A Day Shopping

7 min readSep 29, 2025

There was a day of not doing much, just mooching around town and going into shops (mainly of the charity variety). After two days of long walks and photographic overload it was going to be a relaxed and much less snap happy day.

Although saying that it is still there in the side of my mind, ‘take a photo of that, take a photo of this’ as I pass anything. Even going down Granby Street, somewhere I’d taken photos of extensively on previous visits back, and that I’ve written about in detail before.

It saddens me that Blunts is now closed and I hope that someone takes the building over who will take car of it and use it sympathetically and not chrome and neon it up as so many other ground floors of buildings down Granby Street have been disfigured with.

We weave back and forth across the road poking in the various charity shops. Helen is looking for something appropriate for Brighton Pride a few weeks away (at that point anyway), and as usual I’m only looking at books and records.

During the day we go in charity shops along Granby Street, Gallowtree Gate, Humberstone Gate, Charles Street, High Street, Silver Street, and Loseby Lane. There are a lot of charity shops, something common to every town and city nowadays, but as I think back to when I used to live in Leicester, I struggle to think where there would have been any back then. Perhaps there would have been a Loros one, but if they were around then, they wouldn’t have occupied such prime locations. It is funny to see how differently they approach their pricing as well. Some act as you would expect and have what you’d call charity shop prices, selling the stuff remembering that it’s all been donated and that on the whole they are manned by volunteers. Whereas others seem to have forgotten that original ethos and some of their price tags are ridiculous, a tenner for a t-shirt might just be acceptable if it is a mint condition designer effort, but to charge that for a t-shirt you can buy for a fiver in Primark is just taking the piss.

There are a couple of main changes along Granby Street since I was last down here in October. On the plus side, work on the Grand Hotel has finished, there is no scaffolding there and it is preparing for its reopening a few days away and looks a lot smarter.

But on the downside, the iconic Turkey Café is closed, hopefully that is only temporary, and it will be in use again soon.

Gallowtree Gate seems to be a shadow of its former self. M&S closing being seemingly another nail in its coffin. I did see after getting back home to Crawley that one of those home décor money laundering style chops has opened in the building. We had the same thing in our old M&S building in Crawley, but they are already closing down, and it hasn’t been three months.

We have a break from shopping and get a coffee here on Fox Lane.

It is good to see the building is open and being used as a café again. It is just a shame it is no longer a Brucciani’s.

I wander a bit further up Fox Lane and again there is a tinge of disappointment. It is now a dead end with only an entrance to a good delivery yard for the shops in the space where Lewis’s used to be. I remember it winding around the outside of Lewis’s, a bit coming out onto Charles Street and another heading up behind the shops on Gallowtree Gate to come out on Halford Street.

And how coming out of this back corner of Lewis’s you could go straight across the road and into the back of M&S, or coming out of another rear entrance further around Fox Lane you could get into the back corner of Boots. On rainy days I would have been able to get off the bus in Charles Street and be able to walk undercover pretty much all the way up to Millstone Lane, both when going to the Poly, and when I worked on Norton Street. I’d get off the bus, up the steps and across the walkway into the Haymarket, across the other one into Lewis’s, out the back corner into Boots, across Gallowtree Gate into Smith’s, out the back into the market, and through there to come out onto Hotel Street and walk under the overhang of the old Rackham’s building.

I would like to say there was a brief look in Primani, but you know how much of a time suck that kind of place can be. I came out the other side upstairs into the Haymarket, and I spot these elephants.

I didn’t realise they were going to be the latest animal trail around the city (Stomp around Leicester). I saw two more in Loros on the High Street, which has now crossed the road and is in the large space where Blacks used to be. It is now more like a charity superstore.

There is another stop for soft drinks, this time at the Globe. It is good that it is still there, but it just doesn’t have the same feel to it anymore. Card payments only always gives me a bad impression of anywhere, and it isn’t as welcoming anymore.

The Sue Ryder vintage shop on Loseby Lane is the one I really struggled not to spend a fortune in, as there is so much good stuff in there.

But elsewhere on Loseby Lane it looks really sorry. It is sad as most of the shops are closed and/or empty. We’d stopped for coffee down here the previous afternoon and there had been several overheard conversations about how the soul of the city was being ripped out by Soulsby, with all the parking restrictions, impenetrable one-way systems, and closed streets. The packed Fosse Park on Sunday afternoon would say those thoughts aren’t far off the mark.

There had been a couple of hefty tomes I had spotted earlier in the day with a mind to get on the way back to the hotel rather than carting them around like a packhorse most of the day (having made that mistake on Monday in Syston before walking through Watermead Park). Only to misremember which charity shops they were in and so get to the top of Granby Street and realised they must have been in the ones at the bottom of Gallowtree Gate. And no more books isn’t really a bad thing.

In the evening we went to the Mumbai Inn for dinner, a nice two-minute stroll from the hotel, and we honestly can’t come to Leicester and not go for a curry. On the table behind me when we got in there were a couple who were having various heated discussions whilst they ate. When the bill came the bloke asked to see the owner, and then, having ordered and drank three bottles of wine, decided it was time to argue about the price of them and say they were too expensive and he should get a discount, as that was why he didn’t go in there anymore. He told the owner he could get the same bottle for a third of the price from Majestic Wines, and then told him that bottles of wine from the Three Kilns were much cheaper. It’s not a winning argument when you’re comparing a city centre, nice restaurant with the Three Kilns. It was cringeworthy.

Only for them to leave and the table to then be taken by four blokes. One of whom liked the sound of his own voice. He wanted alcohol free beer and then moaned because they only had Heineken. And proceeded to tell his table mates about a night out in Manchester where he’s been staying in Castlefield, and had gone to the Northern Quarter, but had gone along Canal Street as it was along the way, and he was being derisive about the old queens down there. Meanwhile I’m thinking, how far out of his way did he want to go to get from Castlefield to the Northern Quarter. It would be like going Welford Road Cemetery to get from one end of the New Walk to the other.

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