Tim Bell has been running highly successful Trainspotting walking tours for the last few years, taking fans of the book and film on a tour around Leith, where much of the action is set. (You can read more details about Trainspotting Tours on Tim’s own site LeithWalks. On the back of that, he’s also written a great essay about the history of Leith and the impact of Trainspotting’s success on the area for the book A Sense Of Place.

Here’s a quick extract from Tim’s essay:

It is difficult now to find any excuse for those vast badly planned and badly built schemes, under the ownership of the local authority which had the task of acting as landlord thrust upon it without any clear rationale or policy. Many families, including Mr and Mrs Welsh and their son Irvine, had left a town with its centuries-old structures, institutions and middle-class, for these places that were supposed to answer the needs of a single socio-economic group. The open spaces quickly became unattractive and even unsafe with broken glass and dog shit. The planners had no intention of letting shops and pubs start a business where there was demand. That sort of thing was grouped around shopping centres. The one on Pennywell Road is typical:unattractive in appearance, unappealing to walk round and linger in, and the shopkeepers always struggle to make a living. The units were never designed for family businesses anyway – branches of chain shops are far more common. The banks are noticeable by their absence, seeing no market for themselves, leaving financial services in the hands of loan sharks. Thus is spontaneous and healthy economic life and social intercourse stifled and stilted. Inevitably a generation grew up with little knowledge of or stake in wider society. In his novel Trainspotting Irvine Welsh later depicted the toilet in the bookie’s in the shopping centre as a fantastically, grotesquely, foul place. The film of the novel dubbed it the “worst toilet in Scotland”.

You can read the full essay in A Sense Of Place: A Collection Of New Scottish Writing, published by Waverley Books.