Mark Renton Leith Walk
Leith
The spine of the book's Leith: a long, downhill street of tenements, betting shops and pubs running from the edge of the New Town to the docks. Welsh's characters live, score, drink and argue along it, and the local speech is written the way it is spoken here. In the late 1980s this was a poor, run-down quarter, well before its later gentrification.
Leith and Leith Walk sections
explicit Welsh names Leith Walk directly; the long street has no single scene, so this marks a representative point on the tenement stretch between the New Town and the foot of the Walk.
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Mark Renton The Banana Flats, Cables Wynd House
Leith
A long, curving nine-storey council block on Cables Wynd, built in the mid 1960s and known to everyone in Leith as the Banana Flats for its shape. It is the home of Simon Williamson, the character called Sick Boy, and has become a landmark of the book's working-class Leith. The building is now category-A listed.
Leith sections
explicit Cables Wynd House, nicknamed the Banana Flats for its curve, is a real Leith building and is named in the wider Welsh writing; sited at the block itself.
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Mark Renton A Leith drinking den
Leith
Much of the book happens in Leith's pubs, where the drinking is heavy and the violence, especially around the character Begbie, is never far off. Welsh mixes invented bars with the feel of real ones; the Port o' Leith Bar on Constitution Street was one of the district's best-known dockside pubs of that era, and stands in here for the type.
Leith sections
inferred The novel's pubs are drawn from Leith's bars but not tied to one address; this marks the Port o' Leith Bar on Constitution Street as a representative example of the old dockside pubs the characters would have used.
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Mark Renton The old Leith Central station
Leith
The station that gives the book its title. Leith Central closed to passengers in 1952 and shut completely in 1972, then stood derelict and was used by drug users. In the scene, two characters wander into the empty shed and a drunk old man mockingly asks if they are trainspotting; one of them realises the man is his own father. The site is now a supermarket and leisure building; the clock tower survives.
Trainspotting at Leith Central
explicit The disused Leith Central station is named in the book and gives it its title; sited at the former station at the foot of Leith Walk.
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