Everyday Heritage In A Leith Pub

By Dr Julian Grant

This article originally appeared in the October issue of the SCHA Newsletter.

I work in a pub on the Shore in Leith called the Malt & Hops. In its own way, the pub is a channel for a very ordinary but important current of local heritage in a changing community.

Its lineage as a public house can be traced back to 1747. For much of the 20th century it was called the Drawbridge, in reference to the nearby bridge over the Water of Leith which would lift (and later swivel) to allow ships into the basin to unload their cargoes. It became the Malt & Hops in 1992 - a new name, but otherwise very much a traditional pub. A knotted rope hangs from the bell rung at closing time; it was tied by a former merchant seaman who recently came to celebrate his 90th birthday at the pub. Faded notes of every currency in the world are pinned to the rafters, and hundreds of old ale labels dot the ceiling. You can sense the layers of intoxication, camaraderie, memories and stories that have woven punters into the fabric of this place for centuries.

Behind the bar is a folder containing photographs of each iteration of the pub frontage from 1980 to today. When the first of these photos was taken, the nearby Henry Robb shipyard (immortalised in the music video for The Proclaimers’ 1987 hit Letter from America) was still holding on. Hundreds of workers passed by the pub as they came in and out of the busy Leith Docks every day, and a pint of heavy cost somewhere in the range of 50p. The renaming of the pub in the early 1990s mirrored a shift in the trajectory of the area. Many of the old warehouses, cooperies and tenements which lined the Shore were restored and converted into flats over the course of the decade. A string of elegant new restaurants and bars catered to a different clientele: young professionals and creatives flocked here, instead of the industrial workers of ‘old Leith’. The area’s complicated maritime and industrial heritage became a vehicle for drawing investment, business, and new residents.

Evolution of the Drawbridge pub from 1980 to its present day form.

A photograph from 1988 (seen below, courtesy of the Living Memory Association) shows the Drawbridge in a dilapidated state, with a mossy roof, broken windows and girders to prop the structure up. On the right is a new block of flats going up, signalling the emergence of the ‘new Leith’. Some of the older regulars have been coming here since the days of the old Drawbridge, and are more than happy to regale listeners with tales of how it used to be. I shared the old photos of the pub with a woman whose father managed the Drawbridge many decades ago. She told a story of the pub being used to store an illicit cargo of carpets smuggled in from the docks. When a policeman arrived to investigate, he was told that the pub was simply being fitted with new carpets - despite the fact that there were many more square yards of fabric there than could possibly fit the pub’s tight floorplan!

Photograph from 1988, showing the drawbridge in a dilapidated state.

These days, conversation at the bar sometimes traces an informal history of Edinburgh’s youth subcultures, as regulars discuss the music, fashion, football teams and local identities that shaped their upbringings. Tales of the pub’s characters in times past give an insight into the colourful and often difficult lives of the men and women who lived around here in the 1970s and 80s, when Leith was beset by severe poverty and declining industries. They tell of how the changes of the past few decades have made the pub a much more accepting place for people of all backgrounds, particularly women. And yet regulars also reflect on the way that gentrification and the growth of tourism has changed the character of Leith and Edinburgh, making living here unaffordable, inaccessible or unwelcoming for many people who once called the city home.

One way of defining heritage is in material terms: as something important from the past which is preserved in the bricks and mortar of venerable buildings, or displayed behind glass in museums. This approach favours the expertise of museum and heritage professionals, who preserve important objects or sites and curate them for public interpretation and display. A broader and more flexible definition meanwhile recognises heritage as diverse memories and meanings of the past which are passed organically from person to person. From this perspective ordinary people are seen as experts of their own heritage, and everyday places emerge as forums for the making and sharing of those heritages.  My PhD supervisor, Dr Iain Robertson, uses the term 'heritage from below' to describe these grassroots uses of the past.

My experience working in the Malt & Hops reminds me that heritage doesn’t only exist in the obvious historical sites. It is also continually made (and re-made) in ordinary places of community and leisure. As punters in the pub today discuss what has been gained and lost through sweeping physical and social transformations, they make the Malt & Hops a vital space in which grassroots meanings of local heritage are created. This allows those who lived through previous eras to make sense of changes in the world around them, and helps those of us who were not there interpret the earlier society which shaped the world we live in today. For many people, this is a more accessible and relevant way of relating past to present than that which they might encounter in a museum or at a designated heritage site.

As community heritage practitioners, it is important that we continue to expand our sense of what different forms heritage might take by asking: where else is heritage made? What does it mean for different people, especially those whose voices aren’t often heard? How might the recognition of these everyday forms of heritage help us understand our changing societies? We as a sector must recognise our unique capacity to ask and answer these questions. With our local footprint, our grassroots grounding and our emphasis on ordinary people’s relationship with the past, we are well-placed to recognise and engage with this strand of heritage and the urgent meanings about past and present it contains.