Choose Life, Choose Leith: A Trainspotting Walk with Tim Bell

Tim Bell has lived in Leith since 1980. Intrigued by the way Welsh spliced geography and history into Trainspotting, he set about unpicking the chaos and complexities of the place and the culture. 

In 2000, Tim became a tour guide in Leith and embarked on research for Choose Life, Choose Leith.

Tim joins us to give a Trainspotting Walk, beginning in the bookshop for coffee and cake and ending at the foot of Easter Road. Please note, you will have to make your own way home from there!

The walk will take around an hour in total. We ask you to wear sensible shoes and clothes.

Much more than transgressional entertainment, Irvine Welsh’s book Trainspotting and its derivatives is a window into the social mayhem that was everyday life in one of the most deprived areas in 1980s Britain. Thatcherism. Greed. Poverty. Heroin. HIV. Disenfranchised youth. In the back garden of posh, prosperous Edinburgh, Leith had the lot.

For 20 years, Bell has interpreted Trainspotting on the streets of Leith for locals, tourists, aficionados and academics. In this book, a critical analysis of Trainspotting – the book, the play, and the film – he splices well-researched erudition with street-level wisdom and lived-experience testimony to tell the story behind the story.

This new edition refocuses Trainspotting as a creative chronicle of the early years of the ongoing and uniquely Scottish drug death culture.