Leicester

Gujarati flavours and city-centre independents

On Belgrave Road, about a mile north of the city centre, Bobby's has been serving Gujarati home cooking since the 1970s, still run by the Lakhani family. The chilli paneer and tarka daal are the house favourites, but the thing to know about Bobby's is the afternoon tea: unlimited sweet and savoury snacks with masala chai, which is not a combination most people arrive in Leicester expecting to find. This is the Golden Mile, and Bobby's is one of a long run of Gujarati and South Indian restaurants, sari shops, jewellers and sweet centres that make up the best eating in the city. Southern Spices does Kerala fish curry and appam with stew. Preet's does home-style Punjabi, butter chicken and tandoor-fresh naan. My Delhi runs to dosa and good-value thali; Café Delhi puts nacho chaat and cheese-and-chilli kulcha on the menu and calls one plate the Royal Memsaab Thali, about eleven pounds a head. Between the restaurants are the mithai shops, stacked with barfi, jalebi and gulab jamun.

The cooking here is Gujarati vegetarian and South Indian rather than the standard curry-house template, and the reason is the reason for a lot of things in Leicester. Large Gujarati Indian and Ugandan-Asian settlement in the 1960s and 70s made this one of the first cities in Britain where no single ethnic group formed a majority. The Golden Mile is what that produced. Each autumn the road is draped in around 6,500 lights for Diwali, roughly fifty events over a fortnight, the largest celebration of its kind outside India. It is a place to eat in rather than sleep in.

For sleeping, the medieval old town around Greyfriars and St Martins is the better base. The streets are tight, the cathedral is at the centre of them, and most of what you'd want to see is within a two-minute walk. St Martins Lodge, a Grade II listed Georgian building of 28 rooms, many with roll-top baths, sits directly opposite the cathedral. St Martin's Square, just off it, is a pedestrianised courtyard of independent shops and food. Crafty Burger does handcrafted burgers and loaded fries. Casa Casa does Spanish tapas. Kai does all-day brunch and, if you want it, breakfast cocktails. Lynn is a Sicilian deli-café turning out croissants, arancini and cannoli until three.

Also on the square is Gelato Village, which is worth a paragraph of its own. It was founded by Antonio De Vecchi and Daniele Taverna, both from Turin, and the gelato is made in-store by the traditional mantecazione method. Antonio trained at the Carpigiani Gelato University, which is a real place. The shop won Gelateria of the Year at the 2018 Lux Food and Drink Awards and came second for Best Gelato on the Web at an international festival in Longarone the same year. There is a second site on Queens Road.

Pubs, quarters and Leicester Market

The drinking is good and old. The Globe on Silver Street has been a pub since 1720, an 18th-century Georgian building long owned by the local Everards Brewery, with typically eight cask beers on. Ale was once brewed on-site with water from a well, and the well is still down there beneath the building. Over in the Cultural Quarter, the Ale Wagon on Rutland Street is a corner pub built in 1931 in a 1930s style, run by the Hoskins family, with hop mouldings on the drainpipes and regional cask ales inside. The Kings Head keeps up to eleven cask ales, several from Black Country Ales. The Real Ale Classroom, a micropub that opened in November 2023, is in a Grade II listed building of 1888 by the local architect Stockdale Harrison, with four cask lines and ten keg.

The Cultural Quarter itself is east of the centre, a former hosiery-factory district that now runs on bars, restaurants and creative spaces around the Curve theatre and the Phoenix cinema. If you'd rather something quieter, Clarendon Park sits south of the centre near the university and Victoria Park: trendy cafés, vintage shops, and Queens Road, a village-y independent high street with a local feel to it.

The market is the oldest thing you'll walk through. Leicester Market is around 800 years old and moved to its present site roughly 700 years ago, long billed as the largest outdoor covered market in Europe. The Market Place was first recorded in 1298 and turns up in Elizabeth I's 1589 charter as the "Saturday Shambles"; the Domesday Book of 1086 names the marketplace as Cheapside. The old 1973 indoor building, with its fish market and haberdashery, was demolished in 2014-15 and its footprint became New Market Square, and the whole market was overhauled through the mid-2020s. On one edge of the Market Place stands the Corn Exchange, an 1850 building with an external "bridge of sighs" staircase, now a Wetherspoon.

