- 01 EDINBURGH FRAGMENTS 8 - LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Decaying timber jetty with red ship
It’s taken me a long time to visit Leith, the North Sea port just down the road from Edinburgh city centre. Once a very busy place with a long history it now seems almost abandoned but undergoing regeneration. Perhaps its greatest current claim to wider fame is the retired Royal Yacht “Britannia” moored up on the water front as a visitor attraction.
- 02 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Detail from decaying jetty with a Gormley sculpture
This image combines a relic of past times with a more recent and unconnected structure. Anthony Gormley’s SIX TIMES sculpture was commissioned by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art: he created 6 life sized iron casts of himself : The first is buried neck deep at its entrance gate, 2, 3 and 4 stand spaced along the bed of the Water of Leith and 6 is set in the sea at the end of this decaying timber structure.
- 03 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | North Sea oil and gas field vessel moored up
Two docked vessels moored across the harbour under louring skies.
- 04 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | North Sea oil and gas field vessel and mineral dumps
Loose materials being moved on the dockside in front of a North Sea oil industry vessel.
- 05 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS
Victorian era dock buildings with oil service ships moored beyond.
- 06 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS
A panorama of the nineteenth century harbour administration buildings.
- 07 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS Albert Dock cranes
Three dockyard cranes stand with a large warehouse in the background.
- 08 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Albert Dock cranes Perspective 1
Crane structural details mingle with one of a number of encroaching conifers.
- 09 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Albert Dock cranes Perspective 2
These cranes have seen little recent use and are showing both object and weather damage.
- 10 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Concrete warehouse on Salamander Street
A later warehouse contrasts with the timber, masonry and corrugated iron structure in the next Image.
- 11 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Storage sheds on Salamander Street
This long structure’s decaying mixed materials appealed visually as did the street name. Online searches show its clearance and replacement by six-storey brick apartment blocks branching from the street line.
- 12 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Storage Shed detail
A block of flats now stands at this street corner fronted by a new traffic lights array similar in form but too far from any wall to cast such an intimate shadow.
- 13 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS Moving scrap
An invisible driver used this angular machine to tidy a modest scrap collection. A nearby enclosure opposite the pub building in the next image holds much more.
- 14 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS “The Pond” public house on Salamander Street
Long a well-known pub, The Pond changed ownership and reopened as The Bullfinch in 2021. Restored, enhanced and updated it’s launched into a new life. The view of the scrap piles across the street is not life enhancing but changes seem underway there as well.
- 15 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Decay and redevelopment
If my recall is accurate these decaying structures flanked the entrance to a narrow dock. The red building is a shopping centre and its blue companion was an office block awaiting tenants’ arrival.
- 16 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Colourful building site screen 1
This and the following image came from a long curving screen some nine feet high erected in front of a building site. It’s one of the more creative solutions I’ve seen and did temporarily enhance its setting.
- 17 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Colourful building site screen 2
Another length of screen depicts the retired Royal Yacht.
- 18 LEITH DOCKS AND QUAYS | Apartment buildings on Western Harbour Park
The panoramas from these apartment buildings must be spectacular at any time, but especially at dawn, dusk and during stormy weather. In the eighteen-thirties a railway was built northwards from Edinburgh to the nearby small ports of Newhaven and Granton from where trains were later carried across to the Fife shore in what was then the world’s first train ferry service. That rail route is now a footpath linking the city centre to the waterfront: the Forth Rail Bridge was opened in 1890.