The famous yellow towers have loomed over Leith like an alien armada for months now, inspiring horror, hope, awe, and art in equal measure.
Bound for a huge new wind farm development off the Angus coast, the “Eiffel Towers of Leith” will begin to leave the Port of Leith as mysteriously as they appeared over the next few months.
Before they do, however, a pair of Edinburgh creatives – backed by a collective of yellow jacket-loving artists – will send them off with a dedicated art exhibition.
They are gathering responses to the hulking lattice structures ranging from scale sculptures and paintings to experimental electronic music. One artist even went the extra mile and had a tower tattooed on her arm.
Maria Stoian, 36, illustrator, comic book artist and one half of the duo fronting the project, said: “I think everyone has their different reasons for why they like them.
“Some folks are really fascinated by what they are as a scientific marvel and the fact that they’re going to be mostly underwater and that they’re used for wind turbines or part of the structures of wind turbines.
“But a lot of other folks are just interested in them as abstract objects, their shape, their colour, their enormity: that’s what’s interesting, and it almost doesn’t matter what they’re for.”
Maria’s counterpart Christina Neuwirth, 35, said the fact of the towers will soon disappear makes their current visibility all the more compelling.
The Edinburgh-based researcher, writer and bookseller said: “It’s kind of amazing to be able to see them so regularly when for the rest of their life they’re not going to be seen again.
“They’re kind of like art objects – or accidental public art because they’re not intended as art objects.”
She added: “I’ve lived in Leith for about 10–11 years, and I haven’t seen anything like that in terms of industrial activity, so I think that’s also quite cool to remember, this is a working port, and we can all see it.”
Having grown up in landlocked Austria, Christina said she was excited for a change of pace in a port city before moving, and the yellow jackets have provided a highly-visible anchor point for her growing fascination with the sea.
She added: “I think currently they feel like a constant, where every day on my little walks I can see them from wherever I am, and I find them very comforting.
“They’re like gentle giants, and I always count them to make sure all 18 of them are there.”
The developers of the wind farm, Inch Cape, have been supportive of the art project, and have taken time to engage with locals, students, artists and engineers.
“I think it’s potentially a nicer, fun experience for them to get this interest in their work,” Maria explained.
“They’ve done a lot of stuff to kind of demystify the project, and ensure it’s not something that’s happening somewhere far away, and the local residents don’t know what it is.”
Maria and Christina were even invited on a tour of the jackets’ temporary home at the Port of Leith, where the process of transporting the towers and installing them in the seabed was laid out.
“There were some professors of marine architecture and engineering, and some postdoctoral researchers, who were all there to learn about the jacket foundations,” Christina explained.
“I think we were coming from different angles, but the awe I think we all felt to be standing underneath them was shared by everyone.”
In a statement, Inch Cape said they were “genuinely delighted with the reception the jacket foundations have received and were truly awed at the creative ways they have been portrayed”.
“It has been hugely positive to find out what they have meant to the individuals who encounter them on a daily or regular basis,” they added.
The pair say they have had more than 60 responses to the “Yellow Towers” project so far, and they are expecting more before the exhibition’s anticipated opening in February 2027.
Some of the more ambitious ideas touted on their website are a yellow jungle gym, a full set of the 18 towers, at a scale where you can walk among them “like Godzilla” and a focaccia loaf in the shape of a tower.
Malcolm Cruickshank, Senior Workshop Technician at the University of Edinburgh, has already begun work on a model of a tower, and will exhibit the work at the ECA technicians exhibition as well as the proposed yellow towers exhibition.
The Chinese-manufactured towers are of varying sizes of up to 91 metres each – making them taller than Edinburgh’s tallest building, the 90-metre St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral spire – and are visible from Fife.
Inch Cape Offshore Limited, the joint venture behind the project, will begin transporting the structures from Leith Docks to the wind farm site when structural pin piles are attached to the North Sea seabed.
The jackets will attach to these cylindrical pin piles, which start being installed this week, and support large wind turbines off the Angus coast.
The final towers are expected to leave Leith Docks by early 2027.
Maria and Christina plan to crowdfund to raise the money for an exhibition space, and envisage the exhibition taking place when there is only one jacket left at the Port of Leith – sometime in February.
On the jackets’ eventual departure, Christina added: “It feels quite bittersweet that they’re going to go soon.
“But I think that’s why the project is also so meaningful for us to be a part of – we wanted to do it to record the time in history when they were here, and when like we lived alongside the giants.”
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