A newsagent's stock is bouncing along the pavement of Princes Street, and Renton and Spud are running away from it with shop security on their heels. The chase goes up Hanover Street past the Royal Scottish Academy and ends on Calton Road, beneath the arch of Regent Bridge, where a car catches Renton and flips him over the bonnet. Those three streets sit within 900 metres of each other, and they are as much of Edinburgh as anybody has written down: going back over the ground in 2017, the BFI put the city's presence on screen at about three minutes.
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places on the route
The three Edinburgh streets stand within 900 metres of each other — switch cities with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Everything else that reads as Edinburgh is Glasgow, and that was a budget decision rather than a scouting one. Danny Boyle told Empire that the Glasgow Film Fund had backed Shallow Grave, and that the money came with an obligation to shoot as much of the next film as possible in the same city; most of the best crews in Britain were living there anyway, he said. His producer, Andrew Macdonald, said they were carrying more than fifty locations on a small budget and could not afford to go east twice. So Spud's cafe is on Maryhill Road, Begbie's balcony belongs to a converted Baptist chapel in North Kelvinside, the Worst Toilet in Scotland was a set inside an empty cigarette factory, and the London hotel room at the end of the story is on Buchanan Street. Of those Glasgow locations, the cafe and the pub are still serving. The nightclub is rubble under a block of flats, and the hotel has been hollowed out behind its own front wall.
filmed herewhere it really happened
The Edinburgh filming locations: three streets, 900 metres
Princes Street
Princes Street looking east at dusk, with the spires of the Old Town beyond. The opening chase runs along this pavement.
The opening chase, cut to Iggy Pop with the Choose Life speech laid over the top of it. Which part of the street you would have to stand in to see it, we cannot tell you: Princes Street runs about 1.2 km, and the accounts of the scene name shops rather than numbers. Empire sent a reporter to the shoot on its nineteenth day, and what he describes is two actors sprinting the same few yards most of the morning and strewing the same stolen goods across them. The newsagent, John Menzies, closed in 1998, and by 2017 the BFI found a Zara standing where it had been; the Marks & Spencer visible behind the runners was still in business, its frontage cleaned up. The trams running down the centre of the road arrived in 2014; in 1995 there were none. Film Edinburgh, the city council's own film office, is the only source we have that names all three streets of the chase together, and its card for this one lists three later productions: T2 Trainspotting, The Angels' Share and Clique.
Hanover Street
Hanover Street looking south towards Princes Street — the direction of the chase.
Hanover Street where it meets Princes Street, seen from under the portico of the Royal Scottish Academy, with Edinburgh Castle above.
Photo: Ninian Reid from Perth, Scotland · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The middle third of the chase, 291 metres uphill from the point we mark on Princes Street. The two of them run past the portico of the Royal Scottish Academy through a crowd of shoppers who, as the BFI reads the shot, had been told nothing and are in the film regardless. Above the Academy the street climbs to George Street between tall stone frontages. The Academy at the bottom of the hill is a gallery you can walk into.
Calton Road, under Regent Bridge
Calton Road from Leith Street in 2005, with the arch of Regent Bridge across it. The bar on the right is the one the chase runs past.
Where the chase finishes, and where Edinburgh finishes with it. A car pulls out of a side opening, Renton rolls across the bonnet and gets up laughing, Spud keeps going under the arch, and Waverley station sits in the background of the shot. The arch belongs to Regent Bridge, designed by Archibald Elliot in 1819, category A listed, carrying Waterloo Place over the road; the station's Calton Road entrance is a few steps east. Empire watched them get it: under five seconds of screen time, two hours of work, McGregor knocked down about twenty times, with pauses while the nurse put him back together. Afterwards everyone went back to Princes Street and shot for another hour.
One loose end. Boyle said before the shoot that the Edinburgh days would also pick up wordless shots to establish the city, and nothing we read identifies any of them in the finished film or says where the camera stood. The little bar the runners pass had become Pivo, done out on an eastern European theme, by the time the BFI came looking.
Glasgow playing Edinburgh: half a mile of Maryhill
Firhill Complex, Hopehill Road
The Firhill Complex on Hopehill Road, where the five-a-side match of the opening titles was played.
Five-a-side football under the opening credits, the group introduced one player at a time as the match runs. The team on the other side of the ball is Calton Athletic, a recovery group for heroin addicts, started in Glasgow's East End in 1985 as a football team with a social club attached; Ewan McGregor went to meet them while he was working out the part, and they are the opposition on screen. The pitches are on Hopehill Road. That is worth pinning down, because Wikidata hangs this film on Firhill Stadium, Partick Thistle's ground about 500 metres north, while everyone who describes the scene means the sports complex. The descriptions cannot agree on its name either: Firhill Health Complex, Firhill Sports Complex, the Firhill Complex, with two postcodes between them. A photograph from 2024 shows a low building behind steel mesh fencing, floodlight poles standing over the car park.
