Lines from Leicester

We moved to Leicester in July. I’m going to attempt to return to blogging (with lots of pictures) over the next few months. Here’s a very short first entry. It may be some time before I do any more … but this is a start.
 
So here we are in Leicester.  Strangely, the experience currently feels a bit like our stay in Bilbao. We are once again living in a flat in a strange but interesting city centre where we don’t know anyone, and I have again left my teaching job behind. And in many respects Leicester is like Bilbao. As I suggested in my Bilbao blog post about the similarities between Bilbao and Nottingham, a city like Leicester, a big Victorian industrial city which has seen better times, has far more in common with Bilbao, and feels far more like Bilbao, than, say, Oxford or Cambridge.
 
There are lots of interesting things to report from here, and we are enjoying discovering the city. What have we discovered so far?

• Leicester is a far more interesting and attractive city than one might think from its reputation.
  
• Leicester is the most multicultural city in the country (Birmingham and one or two other places not far behind) with 50% of the population white and 50% non-white. The cultural mix is dynamic and the city has a reputation for being welcoming and tolerant of difference. The kind of violent racial tensions that characterise some Northern cities and parts of London seem not to exist here in any substantial way.
  
• Leicester's history is fascinating - a Roman city, and indeed a major Celtic centre before that, and therefore one of the oldest cities in the UK. Locating the traces of this history has been very interesting. There is also some stunning architecture here - from Roman to 20th century, but with an especially fine Victorian heritage.
  
• The city centre is thriving and (mostly) attractive, with some great places to eat and drink, plenty going on culturally and in terms of shops and markets, and a fine medieval centre.
  
• That's not to say the city doesn't have its problems. It has suffered economically, and the cityscape shows signs of its struggles over the last century: parts of the city look great and are thriving, whilst other parts contain terrible eyesores and are shockingly run-down. The city council seems to be doing a good job, and there's a successful regeneration programme in place which is gradually transforming the city in a largely positive way. But things may not look so rosy in some of the estates on the edge of the city. And here in the inner city, where we live, we get frequent glimpses of some of the lows of city life as well as some of the highs.
  

I’ll write more in later posts, but, for the time being, here are ten pictures to whet your appetite.

Where we live (2nd floor, the last three windows on the right).

Where we live, with Leicester's theatre, Curve, across the road.

Our local cafe, the Exchange, across the road from our flat.

St Mary de Castro, the Norman church next to the castle ruins

Venice ... or Leicester? Venetian Gothic in the city centre.

The Town Hall

The Turkey Cafe

Richard who?

Ragas in the Garden - Indian classical music at Belgrave Hall last week

The staircase of Pietro's institute at the university