Market Harborough

School, Spire and High Street

The Old Grammar School stands on wooden legs in the middle of Church Square. Ten octagonal oak posts hold a timber-framed schoolroom a full storey above the ground, open underneath, as if the building decided it would rather not touch the mud. Robert Smyth, who walked to London from Market Harborough around 1570 and ended up as Comptroller of the City of London's Chamber, left money for the school in 1607. It was built in 1614, raised on stilts so the farmers' wives could keep selling butter underneath it in the dry. Certain texts Smyth specified are still painted on the lintel above the posts. He wanted Latin, Greek and Hebrew taught to poor boys. One of them, William Henry Bragg, went on to share the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his own son. The building is Grade I listed and was restored in 2014, four hundred years to the year.

St Dionysius rises directly behind it, a broach spire of about 160 feet that Pevsner called one of the finest in the country. The earliest parts of the church are thirteenth century, with most of what survives now from the fourteenth and fifteenth. A storm in 1735 destroyed part of the tower; the replacement came back several feet shorter. It is Grade I listed and dedicated to the patron saint of France, which nobody in Market Harborough seems to find remarkable.

The High Street runs north from the square, wide and mostly Georgian — two and three-storey buildings, essentially unspoilt, with not more than four dating from after the mid-nineteenth century according to the Victoria County History. You'll notice the wrought-iron inn sign spanning the road outside the Three Swans. It's eighteenth century and considered one of the finest examples of its kind in England — three swans worked in iron, supposedly combining the emblems of three different landlords. Below it, the coaching inn has been operating for about 500 years.

More on the Three Swans in a moment. First, the shops.

Markets, Farm Shop and Coaching Inns

Hambleton Bakery is on Church Street, just off the square. They won ITV's Britain's Best Bakery and produce around 500 loaves a day — sourdough, country white, dark rye — from a woodfired oven. The treacle tarts and sausage rolls are what people queue for. The indoor market hall on Northampton Road runs Tuesday to Saturday, with around 25 permanent stalls: Farrell's Fish, John Ross & Son butchers, greengrocers, and a rotating cast of casual traders. Wednesdays it turns vintage and antiques. Sundays, collectibles. The outdoor market still fills Church Square on Tuesdays, beneath the Grammar School's oak legs, much as it has since King John granted the charter in 1203.

For a proper food shop, Farndon Fields is the one. It's a farm shop on Farndon Road, started in 1983 by Kevin and Milly Stokes on their 250-acre farm. The veg is grown in fields half a mile from the counter. There's a butchery with sausages and burgers made on site, a bakery using locally milled flour, and freezers of ready meals that have won enough awards to fill a wall. The Farmer's Kitchen does cod goujons, cheese pies, and a cheesecake that reviewers mention with suspicious regularity.

Now, the pubs. The Three Swans has history even by coaching-inn standards. King Charles I is said to have stopped here the day before the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, though surviving records suggest he actually slept two miles away at Lubenham Hall and was woken at eleven o'clock at night by news that the Parliamentarian army was eight miles off. He lost the battle the next day, and with it, effectively, the war. In 1934, John Fothergill bought the place. Fothergill was an eccentric innkeeper who had already written *An Innkeeper's Diary*, one of the first titles published as a Penguin paperback. He ran the Three Swans for twenty years and was known for shunning guests who failed to appreciate the finer points of his service. The hotel now runs two restaurants and a coffee house. The Eatery does modern British food — homemade pies, seasonal dishes, Sunday roasts with Yorkshire puddings. In summer there's a courtyard with a pizza oven. Dogs are welcome in the bar. The local beer to ask for is Langton Brewery's Inclined Plane Bitter, an amber ale brewed five miles away in Thorpe Langton and named after the boat lift at Foxton Locks. It won bronze at CAMRA's Champion Beer of Britain in 2014.

The Red Cow, further up the High Street, is a proper locals' pub. Darts, pool, table skittles, cribbage, live sport, acoustic music on the first Thursday of the month. It doesn't serve food, which is either a limitation or a sign of good priorities depending on your view. Old Speckled Hen and a changing guest ale on the hand pumps. Dogs welcome.

Beer, Dining and the Canal Arm

If beer is the point, Beerhouse on St Mary's Road is Market Harborough's first micropub, set up in a converted furniture shop. Twenty draught taps — six cask ales, four still ciders, the rest keg and craft — with a blackboard listing the day's selection. No gaming machines, no loud music. They host vinyl nights and a book club.