Café D'Jaconelli, 570 Maryhill Road
Café D'Jaconelli at 570 Maryhill Road, Glasgow, in 2011.
A milkshake, and Renton's advice about the job interview waiting for Spud. The cafe stands 457 metres from the Firhill pitches, wedged between The Codfather and a small launderette. The Guardian came in 2017 and counted 93 years of it: blue fishtank, 1950s juke-box, booths with Formica tops. The BFI came the same year and found the interior more or less untouched. The University of Glasgow's blog has it open and serving.
The Crosslands, Queen Margaret Drive
The Crosslands on Queen Margaret Drive in 2011, still under that name. The building began as a Baptist chapel.
Begbie on the couch under the wrought-iron balcony, telling the table how he gave a man a hiding over a game of pool, then lobbing his glass backwards over the rail into the bar below. The place was built as a Baptist chapel, and the balcony is the reason the production wanted it. Two days in the summer of 1995 cost 700 pounds to the owners, plus 20 pounds and free drink for every regular in the place. The sign has been repainted three times since: Franco's Bar; The Kelbourne Saint, in 2016, after 40,000 pounds went into the place; and BrewHaus, by 2022.
James Killen, the general manager in 2017, told the Guardian how to spot a visitor who has never been in before: they look up. Two young Finnish women had done it that week, one of them holding an iPad up under the balcony with a still from the scene on the screen while the other photographed her doing it.
One account will not sit with the others. Empire's reporter, riding along on the 1995 recce, names the pub for this scene as the Brewhouse, puts it in the town centre and reports that no other bar they saw had a balcony that would work. Queen Margaret Drive is 2.7 km out from the centre, and the pub there has carried the name BrewHaus only since about 2022. Either Empire wrote down a candidate that was later dropped, or it had the name and the district wrong. Everyone else, the manager included, says Crosslands.
Partick: the club that kept its own name
The Volcano, Benalder Street
The West Village flats on Benalder Street, on the ground the Volcano nightclub stood on.
Renton meets Diane in the car park. Inside, Tommy and Spud are talking about sex in a curtained-off corner while the girlfriends are having the same conversation in the toilets. The club plays itself, name and all, which makes it the odd one out among the Glasgow addresses on this page. Before it was the Volcano it was Cinders Disco, and it stood where Byres Road comes down to Partick Cross; the Blondie and Heaven 17 on the soundtrack, by the BFI's account, is what the place played on an ordinary night. Empire went round with the location scouts and took down the booking: club and car park, Tuesday 30 May 1995. The building is gone. Flats called West Village occupy the ground, and 15 Benalder Street is not an address any more.
Tommy and Lizzy rent a tape here. Their own video goes missing, and Tommy's slide starts from that. The shop was 388 metres from where the Volcano stood, and its address reaches us in a single sentence in the Glasgow magazine Glasgowist. No other account we opened mentions it at all. OpenStreetMap has a pharmacy at the number now. There is no photograph of the shopfront here, because nothing we found shows the number over the door.
Diane comes out of school and Renton is waiting at the railings. They walk the length of them to the gate, where she tells him she will go to the police unless he comes back. Every account names the district and stops: Diane's school in Jordanhill, Jordanhill in the West End. One school in the district carries that name, on Chamberlain Road, and its railings and gate match the BFI's description. Fixing the name to the place is our own inference, not a statement anybody made. It is a working state school with its own board of managers, and there is nothing there to visit.
Rouken Glen Park
Rouken Glen Park, opened to the public in 1906 and now run by East Renfrewshire Council.
Renton and Sick Boy lie on the grass doing Sean Connery voices, disagreeing about the Bonds and about The Name of the Rose, while Sick Boy puts air-rifle pellets into strangers across the park.
Boyle had used this wood before. Two years earlier, in the trees here, Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccleston dug the hole that gives Shallow Grave its title. VisitScotland prints one card for the two of them. The body in the wood is Keith Allen, who turns up again in this film as the London dealer, in a room we will come to.
The park runs to 58 hectares, it has been open to the public since 1906 and East Renfrewshire Council looks after it. Which part of it the two of them are sitting in, no source says.
Dennistoun: the cigarette factory where the interiors were filmed
The former Wills factory, Alexandra Parade
City Park on Alexandra Parade in 2005 — the former W.D. & H.O. Wills cigarette factory, empty from 1990 until its office conversion in 2004, and the film's improvised sound stage in 1995.
You cannot visit the Worst Toilet in Scotland. It was a carpentry job, put up inside the disused W.D. & H.O. Wills factory in Dennistoun along with Renton's flat, his parents' front room, the squats, the tidier suburban rooms and some of the London interiors. The production office, the wardrobe and the art department worked out of the same building, and the sets took up 15,000 square feet of it for three weeks of interior filming. Glasgowist and GlasgowWorld both put 30 of the 50 locations in Dennistoun; the Guardian, describing the same derelict factory beside the M8, says nearly all 50 were in Glasgow.
