New Kirkgate Shopping Centre

As Nikki A says you could do a lot worse.
There’s a good Lidl. Now ‘good Lidl’ may seem like an oxymoron but fresh bread, lots of fruit and veg, and a reasonable area for the weekly Lidl deals means you can get everything here for super cheap (including, occasionally, the kitchen sink!)
Apart from the Lidl, there’s pound shops, a Peacocks, a Boots, a Lloyd’s pharmacy, some cheapy furniture shops and a bank. If you go up the steps I believe you find the community centre for the surrounding area. The Specsavers staff are really nice and super helpful.
New Kirkgate Shopping Centre isn’t fancy. And that’s probably an understatement. The Leith Walk end is populated by the laid-​back types who like to spend their days with a bottle of white lightning. Although this might put you off, I’ve never seen or heard of any trouble. However, I wouldn’t be overly fond of the place at night.
Overall, it’s an alright place if you don’t want to spend too much!

Imagine a place where Lidl is the most posh of the shops. yeah? Welcome to NKSC — apart from the descriptions in previous reviews — which are accurate — there are also 2 dispensing chemists (Boots & Lloyds), a £5 crew-​cut barber, greasy burger & hot-​dog cart, HBOS, newsagent, First Choice Travel, several charity shops and a rent-​to-​buy Warehouse.
But it has ‘character’ — I hear people saying to me — well. no it hasn’t. Drunk people from 7am onwards doesn’t count towards having character. People with different stages of inebriation and disabilities alike, in electric wheel chairs or crutches. Junkies with their dogs and alcoholics blocking the entries to shops and passways and … «NO I HAVE NOT GOT 60p FOR YOU!» — Character? My arse.
Anyway, this area is the place where you can pass through to get too the Shore. When it is bright day or early evening. You can. If not, don’t. When this place is shut — last shop to close is Lidl at 8pm — it transforms itself into the Leith of yore. Shady, creepy and generally unpleasant.
I give it an extra star for Boots, Poundland and Lidl.

All area is a kingdom of cheep shops, starting from Lidl and Farmfoods by Peacocks, Poundstretcher and everything for one pound, (or something like that) if you are suffering from lack of fund, you can quickly sell jewelry in HT pawnbroker for 30% of real value ;-)
In the evening, you better not to go there.

After moving to Leith, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that it is not an impoverished, drug-​ridden, Trainspotting-​esque hellhole as many snooty South Edinburgh types like to imply. As an area, it’s actually got a lot going for it. However, the New Kirkgate shopping centre at the foot of Leith Walk does seem to corroborate all those negative stereotypes.
This depressing precinct is given over exclusively to cut-​price retailers, from Lidl and Farmfoods to Pound Stretcher and the dismal Shoe Zone. There are always chain-​smoking unemployed men sitting on the pigeon-​daubed benches beside the statue of Queen Victoria, bored teenagers in hoodies idling outside the shops and single mothers in the supermarket bawling at their unruly offspring. In fact, the whole set-​up seems to encapsulate the desolate image of ‘broken Britain’ so often invoked by politicians. It serves as a reminder that, in many ways, the supposed regeneration of Leith is only skin deep.
A lot of what makes this shopping centre so dispiriting, however, is not just the fact that everything here is cheap and low quality — after all, it’s actually very useful to have somewhere nearby where you can get eight tins of sweetcorn for a pound, or a pair of boots for under a tenner. It’s more that it’s such an ugly and soulless development, the misguided project of 1960s city planners who ripped out the historic buildings and cobbled marketplace of the original Kirkgate, to replace it with this concrete monstrosity. The Newkirkgate Shopping Centre may seem like an embodiment of social deprivation, but it’s worth bearing in mind that it didn’t have to be this way