Why £4.5m to save Leith Theatre means so much to locals like me

Leith Theatre is back and its future is looking more secure than it has for decades which is music to the ears of locals like me.

With £4.5 million of National Lottery Heritage Funding, a 50-year lease that secures the building’s future and a full-on summer programme that starts with Restless Natives: The Musical, the lights are shining bright again in this cultural and community hub that’s always been at the heart of Leith.

It’s one thing to live in a city full of amazing theatres and venues but quite another when you walk past one every day. It’s part of a council complex where I registered my children’s births, borrow books and, during Covid, had my vaccines and saw the Theatre serving as a food bank donation centre.

Leith Theatre has a $4.5m National Lottery boost and a summer programme ahead. | Janet Christie

Back in the 1990s the theatre was dark, a slumbering behemoth dreaming of its glory days. Gifted to the people of Leith following the district’s incorporation into the City of Edinburgh in 1920, it opened in 1932 but was closed during the Second World War by bomb damage, reopening after 20 years, only to be mothballed in 1988.

Saved from the risk of private development by local campaigners in 2004, eventually the lights came on again as staff and volunteers began the long fight to secure funding to restore the grade B-listed building and performances, events and classes have seen the public welcomed back into the space while work goes on.

And what a space. In the art deco 1,500-capacity auditorium (elegantly dishevelled but still classically beautiful and getting a glow up every day as restorations continue) in the last few years, I’ve joined crowds drawn from far and wide to enjoy multiple musical highlights.

There was Jarvis Cocker, Young Fathers, Arab Strap, Teenage Fanclub, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kae Tempest, Lucy Dacus and the list goes on – sadly I missed AC/DC and Kraftwerk in the 1970s – as the redoubtable staff and volunteers worked to get show back on the road.

Author Irvine Welsh, pictured at Leith Theatre | Lisa Ferguson

Irvine Welsh in the expanse of the auditorium, Leith Theatre. | Janet Christie

I even got to roam around the Theatre’s backstage delights – a full orchestra pit, the Ladies’ Retiring Room, dressing rooms and storage. The ever-welcoming staff let The Scotsman in to use it as a venue to interview Jack Lowden and Irvine Welsh, and I witnessed the Trainspotting writer bouncing on the sprung dance floor in the Thomas Morton Hall to music from the workies’ sound system blasting high up on scaffolding as they tackled the renovations.

Edinburgh is full of beautiful buildings, but the best ones are those that are open to the public – its galleries and theatres, cinemas, libraries and swimming pools, the ones anyone can enter, admire and use, and Leith Theatre has a lot of love because it’s been there, persevering through thick and thin, bad times and good.

It’s embedded in Leith, looking both outwards and in, involving everyone in the arts and so much more.

Janet Christie looks at concert tickets from the 1970s in Leith Theatre | Chris Scott

That’s why a lifeline of £4.5m is a major step for Leith Theatre and a boost to a fundraising campaign that continues with the hope of making sure it shines bright for many years to come, for all of us.

To see the summer programme, all things Leith Theatre, and support, visit www.leiththeatre.co.uk