City of Leicester & Leicestershire - The Good and Historical Stuff

[Parafox]

7 hours ago, davieG said:

If you're a fan.

 

 

I'll give that a swerve.

[davieG]

 

 

Leicester Memories

Peter Hill

Anyone remember pat keelings kiss a grams fron on the high street pretty sure she doesn't supply them anymore

[davieG]

 

Leicester Memories

Peter Taylor  

Rossa`s - Lovely Ice Cream .

[Wymsey]

Mike Ashley has a stake in Leicestershire firm Marks Electrical.

 

They've grown significantly.

 

https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/leicester-firm-marks-electrical-sells-9747969

 

[davieG]

Leicester Memories

John Finch  

Great archive of the Leicestershire Land Army Girls 1941. With the majority of young and middle aged men fighting and stationed abroad during WW2, ladies were used to fill the void in farm labours during the duration and thousands worked on their local farms making sure Britain had food to eat. Some also worked in munitions factories, again filling in for the male workforce absent at the front. If the ladies hadn't have stepped into the breech at this time to bridge the shortfall the outcome of the Second World War doesn't bear thinking about, it could have been oh so very different.

 

 

[davieG]

 

Leicester Memories

Peter Taylor  

Some heatwave was that .

Water in the canal near Crow Mills, South Wigston, nearly dry in 1976. Employees from a nearby factory testing the depth with a tree branch .

[davieG]

Leicester Memories

Mervin Wallace  · 

It might come as a surprise to learn a couple of things about the wartime Avro Lancaster Bomber. Firstly, many were made locally at Armstrong Whitworth in Bitteswell, Leicestershire. And secondly the launch of Leicester's ambitious Lancaster Fund in 1943. An appropriately named target board was erected outside the town hall showing the German cities of Essen, Hanover and Berlin. A Lancaster outline was added every time sufficient money had been collected to acquire an example. The purchase of 100 bombers was given as £2,097,678 - in present day values around £160 million - and it was achieved. Ventures like this were run all over the UK and the Commonwealth.

 

 

 

 

 

David Stretton

I've seen the cost of a Lancaster costing between 42,000 and 50,000 pounds in 1944 values. 7,377 were built of which 3,736 were lost in accidents or on operations. The current British fast jet, the Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II, cost about 85 million pounds each.

[davieG]

 

Jan Smith

All-star contributor

Leicester, the bridge in Knighton Fields Road. Beyond the bridge was the swimming pool c1960s.

 

 

We used to go there for swimming lessons from school. It's where I got an ear infection, well that or swimming in the sea at Great Yarmouth that has now rendered me deaf.

[davieG]

 

Leicester Memories

Julia Mason  · 

John Bull - Evington Valley Road, Leicester

Growing up at 56 Gedding Road, Leicester in the 60s and 70s, one of the predominant features of the area was the enormous John Bull Factory on the Evington Valley Road.

It was a place I was aware of almost every day, from walking to and from Mayflower Junior School or Crown Hills secondary modern at the top of the Gwendolen Road, through the never-ending smells which hung heavily in the air, and the volume of factory workers heading to and from work whether by foot, bicycle or bus.

Peter Shilton's parents had the cafe across the road from the factory and I would sometimes watch him drive up to visit on a Sunday afternoon, and the bus stop for the 35 Goodwood bus we would catch into town was just outside the factory (next to the obligatory red telephone kiosk) and so one way or another, John Bull was seared into my memory from a very early age.

I remember picking up nuggets of rubber which had somehow made their way onto the streets and using them at school as erasers. They were very effective! Was I the only one that did that? And I remember how one day one of the boys in my junior school class decided he’d try and break my ‘eraser’ in half (because he wasn’t particularly nice) only to find that, whilst he could stretch it a fraction, he was never going to snap it in half like he’d done to so many other girls! One nil to John Bull!!

The demise of this once great ‘bull’ of a factory, like so many before and after, had to come and, although it was gradual, there’s no getting away from the tired beast it became. Workers reduced in number, weeds started growing and the whole place looked very neglected. I did hear how the factory had been separated into different units but by then I was living elsewhere and, to the youthful me, it didn’t really matter.

Today, I understand the building has been given a new lease of life following its conversion and redevelopment into a school but whilst an iconic name and industry was lost, I for one am grateful this piece of our history has diversified into something so worthwhile.

