City of Leicester & Leicestershire - The Good and Historical Stuff

[davieG]

 

Julia Mason

 

Early 1900s - Highfields. I was born 26 Gordon Street - demolished to make way for the new St Peter’s Estate

 

[Trav Le Bleu]

On 04/09/2026 at 18:39, davieG said:

Simon 'Schooly' Phillips

AI content

 

Been playing around with an idea and thought I’d share this very rough first attempt.

I’m going to do a little series of Then & Now images of Leicester, taking some of the oldest views I can find and trying to recreate roughly what the same landscape looks like today.

This first one is The South Prospect of Leicester, engraved by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck and published on 25 March 1743.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Look closely at the original and you can see Leicester as a remarkably small town surrounded by open countryside.

The fields in the foreground include land around what would eventually become Highfields and Victoria Park, complete with windmills. In the distance are the hills of Charnwood, also dotted with windmills.

Some of the old Leicester landmarks represented in that eighteenth-century skyline survive, while almost everything around them has changed.

Even Abbey Park has a connection to this landscape: the park itself didn’t open until 1882, but it was created from the former Abbey Meadows, alongside the historic landscape of medieval St Mary’s Abbey.

The second image is NOT a historical photograph, it’s my rough 2026 digital/3D experiment, imagining how a modern version of the Buck brothers’ prospect might be presented today.

Still plenty to correct and refine, but I love the idea of putting nearly 300 years of Leicester into the same view.

I’ll post more of these as I find them.

So I Googled mapped it.

 

 

From that perspective (I have put Vicky Park at the bottom, but it's more SE of the town centre) it would be St Mary DC, St Nick's, St Martin's, All Saints and St Margaret's.

 

So my earlier guesses were wrong too, but more from looking from the wrong perspective, but he's looking from the other side.

Edited 8 September by Trav Le Bleu

[davieG]

 

Highfields the gooddays  · 

Andy Heap

Charles Street 1962

[davieG]

[Free Falling Foxes]

Vaughan St, off Tudor Road.

 

Mrs. FFF's grandparents lived there. Her uncle was the 1st person in the street to have a car. It was the only one parked on the entire street for many months.

A little bit different these days.