Leicester revisited and rediscovered

Somewhere I have made it to recently is Leicester, a city where I studied as an undergraduate and became a political activist, and which thus had a defining influence on my life.

My appetite for election campaigning was much influenced by Chris Rennard, who at that time was East Midlands Area Agent and a rising star of the then Liberal party, and my political thinking by the late Professor Robert Pritchard, a polymath who led the Genetics Department that developed DNA fingerprinting and who then became leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicester City and then Leicestershire County Council.

While I can’t claim to have been that assiduous in my studies, I got my act together to earn a decent enough degree thanks in great part to the wise guidance of Dr (now Professor) Stuart Ball, the distinguished historian of the Conservative party. That encouraged me to engage in postgraduate study in later life.

For a few years after I returned to live in Watford, I continued to visit Leicester, still having Lib Dem friends there. But over the years I lost touch with people and didn’t go back for over two decades apart from a brief and sad visit in 2015 for Bob Pritchard’s funeral.

This year, though, has taken me back twice, once for sightseeing as we were staying nearby and most recently to watch rugby, of which more later. While I hope I wasn’t a total philistine when I was a student and do remember going to the Newarke Houses and New Walk Museums, somehow I never made it to the cathedral, nor to the greater architectural gem of St Mary de Castro parish church. I’m sure I intended to visit but never quite got round to it before leaving.

This year I was able to put that right and indeed that whole part Leicester was quite a revelation and I wish I had discovered it when I lived in the city, including the medieval Guildhall. The cathedral itself while II* listed, would be quite low down the English rankings, although it has received a boost in from the reburial there of Richard III, something they certainly make the most of. At St Mary de Castro, however, the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves. It is evidently very high church, being full of icons and making more of its Marian affiliation than one expects in an Anglican church.

The more recent visit took in rather less distinguished elements of Leicester’s architecture and skyline. With an hour or two to spare before heading to watch rugby at Welford Road (sorry, Mattioli Woods Welford Road Stadium), we dropped in at the University of Leicester campus. There were various reasons why I chose Leicester back then, but aesthetic considerations were not really among them, although there have been significant changes and new building since I was there, and these are mostly positive additions.

I knew that the famous paternoster in the otherwise undistinguished Attenborough tower, where we humanities students were based,  had been taken out of action in 2017, as it became increasingly difficult to get parts to repair it, but I had a vision of it still being in place, perhaps with the platforms permanently suspended between floors. Alas, it has been replaced by an ordinary lift.

The more famous tower on the campus is the Engineering Building, indeed this is the feature that people most often mention if I tell them I went to Leicester University. Designed by the famous modernist architect James Stirling and his colleague James Gowan, it was a notoriously terrible environment to study in, notorious for leaking water and unpopular with students and staff alike. It was one of Stirling’s Red Trilogy, another one of which, the History Faculty Building at Cambridge University, was reputedly the subject of the following parody by Tom Sharpe in his novel Ancestral vices:

“… thanks to the architect’s obsession with the idea of advanced technology and his consummate ignorance of its practical application, a slight spell of bright weather followed by a small cloud could threaten students who had been sunbathing one moment with frostbite the next.”

The Students Union building had had a serious makeover since I was there, but it was nice to see my friend Neil Fawcett’s name on the honours board of past office holders from when the Lib Dems seized power for a few years there in the early 1990s.

Then it was on to Welford Road to watch Leicester versus Coventry, the club representing the city of my birth and which I have supported since childhood. This was once one of the great rugby rivalries, but in the 1980s Leicester secured their place among the elite clubs while Cov slid into the doldrums. It was painful to be a Coventry supporter living in Leicester at the time, and seeing players who actually came from Coventry and its environs, such as Neil Back and Darren Garforth, lining up for the Tigers.

So for the last 35 years the two clubs have been in different leagues and games between them few. But the need for some kind of cup competition during the international break had led the Premiership clubs to condescend to play teams from the league below and thus Cov had a rare competitive away fixture at Welford Road. And they won, 33–19,  cheered on by a large and vocal contingent of away support. Admittedly the Leicester team was largely composed of academy players, while Cov had a full-strength team out, but I suspect the Tigers would still be better paid than their second tier counterparts. So it was a happy outcome to the day and a visit that brought back mostly fond memories.

If the silly rules that still make it almost impossible for tier 2 teams to get promoted are ever changed, perhaps I will yet get to see a Leicester v Cov league match, and indeed visit Leicester more often.