[davieG]

 

1940s ?

 

1938

[davieG]

 

Wigston In Photos 1950-2000

11 January 2019  · 

The Oven Door, 35 Bell Strret, Wigston

"Standing in line for bread, September 1977. The second of two bakery strikes that year. The queue extends all the way round the car-park, out of sight, and ends in the lanes back near to its start."

(Gerry Broughton - People In Wigston Magna)

[davieG]

Born and Raised in Leicester  · 

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East Park Road 1955

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Leicester Memories

Peter Taylor  

Memories of the IL Rondo on Silver Street Leicester .

© Born & Raised in Leicester .

[davieG]

 

Leicester Memories

John Finch 

Corn Exchange in background.

1915.

[davieG]

[davieG]

 

Leicester Memories

John Finch  

Army ambulance team outside the Leicester General Hospital during WW1.

[davieG]

 

Leicester Memories

Graham Hulme  ·

Old postcard view of a busy Humberstone Gate, possibly late 1930s. On the left, at the corner of Haymarket, is the tobacconists shop of Salmon & Gluckstein Ltd. The slightly taller building beyond the corner was the Tower Vaults and after that was the Stag & Pheasant Hotel. These buildings were demolished in the 1960s to make way for the Littlewoods building which contained a new Littlewoods store, opened by the local MP Sir Barnett Janner on 17th May 1967 (now the TK Maxx store). On the right of the picture, at the corner of Gallowtree Gate, is the store of Burton’s the tailor which was opened here in July 1928 (the building is now an HSBC bank branch). The store was designed by Harry Wilson of Leeds who was a chief architect to Montague Burton's vast tailoring company and he designed many of Burton's buildings around the country. The premises of the wine and spirit merchant John Allen & Co. had previously stood on the site for many years. Unmissable beyond Burton’s is the bulky edifice of Lewis’s department store. Lewis’s opened their new store here on Saturday 21st March 1936 when thousands of people gathered in Humberstone Gate to witness the event. The Lord Mayor of Leicester, Richard Hallam, declared the building open and the opening ceremony was broadcast to Lewis’s other stores across the country. Outside, a fanfare of trumpets sounded from the roof on the opening and flags unfurled from flagstaffs. Around 20,000 people were said to have poured into the new building in the first hour after the opening. The store, Lewis’s seventh, cost about a quarter of a million pounds to build and was designed by Gerald de Courcy Fraser of Liverpool, who was architect to the company. The chairman of the company, Harold Cohen, and the full Board of Directors attended the opening, including Sir Frederick Marquis, joint managing director together with Cohen. Sir Frederick Marquis was to become chairman of Lewis’s a few months later on Cohen’s death (Sir Frederick was subsequently made Earl of Woolton and in political life he was Minister of Food from 1940 in the wartime government - in this capacity he was responsible for food rationing and the famous “Woolton Pie” was named after him). A large extension was added to Lewis’s store towards Charles Street and the Manchester Working Men’s Club in the mid 1960s. The store closed down in January 1994 and was demolished, except for the 160 feet high tower, during the summer of that year.

[davieG]

Leicester Past & Present ~ A walk down Memory Lane.

LEICESTER PAST: The Magazine ~ Postcard from the early 1920's.

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Leicester Memories

Peter Taylor 

Churchgate 1920`s .

 

That's St Margarets Church before they ran Burleys Way across Churchgate followed by St Magarets Way along side it.

[davieG]

 

Leicester Memories

Peter Taylor

Bond Street Maternity Hospital Leicester ( Unknown Year )

[Free Falling Foxes]

7 hours ago, davieG said:

 

Leicester Memories

Peter Taylor 

Churchgate 1920`s .

 

That's St Margarets Church before they ran Burleys Way across Churchgate followed by St Magarets Way along side it.

Compare and contrast.

 

[davieG]

16 hours ago, Free Falling Foxes said:

Compare and contrast.

 

Motor Vehicles

[davieG]

Terry Jones

Maybe early 1930s.The building far right is the Fifty Shillings Tailor.They were called that from 1932 and moved in 1935 to the newly built Granby Buildings on Granby St...In 1953 they became John Colliers.(The Window to Watch). 

[davieG]

[davieG]

Born and Raised in Leicester

Charles street 1951