Panels telling stories of city’s diverse history installed

MORE than 150 information boards celebrating Leicester’s rich and diverse history have been placed around the city.

The heritage panels have been installed on streets and in public locations across the city as part of the city council’s Story of Leicester Project, which is run by the museums service.

The project aims to celebrate the city’s 2,000-year history by remembering the people, places and events of Leicester’s recent and distant past.

Councillor Sue Hunter, assistant city mayor for diversity and tackling racism, said: “Leicester has a reputation for championing diversity, so it’s fantastic to see the latest of Leicester’s heritage information panels unveiled during Black History Month.

“All of our diverse communities contribute positively to life in this city and play a vital role in Leicester’s past, its present and - I am sure - its future too. It’s right that we celebrate and recognise these contributions through these new heritage panels.”

The panels are grouped in themes to tell different chapters in the city’s story, and each theme is colourcoded to make them easy to identify.

African Caribbean Centre: One of the panels most recently installed is outside Leicester’s African Caribbean

Centre, in Maidstone Road, Highfields. It tells the story of the centre’s inception in the 1980s and the first Caribbean Carnival in Leicester in 1985, as well as recounting some of the famous visitors to the centre over the years.

Highfields Centre: The development of St Peters’ estate will also be reflected a panel at the

Highfields Centre, due to be installed soon. The panel includes an image of the HMT Windrush and focuses on how the Highfields Centre provided a community space for the Windrush generation, as well as allowing South Asian immigrants to develop numerous groups which went on to flourish throughout the city.

Nearby, a heritage panel at Spinney Hill Park tells the story of the Highfields neighbourhood’s historic diversity, from Jewish settlers around the time of the Second World War, to African Caribbean people in the 1950s and new arrivals from India and East Africa in the 1960s and 70s.

Bow Bridge House: A new panel marking the site of Bow Bridge House, near Leicester’s Bow Bridge, tells the tale of two women who campaigned for the abolition of slavery in the early 19th century.

The house – home to Elizabeth Heyrick, who set it up as a school – was demolished in the 1960s. But the story of its campaigning owner lives on. Together with her friend, Susannah Watts, Elizabeth went doorto-door in Leicester asking people to stop buying sugar from West Indian plantations.