Here are 10 things you didn’t know about Western Park – brought to you by Western Park Beer Festival, which was held over September 14 to 15 at St Anne’s Church Hall, Letchworth Road, Leicester. This year we raised £10,000 for local causes Action Homeless, The Bridge homeless charity and…
It’s not every day gelatinous crime boss Jabba T Hutt allows his favourite decoration to go on show. Which was good news for New Walk Museum in Leicester. As you can see, intergalactic smuggler Han Solo – seen here frozen in carbonite – makes a particularly arresting wall feature. Han…
Leicester has lots of beautiful and interesting buildings. Among them is Joseph Goddard’s impressive bank on the corner of Granby Street and Bishop Street. With its stunning stained glass and high lantern beamed ceilings, this French Gothic Revival masterpiece was executed with modern styling when it took shape between 1870…
Leicester’s Walter Edwin Sturgess was a man on the move. When he opened a shop in 1897 and became successful selling modern prototype bicycles, he wasn’t planning on stopping there. And true enough, Wal’s first business in Leicester’s Shaftesbury Road was soon eclipsed by a second in Narborough Road which…
It’s Western Park Beer Festival on September 15 and 16. It’ll be ace. This year we’ll be spreading the love for Loros, the local hospice, and saluting the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Drinks-wise it means 16 cask, six keg, four ciders and liver-shaped swimming pools of gin…
If you flick through the pages of rock’s vast and sticky encyclopaedia, it won’t be long before you come across a Leicester or Leicestershire-related entry. Here, I’ve done some of the leg-work for you. So prepare to be pleasantly surprised by three blokes called Jo[h]n. 1. Disarming rock lunatic…
They say time is a great healer but a poor beautician. Try telling that to St Peter’s in Belgrave. At almost 800 years old, this 13th century stunner can turn the head of even the most hardened aesthete. St Peter’s is what you may consider the Kylie of the Diocese…
The niggling human conscience affects people in different ways. In the case of Co-op salesman Roy Watts, it made him leave the comfort and security of his life in Leicester, travel all the way to war-gripped Spain, and take up arms for a cause as black and white as ink…
Before 4X4s became a familiar sight on the 9 to 5 commute, they were bounding their way across the English countryside without a care in the world. Which is why we’re in the wintry, puddle-pocked grounds of Rockingham Castle for a spot of rear wheel drive rewilding. Land Rover’s…
Framework Brewery is a name you’re going to be hearing good things from in 2017. Leicester city centre’s first craft brewery started taking shape in the summer and their first brew, a hoppy American Pale Ale, only sloshed into a pint glass as recently as December 6. Since then,…
You’ve said it, I’ve said it, we’ve all said it: “Meet you at the Clock Tower, yeah?” It’s a sentence which has been doing the rounds for almost 150 years. And yet, apart from its role as Leicester’s most well known landmark – and a hub for noisy religious irritants,…
When you own a full deck of cards but shuffle a little slower, old age has a habit of throwing up a few impeccably-timed niggles. If it’s not grappling with parcels sealed like a drum of North Sea uranium or dragging leaden luggage on to buses, trains and…
Some clever artist from London came up and sprayed this all over a wall off King Richard’s Road. It’s a corker. Just after taking this pic this morning, I called into Dayman’s DIY store “If you’re going to do it, do it with Dayman’s” – which is a stone’s…
Wave after human wave crashed against the bar, the demand for beer ripping our prediction of 1.8 firkins per hour a new whatsit, and by the time we were four hours in – four hours ahead of schedule – the beer had gone. GONE! This is what happens when…
Tony Magee is searching for the right words as he absently taps his fingers on the table in an airless conference room at Mercury headquarters. “What do you call it when something is like something else?” asks the grey haired 55 year old, his accent a disarming patter of Midlands-softened…
The people of Leicester and Leicestershire have always enjoyed their baths. Always. Since at least AD150 (See Jewry Wall for proof). The Victorians, the people who made the city into a pleasure dome, also enjoyed getting steamy, cold, hot and wet. The Turkish Baths in Friar Lane had been going…
It’s a drizzly Tuesday evening and at a city centre café, a steady trickle of people are pouring through the door as the time inches towards 7pm. On cue, a lady in a long skirt and a mop of brown hair enters in a swirl of fabric. She starts…
