Audioguides Leicester

Leicester is the city that rewrote medieval history in 2012. Archaeologists from the University of Leicester, acting on a systematic hypothesis rather than a lucky guess, dug a trench in a council car park off Greyfriars Lane and found the skeleton of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. He had been buried at the Greyfriars church, which was demolished at the Dissolution of the Monasteries and eventually built over. The King Richard III Visitor Centre opened on the site in 2014 with the excavation visible in situ, and the cathedral a hundred meters away became his reburial site in 2015, drawing global attention to a city that had rarely made international headlines.

Leicester has been continuously occupied since the Romans founded it as Ratae Corieltauvorum in the 1st century AD, and the Jewry Wall, a 2,000-year-old section of Roman bathhouse masonry, still stands near the cathedral.

The city has one of the highest proportions of South Asian residents of any British city outside London, a legacy of Ugandan Asian expulsion in 1972 and earlier migration from Gujarat and Punjab, and Belgrave Road to the north of the center is known as the Golden Mile for its concentration of Indian restaurants, sweet shops, and Diwali celebrations that regularly attract 35,000 people. In 2016, Leicester City Football Club won the Premier League title at odds of 5,000 to 1, an event the city absorbed with complete, uncomplicated joy.