What a wander around Edinburgh tells us about belonging

Just behind Melbourne and Shanghai, and just ahead of London and New York, sits Edinburgh in Time Out’s latest list of top global cities.

Though you should know the list is sponsored by a travel agent – so the criteria lean heavily toward the bacchanalian. “Edinburgh takes everything that makes life worth living and turns the dial up several notches: outstanding food, beautiful green spaces and a vibrant arts and culture scene,” writes Chiara Wilkinson from Time Out.

My sense, as a Leith resident since January 2024, is that each of those “life worth living” elements is variously accessible – depending on how flush you happen to be.

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Outstanding food? We’ve visited a few restaurants that appear in Time Out’s Top 30 Edinburgh list, though we’ve been nowhere near the Michelin stars. Arts and culture? For us, that’s meant a mixture of carefully targeted ticket budgets – Festival or Fringe or otherwise – and a good number of low- or no-cost ideas spaces. The green and sea-bound landscapes are, blessedly, a real commons. Add on a full petrol tank and they extend all the way down the Lothian coastline.

So as a third “best city” for global cosmocrats giving themselves a treat, I can understand why Edinburgh hits the mark. But as someone who chose to move here partly as a launchpad for the remainder of my days, I’ve been looking for more than Time Out’s consumerist metrics.

Consumer pleasures are one thing. Urban experience is quite another.

Big, historic cities – the kind that generations of migrants and opportunists (in the best sense) have flocked to – always create those cheek-by-jowl encounters between worlds.

From our door in Leith you can walk into two of them almost immediately. Head along Ferry Road towards Junction Street and you pass a conceptual art gallery, a modernist furniture workshop, a co-working space and the magnificent Leith Library and Leith Theatre. There’s also the mysteriously bohemian cafe Sketchy Beats. People in visible hardship asking for money are regularly stationed outside the ScotMid.

Go in the other direction, taking a set of stairs under a nearby bridge, and you’re suddenly in the steampunk depths of the Water of Leith Walkway. This is a broad 19km path that follows the river across the city.

Completed in 2002 and shrouded in greenery, it feels as municipal and collective as urban infrastructure gets. Skateboarders and outdoor drinkers mingle with pounding runners and cyclists as you wander towards either the Leith Shore (festooned with Michelin-star restaurants). Or the Botanic Gardens, populated by Stockbridge residents taking the air.

Herons, swans and ducks sail calmly past the backs of tenement blocks and small riverside businesses. Last summer, we came upon an indie-folk band serenading strollers from their back green above the path. Their entrepreneurial touch: a fishing rod extended outwards, with a QR code dangling from the end for digital donations.

Yet another route from our door takes you towards a mixture of the antique, the ecological sublime and the quietly world-historical.

Walk through Trinity to Newhaven Harbour and your view gradually fills with the silver-green expanse of the Firth of Forth. It does everything a giant body of water is supposed to do to the soul, framed by a lighthouse flickering in disco colours and a still-working seafood port.

But keep walking along the shoreline and you eventually stumble upon something that feels like a clue to how the rest of this century will go.

Earlier this year we stood stunned as a Chinese-flagged vessel – two football pitches long – pulled into the Port of Leith. It was carrying three giant yellow foundations for the Inch Cape offshore wind farm east of Arbroath.

The sight is both poignant and planetary. Poignant because such massive construction has to be imported from China rather than built in Scotland. Planetary because, despite all the geopolitical rhetoric about blocs and tariffs, the world is quietly linking itself together, in the transition away from fossil fuels.

In Leith docks, those realities loom above you at the end of an ordinary Edinburgh walk. And if it’s not Chinese wind-farm structures in the distance, it’s cruise liners sending pods of shivering tourists to Newhaven Harbour, gamely bagpiped ashore.

Carry on further along the coast and you reach what we’ve come to regard as Edinburgh’s great wellbeing secret: the beaches of East Lothian.

Within an hour’s drive you can be standing somewhere like Seacliff Beach, with the ghostly white Bass Rock – white because it’s a gannet sanctuary – floating offshore like a science-fiction apparition. If awe at the sheer presence of nature counts as part of “life worth living”, I’d suggest the Lothian beaches deserve their place on the Time Out recommendations too.

What also doesn’t quite come through in the anodyne phrase “arts and culture” is Edinburgh’s continuing intellectual life – which was one of the reasons I eventually landed here.

My own sense of this goes back decades. In the early 1990s, I squeezed into a seminar in the Old Town Law School buildings, hosted by the great constitutional theorist Neil MacCormick. The visiting speaker was Jürgen Habermas, then widely regarded as the most influential political philosopher in the world.

At the time I’d written a Hue And Cry song, Ordinary Angel, loosely inspired by his theory of communicative action. Habermas seemed bemused – but delighted – when I handed him a CD. Months later, he sent a note of appreciation to my Compuserve account. Ever since then, I’ve mostly expected Edinburgh to live up to its Enlightenment reputation. It doesn’t often disappoint.

(Image: Supplied)

During the 1990s, under James Boyle’s tenure at BBC Radio Scotland and guided by the polymath producer Iain Docherty, we hosted a nightly ideas programme called The Usual Suspects.

It mixed Edinburgh’s academic and creative worlds with visiting global thinkers – John Kenneth Galbraith, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, JG Ballard among them.

Just as the need for that level of public conversation feels greatest, BBC talk radio has narrowed dramatically. It seems a squandering of Edinburgh’s intellectual inheritance and possibilities.

Yet the energy is still here.

As I write from deepest Leith, I’m surrounded by it. I’ve been an associate of the Edinburgh Futures Institute for the past year and a half. It’s an extraordinary institution occupying the restored Royal Infirmary buildings (and at the end of a bus route from my door).

Its ambition is to weave ethics and moral reflection into new technologies at their inception, rather than clearing up the damage afterwards.

It’s also a place of convivial encounters – epitomised by its hosting of the Edinburgh International Book Festival – echoing the coffee-house culture that fuelled the first Scottish Enlightenment.

And in that same spirit, economist William Thompson’s Scotland’s Economics Festival takes place this week across several Leith venues. Local and global thinkers gather to challenge conventional assumptions about economics and to raise the discussion to the level of the crises we face.

Of course there are other Edinburghs too. An Edinburgh of educational and geographic snobbery. An Edinburgh as a picturesque bolt-hole for the global 1%. An Edinburgh of Rebus and Renton – poverty, addiction, criminality. A “festival city” that is far less than festive for many who live here.

Still, I’m willing to give this other Edinburgh a chance: the city of common beauty, world-changing ideas and practical experiments in how we might live differently.

Time Out’s idea of the “best city” may be largely recreational. But a city at its best can be much more than that.