Images and map of Leith landmarks

FROM the site of Britain’s most disgusting toilet to the setting for countless fights, drug-taking and sordid sexual encounters, it is not, perhaps, the face of Edinburgh that tourism chiefs are particularly keen to promote.

Yet a tour of the real-life landmarks featured in Trainspotting, the disturbing novel by Irvine Welsh, is proving so popular that it is threatening to eclipse the city’s more traditional literary walks.

Tim Bell’s first words to those who make the trek to Leith, Edinburgh’s old port, for the two-hour stroll through the streets in which Trainspotting and Porno, its sequel, are set, give warning that it is not for the faint-hearted. “This gig’s nae for bairns,” is his usual opening line.

Despite the macabre subject matter and occasional insults from local drunks, the journey through the drug-scarred landscape of Welsh’s Sunny Leith has become such a hit that Mr Bell is committed to at least three walks a week until December and two a day in August, when it will be included in the official listings for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Mr Bell, 59, an elder with the Church of Scotland and former prison chaplain, who has been hosting walking tours around Leith for five years, is so busy that he is seeking young actors to help him.

He said yesterday that the tour, which began last year after a group of Dutch Trainspotting enthusiasts asked him to show them around Leith, was intended as a serious challenge to other literary walks around Edinburgh.

Edinburgh, Unesco’s first World City of Literature last year, has long associations with famous writers and poets such as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns. Now it has added Welsh, who grew up on one of the city’s most notorious housing estates and spent years living in Leith.

Trainspotting was published in 1993 and became a worldwide hit, selling 800,000 copies in more than 30 languages and was made into a successful film starring Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle, although most of it was shot elsewhere.

More than 100 English, Scottish, Dutch, Canadian and French tourists have been on the tours. Starting at the Port O’Leith Bar, above which Sick Boy makes a pornographic film in Porno, the £8 tour takes in everything from the Leith Dockers’ Social Club, where Renton drinks with his parents, to a park where Sick Boy throttles to death a pit bull terrier after shooting it with an air rifle from his bedroom window. It includes pubs, statues, shops and even a taxi rank at the “fit ay the Walk” (foot of Leith Walk), where Renton stands “freezing ma baws oaf” as he waits for a taxi.

Many of the landmarks have changed since the Eighties, in which the novel is set.

Waterside flats in Leith are among the most expensive in Scotland and the old dole office of Trainspotting is now an expensive Italian restaurant.

The Persevere Bar — where Spud, the novel’s perennial loser, gets into a fight — boasts a “family friendly” sign outside.

Leith Central Railway Station, derelict when Welsh was writing about it, is now the site of a swimming pool and supermarket. In the novel, it symbolises the self-destruction of drug addiction. As Renton walks through the “barren, desolate hangar” with the psychopathic Frank Begbie, a drunk, wine bottle in hand, asks them: “What yis up tae, lads? Trainspotting eh?” Mr Bell, who starts each tour by explaining slang such as “chory” (to steal) and “gadge” (bloke), said that his message was, like that of Welsh’s novels, anti-drugs. “There’s a lot of ignorance and if I can address that, I’m doing something.”

He has been told by Welsh’s agent that the author has no objection to his tours, but will not officially endorse them.

Mary Moriarty, 66, who has owned the Port O’Leith Bar since the Eighties, when Edinburgh was known as the Aids capital of Europe, said: “It was horrendous — but that period has gone and this is like a history tour.”

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