If the late monarch looks a bit out of place near the discount store, it’s not that she’s lost her way; it’s just that the neighborhood has changed.
When she arrived in 2007, 65 years after an 1842 visit that Leith never got over, apparently, and six years after her death, the area at the corner of Constitution and Great Junction streets was a center of civic focus.
In what might be stereotypical thrift, the Leith Queen Victoria Statue Fund made the sandstone pedestal serve double duty as a war memorial for Scots Guards killed in the Boer War.
They also incorporated a glass casket containing 1907 coins, local newspapers and other memorabilia. During a cleaning and renovation in 1985, it was opened, and new coins, a copy of the day’s Edinburgh Evening News and a tape of a BBC show about the redevelopment of Leith were added.
