Leicester

Like many people, I’ve spent a lot of my travels going to edges, extremities, ends of the road. I overlooked Leicester because it was so very central – quintessentially in-between. The Fosse Way from Lincoln to Exeter bisects it; Watling Street, from Dover to Wroxeter, passes nearby. The stylish, high spec Jewry Wall museum – which reopened in July after a major redesign – shows how roads and traffic made Roman Leicester (Ratae Corieltauvorum) a wealthy, important hub: sublime mosaics; a gold ring;  a bathhouse complex, a wall still standing.

A cluster of medieval and Tudor structures beside the River Soar, including stone gateways, a church and castle motte indicates a major religious centre. I was the only visitor on a Sunday morning. Near this convenient national crossroads, Richard III was able to gather forces from across the kingdom for the Battle of Bosworth; little good it did him. Leicester’s Richard the Third Visitor Centre delineates the whys and wherefores of the blood-drenched savagery of the Wars of the Roses. The mental shift demanded of you as you segue from the vast, interlocking, bastard-rich Plantagenet family trees and riots of heraldry to the quiet science of archaeology and finally to the cold, austere tomb of the dead hunchback in the cathedral next door is not insignificant. This is a city so loaded with history that every new retail and hotel development unearths new treasure or traces of past peoples, like a stratified tell in the Holy Land. 

 A pint in the Globe allowed some thinking time and – as the former preferred boozer of stockingers – a natural link to Victorian and Edwardian Leicester, which rippled with entrepreneurial energies. Thomas Cook, Walkers, Wolsey and Currys started here. Garments, hosiery and corsetry made the city more like a Lancashire town than an almost home counties-satellite. Chimneys, mills and, most reassuringly, makers are still in evidence. 

 The 21st-century city is multipurpose – the centre has diversified from retail into gaming, co-working, education, dining, cocktails, cafés – and famously diverse. The Golden Mile (Belgrave Road) is a thriving, gimmick-free Asian gauntlet for clothes, jewellery, spices, fresh veg and restaurants. The likes of Bobby’s, with its Bollywood-inflected interiors, and Sharmilee won the city the Curry Capital gong in 2024. It was part of the Fosse Way, which is thought-provoking (Ancient Rome was profoundly multicultural, too) and completely unsurprising in layered, vital, restless Leicester. 

Things to see and do: Guildhall, Abbey Park, King Power Stadium, Curve Theatre.