Clarendon Park
The last full day of the trip saw the plan as being a nice long slow wander over to Grace Road ready for the 20/20 in the evening, and in doing so to try and go along a few roads Helen won’t have seen before, even if I may have done when I lived here, and have photographed on previous visits back.
London Road up to and past Victoria Park wasn’t one of those. It was both well-travelled and well documented photographically.
There was a brief moment of hope when passing St James the Greater church, the front door to the porch was open, but previous experience should have told me that would be it. The door into the main church itself was locked. Since I started making regular visits back to Leicester in 2019 this was the seventh attempt to get in to see the inside of the glorious church. It was the seventh failure. One day I will get in there. Hopefully.
The next stretch of London Road is one I haven’t walked on visits back before. There are grand, huge Victorian builds on both sides of the road along here, a reminder of the prosperity of the town (as it was back then) at the time.
Thornycroft was the former home of Thomas Cook, another of the various buildings linked with him in the city.
An information board and blue plaque are here to highlight this one.
A lot of these red brick monoliths are now spilt into a multitude of flats. This of course makes sense, but it also makes it difficult to comprehend just how huge a place each must have been when they were built as homes for just a single family.
Back in 2019 I had made it to the corner of Clarendon Park Road coming from Queens Road before my legs decided I had had enough, and I got a bus from here into the city centre.
When a walk one block along to the south would have shown me the wonderful Clarendon Park Congregational Church on the corner of Springfield Road.
It is one of many old Victorian build churches crammed into a relatively small area around Clarendon Park Road.
On the last visit here back in 2019 I had taken photos of the outside of St John the Baptist church, and someone had stopped me to say I must see inside as it is lovely. Only for me not to go in as they were hosting a class of school children. This time I wasn’t able to get in either as it appears to have ceased functioning as a church and is all closed up.
They certainly didn’t scrimp on the bricks along here, and they even managed to throw a bit of mock Tudor in as well for good measure.
On one side is the building which now houses the Leicester Chinese Christian Church,
complete with an information board,
And on the other side is the Christchurch.
We stop for coffee at the Northern Cobbler on the corner of Clarendon Park Road and Queens Road, with the Knighton & Clarendon Park Club on the opposite corner.
This stretch of Queens Road between here and Victoria Park is prime hipster Ville. There are cafes, restaurants, cool bars, nice individual shops (and local supermarkets for those who can’t live on organic tofu). Helen thinks it would be very much the area her eldest son would want to live in if he were ever to live in Leicester.
We have a wander up and down, going in the charity shops (who’s have thunk it?), two are specifically bookshops, and another a record shop. Bearing in mind the heat of the day and the miles still to be walked I don’t go mad with the book buying.
There is another stop for coffee, this time at a Portuguese café, so it would have been rude not to try the pastel de natas as well. We had been in Lisbon earlier in the year and so recognise places in the photos adorning the walls of the café, though it turns out the owner of the café, although Portuguese, has never been to Lisbon himself.
After that we get back to Clarendon Park Road and head along there for me to take more photos. The library is a wonderful building, but is in danger of being closed down. Most of the businesses along both Queens Road and Clarendon Park Road has posters up and leaflets in them for the local campaign to save the library and keep it open. I couldn’t agree more and hope they succeed.
We make it as far as another large old church, this one now houses the Guru Amar Das Gurdwara.
On the way back to Queens Road we passed Clarendon Books, which unsurprisingly calls to me. Over the years I have bought a fair few books from here on eBay, and I have been in person before, and I can’t resist the temptation to squeeze my way through the ceiling high close-set racks of books in there. So many books in there calling to me, but again I resist loading myself down. To properly shop there requires a lot of time, a car to load up, and obviously a second mortgage.
Back at Queens Road we turn and head south. There are a few more old Victorian buildings here, and some later Art Deco style former factory buildings, one of which houses the Overcomers church.
And then it turns to residential buildings. I don’t think I’ve ever walked down this stretch of Queens Road before, but I certainly drove down here. During an ill-fated spell living in South Wigston for six months in 2000, this was one of several routes attempted to get into the centre of Leicester, to first drop the ex-wife off on Wellington Street, and then for me to get over to Bede Island (the route used for those two points are now impossible to navigate in a car). It was a route I gave up as getting onto Victoria park Road was a mare, and the almost never used wide sweep of Southerhay Road was much quicker.
Walking this stretch doesn’t seem as far as when I used to drive it and we are soon in Knighton, another of the medieval villages consumed by the expansion of Leicester, and where the next (and final part) of this Leicester trip will begin.
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