‘I think your hair’s returning on the top of your head, Robbie,’ she says, still unable to accept the fact that her little boy has gone bald.
We take the A607 and proceed pleasantly through Frisby-on-the-Wreake and Queniborough but the landscape is gradually turning more suburban. ‘Anybody who can do anything in Leicester but make a jumper has got to be a genius,’ Brian Clough once said by way of tribute to former Forest player Martin O’Neill, who as a manager brought unwonted success to Leicester City FC in the late Nineties. Well, my father’s pretty smart but basically what he used to do in Leicester was make jumpers. The purpose of our trip to the city today is to revisit some of the sites where he worked.
Finding them isn’t proving easy, however. We pick up signs for the National Space Centre, a brilliant, heavily interactive museum which happens to contain the only Soyuz spacecraft in Western Europe, and then for the Golden Mile, one of the most vibrant Indian shopping districts in the country, which offers a dynamic mixture of restaurants, jewellers and clothing stores. Some say, rather prosaically, that this stretch of the Belgrave Road got its nickname because it used to have more than its fair share of amber traffic lights, but the spectacular annual Diwali, or Hindu Festival of Light, celebrations probably offer a more satisfactory explanation. (Over 25 per cent of the city’s population is Indian in origin.)
‘I don’t recognise a bloody thing,’ Dad says encouragingly.
‘They used to call Leicester the wealthiest city in Europe,’ says Mum, ignoring Dad.
‘The wealthiest in Britain,’ corrects Dad, simultaneously executing an obviously wrong turn away from the city centre.
Mum’s having none of it. ‘Europe. We always said Nottingham was a big town whereas Leicester was a city. In Nottingham we’d got the Lace Market and a good red-light district,’ my mother chuckles (I think for a moment that she’s going to roll out her favourite ‘Thor but thatithfied’ joke – but no, we’re spared this time), ‘but Leicester had the De Montfort Hall. It was better for entertainment. It had bigger factories and bigger concert halls.’
We drive past a huge John Lewis, and my father briefly thinks he knows where we are. ‘There used to be the most fantastic factories around here. A lot of these were knitting units. They all look like they’ve been converted into flats now.’
He’s right. As recently as the mid-1990s, when my father retired, proud, red-brick Leicester was still dominated by the hosiery and textile industries. As J.B. Priestley wrote in the early 1930s in his bestselling travelogue An English Journey: ‘Leicester has been a hosiery town these last three hundred years. Since the Industrial Revolution, it has specialised in worsted hosiery, for which the Leicestershire long wools are very suitable.’ In order to capture the spirit of the city, the most appropriate thing Priestley could think of doing was to visit three Wolsey knitwear factories – after all, Wolsey ‘has factories all over the town’. No longer. After two centuries’ dominance of the global market (including supplying underwear to Scott of the Antarctic), Wolsey has recently been relaunched as a much-scaled-down ‘luxury British heritage brand’, while the historic Wolsey Building – bearing a mosaic of the English cardinal who gave his name to the company – has just been turned into care flats. Other former Wolsey production units lie in a state of mournful dereliction.
If the pipe-sucking Priestley, a proud Yorkshireman who is – surprise, surprise – generally briskly dismissive of the Midlands in his book,1 were to return to the city today, what he’d surely notice first is the student presence. Instead of three Wolsey factories, he might now spend an afternoon casting his Northern-patrician eye over three world-renowned institutes of higher education: the University of Leicester, the De Montfort University and (a dozen miles down the road) the University of Loughborough. There’s a high density of hard-working grey matter in this part of Leicestershire; the student presence also ensures that there’s a lively nightlife too.
‘I haven’t got a bloody clue where we are again,’ Dad sighs. Ring roads, pedestrianisation and one-way systems have contrived to render a driver’s basic directional sense almost useless; a disadvantage almost. You may know for sure that what you’re looking for is off to your left – you can actually see it! – but these days you probably need to steer a hard right to get there.
‘I never liked Leicester people,’ my mother pipes up gaily from the back of the car. ‘They were avaricious to an extraordinary degree. The hosiery industry made them rich and horrible. When we lived in Godalming in Surrey briefly in the 1960s, there was a young man there who had worked in Leicester but he’d come home because he found the people so unfriendly. He said he could earn three times as much in Leicester as he could in the South, but it wasn’t worth it. You had to belong to get on in Leicester.’
My father concurs: ‘They were cliquey.’ (He pronounces it ‘clicky’.)
‘Yes,’ agrees my mother, ‘very cliquey.’ (She pronounces it ‘clicky’ too.)
At this moment of unwonted harmony between my parents, I notice that we are driving past Leicester train station.
‘Stop!’ I shout, and my father executes an impressive emergency stop, endangering the lives of literally dozens of other drivers and pedestrians in the process.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ he half-screams.
‘Oh, I just wanted to take a look at the statue of Thomas Cook,’ I say. ‘It’s outside the station here.’
‘You …’ he begins, wagging a fatherly finger in my direction, but I’ve jumped out of the car before he can complete his phrase.
Cook is one of Leicester’s most famous sons. Midlanders have always been great innovators in matters of travel – perhaps it’s because people always seem to want to pass through the region as quickly as possible that we’ve specialised in developing new, ever faster methods of locomotion to help them achieve their goal. Cook’s career as a pioneer of modern tourism began at the railway station here, though it wasn’t exactly leisure that was on the then-cabinetmaker’s mind when he arranged for some 540 temperance activists to be carried by train to a rally in nearby Loughborough. Raised a Baptist, Cook was a fervent campaigner against the evils of alcohol and, as he walked by the newly opened station in the summer of 1841, ‘the thought suddenly flashed across my mind as to the practicability of employing the great powers of railways and locomotion for the furtherance of this social reform’. The canny Cook was quick to see the wider commercial opportunities offered by the newfangled train network, however, and struck a deal with the Midland Counties Railways, which had just come into existence to carry coal and other necessaries to the rapidly industrialising region. As he later noted, ‘thus was struck the keynote of my excursions, and the social idea grew upon me’. By the 1850s Cook’s travel agency was transporting visitors in their thousands across the Channel to gawp at the wonders on display in the Paris Exhibition. Shortly afterwards it had expanded its activities as far as the Holy Land, and by the 1880s it had its own fleet of steamers on the Nile.
The statue of Thomas Cook was unveiled in 1991, to mark the 150th anniversary of that first historic Leicester-to-Loughborough anti-booze cruise, and shows the great pioneer of modern tourism appropriately laden with luggage. The sculptor, James Butler, is responsible for several other statues of iconic Leicester figures. First, there’s The Seamstress, located outside the City Rooms, which pays tribute to the historic centrality of the hosiery industry to Leicester life. Then, in Castle Gardens, there’s a bronze likeness of Richard III, who spent his last night on earth in the city in 1485 before being killed nearby at the Battle of Bosworth. His body was then brought back to Leicester to be laid to rest – where exactly no one was sure until a skeleton was recently recovered from underneath a city-centre car park. Subsequent DNA tests identifying the remains as those of King Richard sparked a controversy with strong echoes of the kerfuffle over Robin Hood’s mythical bones. A group identifying itself as the Richard III Foundation called for the remains of ‘Richard, our hero and martyr, to be brought home to the city that he loved [York], and where he is still loved to this day’. ‘York