Port O' Leith.

Port O' Leith

Shut on 3 May 2026, and the lease was still being advertised three months later.3

Why go

You cannot go, for now. Heineken UK's pub arm Star Pubs brought the end of the lease forward, and Craig Smith stepped down after almost ten years behind the bar.1 In March 2026 Edinburgh Council's licensing board reviewed the premises and issued a 10pm noise limit order, after years of complaints about a bar whose whole character was the noise it made.2 What closed was a one-room dock bar that Mary Moriarty ran for twenty-five years from the mid-1980s, hung to the ceiling with flags and banknotes that sailors had brought in. Her daughter Eilidh described what they started with: When we took it on it was a shell. Mum wanted it to be bohemian, we had gingham table cloths back then.67 She was given a British Empire Medal for reviving the Leith Festival, and Leith called her its Queen. Her son Niall put the room's other claim plainly after she died: The Port was the first, real LGBT friendly pub in Edinburgh outside the city centre. Mum took a bit of stick for that. It didn't bother her.6 The bar was painted green for the filming of Sunshine on Leith in 2013, and the last night under Smith ended with the room singing the song.5 This has happened once before and it went the other way: Punch Taverns put the same lease on the market in November 2015 after a big repair bill, and the pub traded straight through.5 The difference in 2026 is that the lease was terminated and the doors shut before a tenant was found.

Order this / avoid

• Order: nothing, and this is the record of what there was to order. One cask pump, a selection of standard beers, and a wet-led room with no kitchen. CAMRA's branch put the cask honestly: Real Ale from the single pump is unfortunately served erratically, depending on supply, and possibly only in the summer.3
• Avoid: treating Star Pubs' statement as a reopening. The company told the Evening News it was a much-loved pub and that it is keen to reopen it as quickly as possible, in the same week it listed the tenancy.1
• Go here instead: Leith still has the drinking rooms. The Shore Bar and Restaurant is a five-minute walk downhill and has an interior virtually intact since 1884, though its kitchen currently holds a failing hygiene rating, so treat it as somewhere to drink. Nauticus on Duke Street is the one to send a cocktail drinker to.

What locals & experts say

• CAMRA's Edinburgh and South East Scotland branch, surveyed July 2024, wrote the fullest description anyone has of the room: A characterful and renowned traditional one-room local's bar, with an interestingly distressed frontage. Look out for the old Alloa pub sign outside. Internally, the garish but tasteful bar is bedecked with various flags and drink memorabilia... At the end of the bar, the brightly-coloured toilet doors have to be studied, not least to discover which is which. The same survey is the only source that assesses what was in the glass, and it is a complaint: the single cask pump ran erratically, depending on supply, and possibly only in the summer. It also records that children were not admitted.3
• Marshall Bain, honorary past president of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, in Scottish Licensed Trade News (2022), on what the room looked like: The flags and currency notes sailors brought filled the walls and ceilings of the 'Port' like no other pub in Edinburgh. On how Moriarty ran it: Mary once said to me if there was too much 'tomfoolery' she sometimes had to take the participant by the 'breeks' and escort them out of the door.7
• Liam Rudden, Edinburgh Evening News (2019), wrote the line the pub is still quoted on: a bar once described as the nearest thing on Earth to the Star Wars' Cantina, so colourful were the characters who drank there. He also caught the mix: judges, writers, sailors, working girls, actors and labourers all drank side by side.8
• Kate Anderson, a barmaid here until 1984, returning at 98, to Katharine Hay of the Evening News: This was always a good little pub, I loved working here, It was somewhere you felt safe, always. In some pubs in Leith you had to watch your back, but not here, you could bring your wives here, it was safe.9
• No award ever went to this address. Mary Moriarty's British Empire Medal is hers and was for the Leith Festival, so it belongs to the person and not to the pub.

Good to know

• Status: closed to the public since 3 May 2026, with the tenancy on the open market. CAMRA's classification is Closed Long Term, seeking new tenants. The business is gone, the room is for let, and anyone who takes it will be running a different pub in the same walls.3
• What the letting page says: Star Pubs advertises estimated annual turnover of GBP 381,502 against annual rent of GBP 38,609, and pitches the opportunity to applicants as developing a strong wet-led offer. That is a forward-looking pitch about what a new tenant should build, and it is consistent with a bar that ran on drink.4
• Hygiene: no Food Standards Agency record exists. A pub serving no food need not be registered, and a premises that shut in May would have dropped off the register anyway, so the absence proves neither.
• The address: 58 Constitution Street, on the Leith Links side.
• Two phone numbers circulate for this pub in old listings and neither is worth calling now.

Jeff's take (his words)

The room was worth writing down before the next tenant repaints it.

Verdict

listed — The doors shut on 3 May 2026 and three months later nobody had taken the lease, so one rung is honest here and the page is kept for the record. What stood at 58 Constitution Street was a one-room dock bar hung to the ceiling with the flags and banknotes sailors left behind, run for twenty-five years from 1985 by Mary Moriarty, who took a British Empire Medal for reviving the Leith Festival and whom Leith called its Queen. Liam Rudden wrote the line that stuck, the nearest thing on Earth to the Star Wars Cantina. Kate Anderson, who pulled pints here until 1984 and came back at 98, gave the plainest verdict anyone has: somewhere you felt safe, always. Her son Niall recorded the other claim, the first real LGBT friendly pub in Edinburgh outside the city centre. Weigh the glass first, which is what the ladder asks, and there is very little to weigh. No kitchen at all, and one cask pump that CAMRA's own surveyors found served erratically depending on supply. A 10pm noise limit order in March 2026, on a bar whose entire trade was late and loud, is the causal fact, and Heineken's Star Pubs ended the lease behind it. Punch Taverns marketed the same lease in November 2015 and the pub traded straight through, which is the precedent for hope and the reason this page reads temp-closed. Anyone still carrying it as open should be sent to Nauticus, or to The Shore for a drink.