The Sugar Loaf on the High Street is a Wetherspoons. The building was Thomas Goward's grocer's shop, founded in 1810, where sugar was cut by hand from a conical loaf. The warehouse behind the shop, where Goward's staff blended tea and ground spices, still has its vaulted ceiling and skylights. It now contains booths and a bar.

For eating out, Shagorika has served Indian and Bangladeshi food on the High Street since 1980 — the chicken shashlik and lamb balti are what regulars order. Everest Lounge on St Mary's Road does Nepalese, Indian and Tibetan, and won Curry Restaurant of the Year at the English Curry Awards in 2025. Down at the canal basin, the Waterfront overlooks Union Wharf marina and does parmesan-crusted sea bass, tiger prawn linguine, and a luxury fish pie, with live acoustic sets on weekends. In summer you eat on the terrace and watch the narrowboats.

Which brings us to the canal. The Market Harborough Arm of the Grand Union Canal runs about five and a half miles from Union Wharf to Foxton Locks. It was completed in 1809 and there are no locks on the arm, which makes the towpath walk flat, easy, and very good. You follow the water through open countryside with the Welland Valley spreading out either side — flat floodplain, mostly agricultural, with long views across fields. The canal winds along the hillside contours, crossing some handsome brick bridges on the way.

Locks, Railway Paths and Great Bowden

At the far end, Foxton Locks draws over 400,000 visitors a year. Ten staircase locks in two flights of five — the largest such flight on the English canal system — lifting boats 75 feet. A passage takes about 45 minutes, and watching narrowboats work through them is genuinely absorbing. The Top Lock Coffee Stop, in the former lock keeper's cottage, does locally made ice cream in eight flavours. The Foxton Locks Inn sits at the bottom of the flight with a beer garden that seats hundreds in summer and a dog menu alongside the human one. Next to the locks, the earthworks of the Foxton Inclined Plane are still visible. It was built in 1900 as a boat lift: two 230-ton water-filled tanks on rails, powered by a 25-horsepower steam engine, carrying boats up the hill in twelve minutes instead of seventy-five. It was an engineering triumph and a commercial failure. Mothballed after ten years. Sold for scrap in 1928 for £250. The boiler house is now a museum.

The other major walk from town is the Brampton Valley Way, a dismantled railway path running fourteen miles south to Northampton. It starts at the southern end of Britannia Walk and soon you're in rolling countryside on compacted gravel. There are two tunnels — Kelmarsh and Oxendon — both long and unlit, with reflective plates on the walls. Bring a torch. For a shorter loop, the circular to Great Bowden via the canal covers about ten kilometres.

Great Bowden is the older settlement. It appears in the Domesday Book as Bugedone — a royal manor with 10 villagers, 73 freemen, 32 smallholders, and 26 and a half plough teams, valued at just over ten pounds to the king. Market Harborough itself doesn't appear in Domesday. It didn't exist yet. It grew as a planned market settlement on Great Bowden's southern boundary. Great Bowden is now a quiet conservation village ten minutes' walk away. The Shoulder of Mutton, a seventeenth-century pub overlooking the village green, does a good Sunday roast.

Treasure, Trains and Thomas Cook

The Harborough Museum, on Adam and Eve Street, is small, free, and worth an hour. It sits in the old Symington corset factory — R & W H Symington made mass-produced corsets here from the 1830s and grew into an international concern. The drainpipes are modelled on decorative corset stitching, which is the sort of detail a corset manufacturer would think of. The museum's centrepiece is the Hallaton Treasure, found in 2000 in a field seven miles east: over 5,000 Iron Age and Roman coins, the largest such hoard on the British mainland, plus a silver-gilt Roman cavalry parade helmet — the only one found in Britain with most of its plating still attached. Among the coins is a silver denarius from 211 BC, minted during the Hannibalic Wars. It is the oldest Roman coin found in Britain.

Market Harborough sits on the Midland Main Line. The fastest train to London St Pancras takes fifty-six minutes; Leicester is twelve minutes north. Trains run roughly every twenty minutes. It's the kind of connection that explains why the population has grown from 1,700 in 1801 to nearly 25,000 today, and why the Georgian High Street has kept its shape.

One last thing. On 9 June 1841, a wood-turner and cabinet-maker named Thomas Cook walked the fifteen miles from here to Leicester for a temperance meeting. Somewhere on the road, it occurred to him that the railways might be used to move large groups of people cheaply. He organised his first excursion — Leicester to Loughborough, a shilling return — and founded what became the world's first travel agency. The walk started in Market Harborough.