Holding the Line: Gentrification and the Dispossession of the Kirkgate Benches

At 12.00pm on Monday the eleventh of August, four people are sat in the paved area beneath a statue of Queen Victoria on two of the public benches that have recently become a site of contention between council administrators and local residents.

Two men sit: one dressed in white linen, with short brown hair and a beard, the other with white hair and stubble. He wears an oversized navy rain jacket. Both smoke cigarettes, drink beer and talk.

A man enters the square on a ‘Just Eat’ bike from Constitution Street wearing a bucket hat, camouflage jacket, black joggers, and black Nike trainers. He plays drum and bass music from a speaker, joins the two men on one of the benches, briefly, before leaving.

On the other bench sit a man and woman. The man has black, balding hair and is wearing a collared t-shirt with a Hibernian logo, blue jeans and trainers. He drinks a can of beer. The woman to his left has her hair in a ponytail, with rectangular specs, a black vest, black leggings and pink trainers. She drinks from a can of pink Edinburgh Gin.

As the traffic lights on Duke Street turn red, streams of people pass along the back edge of the square. An older man dressed in black and wearing a Scotland cap enters from Constitution Street. He staggers with a blood-soaked cloth in his mouth, leans on the bin, removes the cloth - revealing broken teeth.

Three middle aged men enter the Kirkgate from the North, carrying blue plastic bags. One of them is talking on the phone with an Irish accent. After sitting on a roadworks barrier for a moment, he approaches the couple on the bench. The woman leaves with her shopping.

Lights change at the pedestrian crossing. A woman in a red t-shirt and jeans carrying a bag of lemons and limes passes through with a young girl dressed in pink, riding a scooter. Behind her, two women in denim jackets and head scarves go into the British Heart Foundation, as a woman in a ponytail and scrubs crosses Constitution Street, where from a man on a mobility scooter appears, wearing a brown jacket, a cap and round shades. He enters the square and parks under the statue to feed the pigeons.

The man on the mobility scooter moves, and the pigeons scatter in the air before settling on the statue and surrounding buildings.

Gone

By Tuesday morning, the benches were gone. Local news and social media lit up, attempting to solve the ‘mystery’ of the missing benches. Responses ranged from the understandably baffled to the predictably unsympathetic. For seventeen days, the empty space stood as a silent monument to a decision made without public consultation, a physical void that opened a much needed talking point on local politics, gentrification, and the erosion of public space.

Then, at eight o’clock on Thursday the twenty-eighth, the benches were quietly returned. But this restitution is not a victory; it is a revealing truce. The council’s sudden, unilateral removal—and its equally quiet reversal under public pressure—exposes a fundamental tension. It demonstrates how fragile the right to public space is for the most vulnerable, subject to the whims of an administration that remains deeply ashamed of them.

The Newkirkgate Shopping Centre is far more than a retail hub. It is a vital organ of community life. Its twenty-one shops—including a Lidl, a Poundland, a H & T Pawnbrokers, and a bank—cater to practical needs, but its true function is social. On its upper deck, the Leith Community Centre hosts a vibrant cross-section of city life, including but not limited to: mutual-aid recovery meetings, trade union organising, Zen meditation, and an Over 50s Film Club. It also houses a Criminal Justice office, where people repay a community they are deemed to have harmed.

Built in the 1960s to replace the dilapidated old Kirkgate, the centre’s construction once dispersed residents Edinburgh-wide. Today, it serves the opposite function: it is a crucial cultural landmark where longstanding and new residents coalesce, providing the space and infrastructure necessary for connection. For the most vulnerable—those with nowhere else to go—the Kirkgate is a last refuge, a place to simply exist without being asked to leave or to spend.

In many ways, the Kirkgate is ‘holding the line’ against the continuous and rapid gentrification of Leith Walk. Just up the road, a surfeit of gourmet eateries, artisan coffee shops, and vintage boutiques cater to an influx of comparatively wealthy international students and young professionals priced out of areas such as Bruntsfield, Marchmont, and Stockbridge. The Kirkgate remains one of the few spaces where low-income, working-class, elderly, and infirm residents can meet without attracting the judgmental gaze of newcomers, and without having to dispense with what little disposable income they have on a four-pound coffee.

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Newcomers Welcome

Newcomers should be welcomed. But if Edinburgh City Council is serious about diversity and inclusion, it should know better than to marginalize and stigmatize the most vulnerable and longstanding members of the community. It is they who bring a resolute and characterful presence to a city increasingly defined by the homogenising, alienating demands of hyper-individual neoliberal consumption. If being a ‘Leither’ is defined by a unique sense of local identity, community spirit, rebelliousness, and down-to-earth resilience, then why are local councillors teaming up with Police Scotland to persecute those who embody this very heritage?

If we can tolerate an upmarket cocktail bar commemorating Trainspotting’s drug-dealing ‘Mother Superior’, surely, we can make room for—even celebrate—the very people who lived through that generation and survived. Deindustrialisation ripped the heart out of Leith, costing over 10,000 industrial jobs and creating the social deprivation Irvine Welsh wrote about. That deprivation lingers to this day. Rather than deal with its root causes—a lack of housing, support services, and meaningful investment—Edinburgh City Council would rather test its power by removing the benches that offer a moment’s rest to those bearing the brunt of its failures.

As Lewis MacLeod noted, Renton and Begbie recognised Princes Street and Edinburgh Castle as economic markers welcoming foreign capital—commodities for those with the power to purchase, or experience, them. Today, Leith Walk and the Kirkgate itself have become what born Leither, geographer and Marxist academic Neil Smith would have called the ‘new urban frontier’ of this city. The brief removal of the benches was a classic tactic of frontier violence: a dispossession. The ‘savagery’ of the existing community at the edge of this conflict zone is expected to break or bend to middle-class sensibilities or be pilloried by the state for their economic inactivity.

Council hostility

The Council’s hostility is longstanding. Since its 2005 rebranding of Edinburgh as ‘Scotland’s leading financial and knowledge-based economy’, it has been subservient to big business and international investment. From the stomach-churning sloganeering of “Inspiring Capital” and “InvestEdinburgh”, to the attempt to shut down The People’s Story Museum, the Council lays prostrate at the feet of capital while going to war with the working-class individuals who make this city.

The removal and return of the public benches is not a mystery solved. It is a predictable, concerted effort to sanitise public space for wealthy incomers and businesses in what is essentially a class war. The process was cheered on by commentators who should know better. But class interests being what they are, The Edinburgh Evening News saw fit to make light of the removal, with Conservative Councillor Ian Whyte citing businesses that call the area a ‘Highway to Hell’. Meanwhile, ‘writer and comedian’ Susan Morrison mocked the “sad souls who hug bottles of Buckie” and “some poor overdosed soul on the pavement.” Amid a drug death epidemic that claimed 1,051 lives in Scotland last year alone, I find it difficult to recognise the comedy. It is no surprise that snide commentators and Tories seize this opportunity to pile on the most traumatised members of our community, clearing the way for the more “civilised” and affluent.

For anyone committed to social justice, the saga of the Kirkgate benches is an affront to community diversity and integration. It was a violent act of social cleansing, a silent declaration that some people’s comfort is more valuable than other people’s survival. Their return, won by public outrage, is a temporary respite, not an absolution. It reveals a council that is ashamed of its most vulnerable citizens and is willing to test the waters of erasure rather than serve them. The benches are more than furniture; they are a statement that everyone, regardless of their income or status, has a right to this city. This entire episode is a stark reminder of a community whose character must be constantly defended, or sold off piece by piece until nothing of its soul remains. The benches are back, but the battle for the right to the city continues.

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