* DMU Journalism accepts no responsibility for undazzled friends.
Leicester is Britain’s 12th biggest city. Or the 10th, or the 11th, depending on how you measure it and which website you look at. More importantly, it’s bigger than Nottingham. In fact, the population of Leicester = the population of Nottingham + the population of Leicestershire’s bonsai neighbour, Rutland. Have some of that, Nottingham!
Leicester is the birthplace of modern tourism. In 1841, Thomas Cook organised the first ever package holiday, taking rail passengers on an excursion to …Loughborough. (Sun cream optional.) His statue stands outside Leicester’s railway station.
Some people who grew up walking the streets you now call home: Gary Lineker, David and Richard Attenborough, Kasabian, Easy/Hard Life, Gok Wan, Rakhee Thakrar from Sex Education, ITV newsreader Julie Etchingham, the Elephant Man, snooker’s Mark Selby, Alison King from Corrie, and the heaviest man in England, Daniel Lambert (you can see his enormous trousers in the Newarke Houses museum by the DMU campus. Y’know, if you want).
You’d never guess from the outside, but the cunningly disguised Leicester Castle, on the edge of the DMU campus, dates back to the 12th century. Medieval monarchs stayed here – blissfully oblivious of the curse ‘evil will follow the king who feasts at Leicester Castle’ – including Edward I, Edward II and Richard III. It was also the setting for English parliaments, including the Parliament of Bats, when the noblemen arrived tooled up in case it all kicked off, as Danny Dyer might say. Oh, and Parliament of Bats has already been taken as a band name, if you’ve been desperately searching for one.
The archaeological find of the century was made in the city in 2012, with the discovery of the long-lost burial place of Richard III. He was found in a parking bay under a large ‘R’ for ‘reserved’ sign.
The surviving arches from the medieval church where it’s thought Richard III’s naked, mutilated body was laid out after the Battle of Bosworth still stand in the Hawthorn Building on the DMU campus.
Whatever you called a spherical lump of bread before – bun, break cake, batch, barm cake – you are now firmly in the Land of Cob.
Narborough Road, the main route to the city from the M1, is the most diverse street in the UK, according to a 2016 study.
Leicester Market is the oldest outdoor covered market in Europe, dating back 800 years. Look out for the sign for Lineker’s fruit and veg stall, where a young Gary Lineker used to sell spuds.
The Jewry Wall, which was part of the Roman town’s public baths, is one of the tallest surviving pieces of Roman masonry in the country, standing at more than nine metres tall and dating back to AD160.
Donington Park in Leicestershire is the spiritual home of hard rock – Download festival is held here each summer.
Leicester was the scene of the weirdest riot in British history. On a summer’s day in 1864, a crowd of 50,000 people gathered on the racecourse in Leicester to see a celebrated aeronaut take to the skies in his balloon. When he announced he would not be taking off after all, the mood turned ugly, and a mob ripped the balloon to shreds, set fire to the basket and tried to kill him.
The India Gate in New Delhi, a symbol of Indian national pride, is twinned with its lookalike war memorial in Victoria Park, designed by the same architect, Edwin Lutyens, but constructed earlier.
Leicester hosts the largest Diwali festival outside of India. Diwali is celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains around the world, and is one of the most significant festivals in Indian culture.
Major sports teams in the city are: 2015/16 Premier League champions and 2021 FA Cup winners Leicester City; two-time European champions Leicester Tigers; triple T20 Cup winners and One-Day Cup victors Leicestershire County Cricket Club; and Leicester Riders, the oldest basketball club in Super League Basketball.
We’re all about the foxes here, and not just the football and cricket clubs. You’ll see foxes everywhere: on the names of pubs, cafes, streets, shops and more. To be honest, it’s got a little out of hand. With the possible exception of Wolverhampton, no British city has gone in harder on one animal.
A top-secret radar training school ran on the DMU campus during the Second World War. How secret was top secret? Even the college principal didn’t know about it.
Long before the British curry house boom of the 1970s, there was a Pakistani/Indian restaurant in Leicester. The advert above for Mohammed Mannan’s the Regent Restaurant is from 1951. There are now hundreds in the city. You’ll soon find your favourite. (Tip: give the Little Club and Paddy’s a whirl).
The word vegan was coined in Leicester in 1944. Huh! Along with Manchester and Edinburgh, Leicester was named one of the UK’s most vegan-friendly cities. And any veggies among you will struggle to find a veggier street in Europe than Belgrave Road.
The phrase ‘painting the town red’ for a hellsapoppin’ night out, dates back to 1837. After drinking heavily at the races, the third Marquess of Waterford and a group of toff pals ran amok in nearby Melton Mowbray, daubing the town’s tollbar and several buildings with red paint.
Leicester is the birthplace of the modern English language. Experts believe that 1,000 years ago in Leicester, warring Anglo Saxons and Vikings set aside their differences and started sharing their trades and languages and helped to shape modern English.
The video to Paradise City by Guns N’Roses – current views on YouTube: 937 million – was shot partly in the loos at Sector 5 nightclub, Leicester.
Leicester is one of the oldest settlements in England. To the Romans, it was Ratae Corieltauvorum. The Welsh name for Leicester, by the by, is Caerlŷr.
BBC Radio Leicester was Britain’s first local radio station. The station was launched in November 1967 with a blast of the Post-horn Gallop – the tune Leicester City players have been running out to since the 1930s.
Kingsley Amis’ award-winning 1954 novel Lucky Jim, set in an unnamed provincial university town, was inspired by a visit to his friend Philip Larkin, who was then the assistant librarian at Leicester University. The hero is a disaffected history lecturer called Jim Dixon, and the surname comes from Dixon Drive, Leicester, where Larkin lived. Other novels set in Leicester include Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series, Bali Rai’s (Un)arranged Marriage, Belgrave Road by Manish Chauhan, CP Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, and Some Kind of Fairy Tale, by Graham Joyce.
Lindley Hall Farm on the outskirts of the village of Fenny Drayton, in the west of Leicestershire, was pinpointed in 2002 by the Ordnance Survey as the exact geographical centre of England. This came as an unpleasant surprise to the people of Meriden in the West Midlands, who have a grade II listed monument on their village green, bragging that they are the slap bang in the middle.
Galway Bay, the wistful Irish song covered by Bing Crosby and Johnny Cash and namechecked in the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, was written by Dr Arthur Colahan, of the bay-less Prebend Street, Leicester.
Some faintly amusing Leicestershire village names: Barton in the Beans; Frisby on the Wreake; Sheepy Magna; Husbands Bosworth. The north-west Leicestershire village Breedon on the Hill is a triple tautology: its name comes from the Brittonic brey and the Old English don, both meaning hill. So: Hill, hill, on the hill.
Some faintly amusing Leicestershire street names: Holy Bones (Leicester); Butthole Lane (Shepshed); Flesh Hovel Lane (Quorn); City of Dan (Whitwick); Ingle Pingle (Loughborough).
Compiled by Jeremy Clay, who had more pressing things to be getting on with.
