting, electric place to live. I feel safer than I ever did when I first moved here as a teenager. But progress comes with a price tag usually borne by the Walk’s original denizens. Pricier leases, imposing student accommodation, the loss of familiar haunts, rocketing rents and house prices have all served to reshape the Walk in ways that displace but do not abolish poverty’s prison. Injustice is not resolved by a makeover. The Walk’s pavements see the classes share space and rub shoulders. But when night falls, many retreat to homes where inequalities demarcate the social chasm between Leith’s rich and poor.

On occasion, overtures are made. The recent racist attack on the Walk, where a lone man kicked doors, shouted racist filth and attacked cyclists was met with an immediate and soul-sustaining response. On a burning summer’s day, thousands responded to the call for solidarity. Marchers weren’t insisting on diversity. Leith is already a kinetic mix of ethnicities, nationalities and races. That fact is baked into its stubborn sense of self. Leith knows its enemies. You step onto the Walk with hate and violence, Leithers will come together to bring the love.

The cycle lanes may be slightly less generously proportioned than a Rizla paper. Its cafes may come and go like restless seasons. Gentrification and an invading student throng have refashioned the Walk in the image of those with the cultural power to see their desires reflected back at them. But the Walk is host to more than an ‘imagined community.’ I may be romanticising its crazy paving stones through a stranger’s perspective. It could be that my eulogising of the long walk from Vinyl Villains to the Kirkgate is the kind of narrative trick we play on ourselves as a means of claiming the comforts of place and belonging.

But as I sit outside Leith Depot sipping a coffee on a warm Sunday noon observing the Walk stretch into life, the gut sense that there is nowhere else I’d rather be feels churlish to resist.