Current Affairs
The city of Leicester lies on the Fosse Way, the long Roman Road that runs roughly south west to north east from Exeter to Lincoln through Central England. Its professional football club, Leicester City, which competes in the English Premiership, was during the first few decades of its existence known as Leicester Fosse and it is from this that its supporters became known as ‘Fosses’, which over time became ‘Foxes’. An alternative explanation for the fox becoming the local mascot is that Leicestershire is infamously renowned for fox hunting, the barbaric ‘sport’ in which a fox is chased by a pack of hounds, led by people on horseback, so that those hounds can kill the fox by tearing it apart. As you drive into Leicestershire, as I have done on numerous occasions, you'll see a road sign illustrated with a fox. Leicestershire County Cricket Club has adopted the fox as its mascot and because football and cricket fans now identify as ‘foxes’, it has unconsciously turned them against that barbaric ‘sport’.
If I drive to Leicester it is usually via the Fosse Way. At the county boundary with Warwickshire it crosses Watling Street (the modern A5), another long Roman Road, which became the boundary of the Danelaw and then for a stretch of nineteen miles the boundary between these two counties. Nowadays that junction is staggered with Watling Street taking priority. Continuing along the Fosse Way, through the villages of Sharnford and Narborough, brings me to a Park and Ride Service close to the village of Enderby. There is ample free parking and the return bus fare into the city centre is only three pounds. The set down and pick up point for the Park and Ride is St Nicholas Circle, from which Jubilee Square will lead to the High Street, on the north side of which is the large Highcross Shopping Centre. An alternative route is via Guildhall Lane from which you can see the rear of the Cathedral, there being a footpath round to the front. It is within the Cathedral that the body of Richard III (of York, who gave battle in vain at Bosworth Field) is emtombed.
Alternatively, continuing along Guildhall Lane will bring you out at a crossroads in a pedestrianised area. From here turning right will bring you into Loseby Lane, where the Currant Affairs wholefood shop is. It has been entirely vegan for the past eight years, but has been in business for at least twenty years prior to that as I first discovered it in 1995. Note that it is a fairly small shop though! This ‘Lanes’ area of the city centre is quite picturesque and characterised by independent businesses. The city centre is marked by the Haymarket Memorial Clock Tower. About a mile away from that Clock Tower and just off Humberstone Road (the A47 eastbound), can be found Leicester Wholefood Co-op, as mentioned on the blog post of February last year. It is based in a warehouse on a trading estate, but open as a normal shop, as well as offering a home delivery service to several places within about twenty-five miles or so. Coventry is one of those places and when I lived there I knew someone who occasionally put in a group order, though you don’t need to be part of a buying group, rather just meet the minimum delivery level required. Unfortunately for me, Warwick is outside the distribution area.
Should you visit Leicester on a Saturday afternoon, at or near the Clock Tower, you may see some people with an information table and various notices protesting against the harmful gene therapies administered on the premise of a respiratory illness, as well as other related political issues. By contrast, in the Highcross Shopping Centre, you may see an empty shop unit which has been converted for the purpose of injecting people with said gene therapies. Personally, even if I wanted to be administered with any of those gene therapies – and I have to say that I don’t and I haven’t – I would expect it to take place in a proper medical environment, a hospital, clinic or general practice and by qualified staff; not in a shopping centre and by staff who may have had minimal training. The Highcross Shopping Centre even previously had a retail unit converted into a ‘Testing Centre’ where if you tested ‘positive’ you would need to immediately self-isolate by telling everyone around you that they should keep at least two metres away, including the person who handed the test kit to you in the first place. I’m sure that it must have been great fun on a Saturday afternoon!
Backtracking to the second paragraph, should you get the Park and Ride, you will see that it goes past a large retail park called Fosse Park, which has taken some trade away from the city centre and which has been there longer than the Park and Ride service. That it was given planning permission in the first place is a classic example of a lack of joined-up thinking by councillors or in this case by competition between neighbouring districts, as Fosse Park lies within the district of Blaby, not officially in the city of Leicester itself. The southern part in particular of the city centre, is now blighted by numerous empty shops, a state of affairs that cannot have been helped in June 2020 by Leicester becoming the first city to have a lockdown specifically legislated for it. It feels like this was historical punishment for the townsfolk having defied the medical establishment from 1885 until 1948, when vaccination for smallpox was no longer mandated. The Leicester Method had shown that sanitation, plus quarantining of the sick and their families, not vaccination or a city-wide lockdown led to the local eradication of smallpox.
Walking through that southern part of the city centre does however lead to New Walk, a lovely tree-lined pedestrian avenue along which you can find Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. It houses, amongst other collections, one of German Expressionist artwork, paintings, sketches and sculptures. Photography is allowed but not with the flash operable on your camera. The collection includes works by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka. It cannot be recommended highly enough. When I visited last summer there was also a good temporary exhibition of 1980’s memorabilia, enough to jog the memory of my teenage years.
If you arrive by train, then Granby Street is the main pedestrian route leading from the station to the city centre. Along here is a vegan restaurant, The Donald Watson Bar, named after the man who founded the Vegan Society in Leicester in 1944, whilst next door to it is the Herb Indian vegetarian restaurant, with lots of vegan options. This photo was however taken in the morning, before either establishment was open. There are many other Indian vegetarian restaurants on Belgrave Road and its continuation Melton Road, along which the Fosse Way heads north-east away from the city centre.
Before I forget, if you had visited Leicester during the 1990’s, coming in by road, you’d have been greeted by a sign that stated that it was Britain’s first ‘Environment City’, a label that it had adopted at the beginning of the decade. I remember at the time, on Silver Street round the corner from Currant Affairs on Loseby Lane, was an Environment Centre with a self-service vegetarian cafeteria upstairs. I remember reading about there being an Eco House, which opened in 1989, just off Hinckley Road (the A47 westbound), but never got round to visiting it. Although it was intended to show how people could live in an environmentally-friendly way, by the second decade of the 21st Century it had fallen into disrepair and been derelict for many years. In 2018 it was subject to an arson attack. An initiative was launched in 2019 to revamp it into a more modern-looking building. I wonder if this runs counter to the original ethos? It is listed on the Permaculture Association website as a going concern, so I guess that I shall have to very belatedly check it out. It is close to the return route from St Nicholas Circle to the Enderby Park and Ride.
I hope that you have found all this information to be useful. Although Leicester would make an unlikely holiday destination, from a vegan perspective and otherwise, it is well worth a day trip!