Culture and Community
Leith has a long history of idealistic social advances, many of which were the first in Scots history:
All boys were educated for free from 1555 onwards. This was paid for by the local trade guilds. All girls were educated from 1820, admittedly a long time after the boys, but very early for free education for females (the law only required it from 1876). A free hospital service was provided from 1777, paid for by a local income tax, with beds sponsored by local shops. Leith had electric street lighting from 1890, and electric trams from 1905 (only Blackpool was earlier in the UK). The first public sewer in Scotland was built in Bernard Street in 1780; this simply flowed into the Water of Leith. The iron seal over the end of this is still visible next to Bernard Street bridge. The sewage is now pumped the other way (it was laid to fall westwards) to Seafield.
It is a multicultural area with sizable African-Caribbean, Asian and Eastern European communities.
Hibernian Football Club have their stadium at Easter Road in Leith.
The Utopia pub on Easter Road started a protest campaign against the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling after the 2008 Budget.
Read more about this topic: Leith
Famous quotes containing the words culture and, culture and/or community:
“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold (1886–1948)