What in the blazes is going on? Beer. Firkins and firkins of it. For £3 a pint. Where? St Anne’s Church Hall, Letchworth Road, Leicester. And when is it? Friday, March 4, from 5pm. Eh? It’s a pop-up pub serving the liquid gold of Leicestershire’s finest brewers; Charnwood, Tres…
It’s Saturday afternoon and a crowd of twenty-somethings are listening intently to a tall man holding court in the corner of a pub. That man is Richard Wheatcroft, the events director of Requiem:Live, and he’s in the middle of what will easily be the most surreal team-talk in the city…
It’s one of Leicestershire’s unofficial tourist destinations. Tucked away down a side street, removed from the bustle of the city centre. “I get plenty of visitors,” nods Mukhtar Shah, who has a car workshop in Great Central Street. “Sometimes 10, 15 people come a month, a lot of people who…
There are some days as a journalist that you’d rather not remember. The crown court cases, the inquests, the death knocks, dealing with Tory MPs, the endless parish council meetings about dog poo bins and street lighting. And then you get a job like this one. I can’t remember what…
It’s 7.30pm on a Friday at Leicester’s All Nations Hall and almost 600 people are standing shoulder to shoulder to witness the healing power of the reverends David Carr and Richard Taylor. Tonight’s Free American Methodist service in Frog Island has drawn people from all parts of the city, from…
Fingers clatter across an iPad and up goes the internet chat room profile of 14 year old Jess. A couple of seconds pass and the phone vibrates to indicate a message. The date is December 14, 2014 and this is the first contact from Peter Hyam in Essex. “Hello Jess…
It’s a sweaty Friday night and scores of people are enjoying the bars of Leicester’s leafy New Walk. Basking in the fading rays outside Pause, the time has just gone 8pm when Tony de Sergio arrives. Tall, toned and tanned, he takes a seat and soon, perhaps expectantly, the conversation…
In the moth-tattered annals of De Montfort Hall, many a band have turned up, plugged in and rocked out. Yet none have executed an edge-of-your-seat show with quite the same singular panache as Pink Floyd. Technologically advanced and technically adept, Floyd swept into the city on February 10, 1972,…
It was the sort of place where it was okay to spill your pint, ruminates Andy Wright. “It was what it was – stage, bogs, bar. Some called The Charlotte a toilet stop,” he shrugs, “I don’t have a problem with that.” For many, The Charlotte needs no introduction. For…
“And the boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay, and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.” Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl’s Fairytale of New York gets everywhere at this time of year. Even Tesco in Narborough Road, where this week I was shopping and…
Lilian Lenton in court in Doncaster with co-accused Harry Johnson in June 1913. Lilian Lenton’s prison photograph sits in a display case at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The sepia image, now more than a century old, was taken covertly by police when she was among…
My, what an impressive organ. This is the dazzling interior of Bishop Street Methodist Church. It overlooks Town Hall Square and is just a couple of doors away from the library. They run the Chapel Cafe here, where, for a nominal fee, you can get…
With vandals on one side and the elements on the other, Western Park School – formerly Western Park Open Air School – has taken a bit of a kicking in recent years. Shut in 2005, this elegant 1930s building – Grade II listed and one of very…
“Always and always facing toward the light.” They’ve not seen Poltergeist, have they? Here are some magnificent suffragists standing proud in Bowling Green Street. I don’t know their names but I’d like to buy each of them a drink. Which they’d most likely turn down, cos they’re probably part…
The headliners Sienna Root were rocktastic organic man-flesh from Sweden. The Cult of Dom Keller were a Leicester-Nottingham hybrid with an awesome drummer. And my oldest mate Ben, representing Western Park, and to some extent Hinckley, did the opening Moog atmospherics under the moniker The Early Remains. Oh,…
Mick Bunnage is a dream interviewee. The former musician, Loaded writer, cartoonist and Leicester resident has an unerring habit of making the mundane seem peculiarly jocular. Even when he’s trying to pronounce the address of his old stomping ground in Belgrave. “Leer-rah Street,” he hazards. “Leer-eh?” He…
It’s a sunny Sunday in October and I’m pootling around Faircharm Industrial Estate with a camera. Faircharm is a mixed use industrial estate on the edge of Aylestone Meadows, bisected by the River Soar and the Grand Union Canal. On first appearance it’s pretty underwhelming, but carry on walking, graze your…