Cigarettes stopped coming off the line in 1983, cigars in 1990, and the listing followed in 1992. What the crew took over in the summer of 1995 was a protected building with nothing in it. It stayed empty until the City Park offices were fitted into it in 2004. No source ties the filming to a street number, and Alexandra Parade had two tobacco blocks on it, so the one we mean is the listed one, the big quadrangle.
The London scene that is half in Glasgow
Royal Eagle Hotel, Craven Road
Craven Road, Paddington. The Royal Eagle Hotel stands in this street, at numbers 26–30.
Four men come out onto Craven Road in Paddington and cross it in line abreast, the film doing the Abbey Road sleeve, then go indoors to sell two kilos of heroin. Time Out put the address at 26 to 30 Craven Road in 2018, and the travel writer Caroline Allen gave the reason for picking it: Paddington in 1996 had a drug trade of its own, so a cheap hotel in these streets came with the atmosphere already on it and nothing had to be dressed in. London took three and a half days at the end of a seven-week schedule. When Time Out telephoned the hotel, the manager did not want to discuss the film.
The George Hotel, Buchanan Street
235–245 Buchanan Street, the former George Hotel, listed category B.
They walk through a door in Paddington into a room 550 kilometres away in a straight line. The deal with Keith Allen's dealer was shot in the circular room of the George Hotel, the one with the curved doors, at the top end of Buchanan Street. It was identified by a long-term guest, a man who kept coming back to the place from 1995 to 1998 and who walked a photographer through it in its last month of business. In a film that spends its time turning Glasgow into Edinburgh, the London deal is Glasgow as well, and only the doorstep is where the story says it is.
Glasgowist calls the George demolished. It is not: Historic Environment Scotland has kept it on the list at category B since December 1970, and the record notes the commercial development put in behind the retained facade in 1999. The business died; the building did not. The front at 235 to 245 Buchanan Street, across from Buchanan Galleries, is the one Neil Cameron Duff drew in 1907, and a photograph from 2014 shows the hotel's stained glass still in the windows of the shop trading inside it, saltires and all. The same guest's account hands these interiors two more credits, The Big Man with Liam Neeson and episodes of Taggart. Both rest on him alone, and no second source turned up.
The one place that plays itself, and the one you cannot drive to
Corrour railway station
Corrour station on Rannoch Moor with Leum Uilleim behind it.
Tommy gets the other three down onto this platform to go walking, and what he gets back from Renton is the speech about how shite it is to be Scottish. The mountain behind the platform is Leum Uilleim. No public road reaches Corrour, the highest station in the UK and the most remote: it sits on the West Highland Line from Glasgow to Fort William, at the top end of Loch Ossian on Rannoch Moor, and you arrive by train or you walk in across the moor. Corrour Station House, on the platform itself, is a restaurant with rooms, run by the estate. The spot where four men get off in the middle of nowhere has a dinner service and beds for the night, and it is 128 kilometres from Princes Street with no road to it.
Television has been back twice, both times for documentary: the BBC's Secret Britain in 2010, and Paul Merton's Secret Stations for Channel 4. Neither shot a story here; in both the presenter simply turns up on the platform. A photograph taken at this spot in June 1996, four months after the film opened, catches a train unloading walkers and rucksacks onto an empty platform.
The station that gave the film its name
Leith Central railway station, foot of Leith Walk
The clock tower of Leith Central station, which gave the film its title and never appeared in it.
In Irvine Welsh's novel, Begbie and Renton use the derelict Leith Central as a toilet, and a drunk in the dark asks them whether they are trainspotting. The drunk is Begbie's father. That exchange is where the title comes from, and Boyle's film does not contain it. The name stayed on the picture anyway. The sequel restored it: T2 Trainspotting, 2017, as a flashback.
Passenger trains ran here from 1 July 1903 until 7 April 1952 and then stopped. Diesels used the place as a depot until 1972, and after that it stood empty right through the 1980s, which is how it became the ruin the book describes. It is 2.8 km north of the streets the chase used.
The trainshed came down long ago. What still stands where Leith Walk runs out is the frontage, the clock tower and the row of shops beneath them, with the Central Bar pulling pints in the ground floor. Behind that front, on the ground the platforms used to cover, there is a supermarket and a children's soft-play centre.
The two locations nobody has placed
While the film was still being scouted, Boyle told Empire which rooms were giving him trouble: a crematorium, and above all a courtroom, because courts tend not to let crews in at all. The morning Empire spent riding around with the scouts started at a crematorium. Where either scene was filmed in the end, no source we opened says, and neither building has a marker on the map above.
A production that had secured a working nightclub, a cigarette factory standing empty under a preservation order and a platform on Rannoch Moor with no road to it found a courtroom harder than any of them. Where it found one, nobody wrote down.
