Moving to Leicester

Textiles, garment manufacturing & fashion

Next plc's headquarters at Enderby, Shoezone, hundreds of small garment factories across the east of the city, the Fashion Technology Academy

Leicester has made clothes since the hosiery trade of the eighteenth century and still has one of the largest concentrations of garment manufacturing in Britain. The sector's labour conditions were the subject of national scrutiny from 2020 onwards, which produced a real compliance shake-out — worth knowing if you work in retail sourcing, employment law or supply-chain audit, because much of that work is now done from here.

Space, Earth observation & satellite data

Space Park Leicester, the National Space Centre, the University of Leicester's School of Physics and Astronomy, Airbus and Rolls-Royce partners on the park

Leicester's university has built instruments for space missions since the 1960s and Space Park Leicester, opened in 2021 next to the National Space Centre, put research, industry and manufacturing on one site. Between them they make Leicester the largest cluster of space and Earth-observation work in Britain outside the Harwell campus.

Food manufacturing & consumer brands

Walkers at Beaumont Leys, Samworth Brothers, Dunelm at Syston, Everards of Leicestershire

The Walkers factory at Beaumont Leys is one of the largest crisp plants in the world and Walkers was founded in Leicester as a butcher's shop in 1948. Samworth Brothers, which makes a very large share of Britain's supermarket sandwiches and pies, is headquartered in Leicester too — food manufacturing is a bigger employer here than most people outside it realise.

Health, life sciences & universities

University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre, the University of Leicester, De Montfort University

Genetic fingerprinting was invented at the University of Leicester by Sir Alec Jeffreys in September 1984, and the same department later identified Richard III's remains. Glenfield Hospital is a national centre for cardiac and respiratory medicine including ECMO, and the trust runs one of the largest teaching hospital groups in England across three sites.

Logistics & distribution

Magna Park at Lutterworth, East Midlands Gateway, DHL, Next's distribution operation, the M1/M69/A46 corridor

Leicestershire sits at the centre of the English motorway network, which is why Magna Park near Lutterworth became one of the largest dedicated distribution parks in Europe. If you work in supply chain, warehousing automation or transport planning, this is one of the densest markets in the country.

Sport, culture & the visitor economy

Leicester City FC at the King Power Stadium, Leicester Tigers at Welford Road, Curve theatre, the King Richard III Visitor Centre

Leicester City's 2015-16 Premier League title and the 2012 discovery of Richard III under a council car park did more for the city's profile than a decade of marketing. Leicester Tigers play at Welford Road, one of the oldest continuously used grounds in rugby union, and the two clubs between them fill a lot of the city's Saturday economy.

Landmark · Old Town, between the Guildhall and the Cathedral

The building over the council car park where Richard III's grave was found in September 2012, with a glass floor above the exact spot, and the cathedral fifty metres away where he was reinterred in March 2015.

Local tip: The astonishing part is not that they found him but where: an ordinary staff car park, the trench opened almost on a hunch, and the skeleton in the first day's digging. The identification was done by the same university department that invented genetic fingerprinting. Do the centre and the cathedral together — they are a two-minute walk apart and neither makes complete sense without the other.

Food · North-east of the centre, over the Belgrave Flyover

A continuous mile of South Asian jewellers, sari shops, sweet centres and vegetarian restaurants, and the focus of Diwali celebrations that draw tens of thousands.

Local tip: Come hungry and come vegetarian — this is one of the best concentrations of Gujarati vegetarian food anywhere outside India, and the sweet centres are the point as much as the restaurants. At Diwali the street lights go on and the road closes; go for the switch-on rather than the day itself if you want to be able to move.

Culture · St Nicholas Circle, west of the centre

A standing fragment of Roman masonry over seven metres high — among the largest pieces of Roman civil building surviving in Britain — beside the excavated remains of the public baths of Ratae Corieltauvorum.

Local tip: It survived because it was absorbed into the wall of a Saxon church, which is why a lump of second-century Roman engineering is standing in the middle of a ring road. The museum alongside it reopened after a major refurbishment and puts the baths back in context; the wall itself is free and permanently visible.

Culture · Exploration Drive, on the Soar north of the centre

A museum under a 42-metre inflated tower containing genuine Blue Streak and Thor-Able rockets, with the university's Space Park research and manufacturing campus next door.

Local tip: The rockets are real flight hardware, not models, and the tower was built around them. It is unabashedly aimed at children during the holidays — go on a term-time weekday if you want to read the labels. The Space Park next door is where the actual satellite instrument work happens and occasionally opens for talks.

Food · City centre, behind the Corn Exchange

An outdoor market trading on the same site since the thirteenth century, rebuilt in the 2020s around a new public square, with the medieval Lanes and the Corn Exchange beside it.

Local tip: The fruit and veg here is startlingly cheap by British standards and the traders shout prices at you, which is the point. Behind the market, St Martin's and the Lanes hold the independent shops and coffee; between them and the Golden Mile you can eat very well in this city for very little.

Nature · Newtown Linford, six miles north-west of the city

850 acres of open deer park with the ruins of Lady Jane Grey's family house at its centre, on rock outcrops that are among the oldest exposed in England.

Local tip: The rocks are the hidden story. In 1957 a schoolboy found a fossil frond in Charnwood Forest that became Charnia masoni — the first fossil ever accepted as Precambrian, which broke the long-standing assumption that complex life began with the Cambrian. It is around 560 million years old and it was found in a Leicestershire quarry by a teenager. The park itself is free, has red and fallow deer, and is where the whole city walks on a Sunday.