Medieval halls, Roman walls and Richard III

A short walk away is the Guildhall, a timber-framed Great Hall begun around 1390 for the Guild of Corpus Christi, a rich medieval merchants' guild. Over the centuries it served as council chamber, courtroom, feast hall and theatre — Shakespeare's company is said to have played here, and the Civil War ultimatum to the town was debated inside it. It was restored in 1926 and opened as a museum. It is also reputed to be the most haunted building in the city, with five reported ghosts plus a phantom dog and a black cat.

The Romans were here first, as Ratae Corieltauvorum, and left the Jewry Wall, one of the largest surviving pieces of Roman masonry in Britain, dating to about AD 130. It was the west wall of the public baths, which were excavated in the 1930s; the adjoining Jewry Wall Museum reopened in the mid-2020s. The name is medieval and has no proven connection to a Jewish quarter, which is the sort of detail that would nag at you if the wall didn't so plainly outrank the question.

Which brings us to the two stories that put modern Leicester on the map, both of which happened around a car park. On 25 August 2012 a University of Leicester dig went looking for the lost Greyfriars friary and found human remains six hours into a planned two-week excavation, in trench one, under a council car park. On 4 February 2013 the university announced that the skeleton was, beyond reasonable doubt, Richard III — the last Plantagenet king, killed at Bosworth in 1485, identified with 99.999 per cent confidence by DNA. He was reinterred at Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015 in a televised service attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The King Richard III Visitor Centre now stands over the actual grave, and the car park is a scheduled monument. The tomb, the cathedral and the Guildhall sit within a two-minute walk of one another.

Football, space and parks

The other story is Leicester City. The club were 5000-1 outsiders when the 2015-16 season began, and confirmed Premier League champions on 2 May 2016 — the first top-flight title in their history — when Tottenham drew at Chelsea and left them uncatchable. Claudio Ranieri managed, Wes Morgan captained, Jamie Vardy scored and Kasper Schmeichel kept goal, and for a season they were the story of world football. Two and a half years later, on 27 October 2018, a helicopter carrying the club's Thai owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha crashed just after take-off from the stadium car park, killing all five aboard; the cause was a tail-rotor control failure. Fans buried the stadium in flowers and shirts. Prince William said Vichai "made such a big contribution to football, not least through Leicester City's magical 2016 season that captured the imagination of the world." The King Power Stadium, by the Soar, runs tours.

North of the centre, beside the river, the National Space Centre is the family day out. Its Rocket Tower, clad in translucent ETFE pillows, holds the Blue Streak and Thor Able rockets, real Moon rock, an Apollo lunar lander and the Gagarin Experience, where you climb into a Vostok capsule. There are six themed galleries, the UK's largest planetarium, and one of only two Soyuz capsules on display in the West.

For green space, Abbey Park is the city's best, laid out along the Soar in the grounds of the medieval St Mary's Abbey, where Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530, with the ruins of Cavendish House standing in it. It has a boating lake, a miniature railway, tennis courts, ornamental gardens and a couple of miles of circular walking. Victoria Park, by the university, is the big open one, with a Lutyens war-memorial arch and long tree avenues. Watermead Country Park, further north on the Soar, has lakes, riverside trails and, for no obvious reason anyone need explain, a life-size woolly mammoth statue.

Day trips, transport and Thomas Cook

If you have a car and a spare day, Bradgate Park is six miles northwest: 830 acres of ancient parkland with free-roaming red and fallow deer, the rocky outcrop of Old John, and the ruins of the childhood home of Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days' Queen. Entry is free and you pay for parking. Bosworth Battlefield, where Richard III fell, is about thirteen miles out. The Great Central Railway at Loughborough is Britain's only double-track heritage main line. Foxton Locks has its famous staircase of ten canal locks, and Rutland Water is a reservoir set up for cycling and sailing.

Getting here is easy. Leicester station, a Victorian building of 1892 on London Road, runs East Midlands Railway to London St Pancras in about 63 to 80 minutes, up to four fast services an hour, with direct trains to Nottingham, Sheffield, Derby, Birmingham and Peterborough. The city sits just off the M1 at junctions 21 and 21A and the M69 to Coventry, about 40 minutes from Nottingham. East Midlands Airport is twenty miles northwest. The centre is small enough that the cathedral, the market, the Guildhall and the Cultural Quarter are all walkable, with the Golden Mile a short bus ride or a 25-minute walk north.

One more thing about the city, standing outside the station: a statue of Thomas Cook, who ran his first excursion from Leicester in 1841 — a temperance rail trip to Loughborough — and built the world's travel industry from a building overlooking the Clock Tower. He organised a day out and it got slightly out of hand.