Things to do in Leicester

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.