10 things you didn’t know about Hinckley

1) In 1085 the Domesday book recorded 69 families living in Hinckley. By 1889 there were 11,000 poeple in the town. Today there are around 55,000 in the town.

2) The boot and shoe industry in Earl Shilton and Barwell began in around the 1860s.

And by the 1880s factories had moved out of Leicester in larger numbers to smaller villages.

And in 1896 there were 12 shoe manufacturers in Earl Shilton and 11 in Barwell

3) Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council was formed in 1974 by the amalgamation of Hinckley Urban District Council and Market Bosworth Rural Council, except for the Parish of Ibstock. The motto of the borough is Post Proelia Concordia which means - after battle, concord.

4) The first newspaper in the county was the Leicester Journal which was set up in 1753. Hinckley’s first newspaper for the town came quite a few years later when the Hinckley Journal was set up in early 1859. Its proprietor, publisher and editor was James Burgess. He had set up another newspaper in the town a few months previously called the Midlands Star but this only lasted for three editions.

5) In March 1908 two youths were summoned to court for footballing on the highway. James Frith and Fred Holt pleaded guilty. They were kicking a football along the footpath between John Street and Barwell Lane. The chairman said such nuisance needs to stop. Fifteen window panes had been broken in the town in the last week alone because of this activity. The defendants were each fined the sum of 10 shillings (50p) including costs.

6) In the medieval period, Simon de Montfort was the lord of Hinckley and his coat of arms was incorporated into the town crest.

7) The first car passed through the town of Hinckley in 1898 and electricity came to town in 1912.

8) The green light was given for a new primary school in June 1985. It was to cost half a million pounds and was to be built in Earl Shilton on a three-acre site off Meadow Court Road. The school was called Townlands and work started in 1987. It was to house 270 children and replaced the old Wood Street Infant School.

9) Work started in 1974 to build the new Britannia Shopping centre. However, it took a few years before the centre opened on May 9 1978 when Presto supermarket opened.

10) Hinckley’s new magistrates court on Upper Bond Street opened for the first time in December 1999. The former court house still remains and was used as the home of the police for a few years before they moved next door very recently. The former court house and former police station, on the corner of Hollycroft and Upper Bond Street, first opened in 1937.