Leicester museums and places to visit - Castle areaClick on a photo for a large version. |
Leicester has good museums! There are several museums and places to visit in the Castle area. Some can only be visited on Heritage Sunday.
| Museums and places to visit | Heritage Sunday only |
|---|---|
The Newarke, Leicester LE2 7BY - Website - free entrance - open 7 days a week. I think the double plural is important. It is housed in two different houses, and there are two museums! On the ground floor, there is a museum of Leicester life in the past, quite extensive. The first floor is the Leicestershire Regimental Museum. Regimental museums can be dull, but this is a good one, concentrating on experiences of ordinary soldiers.
Here are the two houses. Wygston's Chantry House and Skeffington House were both built around 1511. The entrance to the museum is flanked with two canons, looking as if they're guarding the entrance!
A poster from the museum:
This lovely fireplace is in the museum:
Postcode LE2 7GZ - Website - you'd better check the opening times. It's free to enter. It's in the Hawthorn Building, which is on The Newarke. The heritage centre has its own entrance, which is well sign-posted, but for some reason we couldn't find it! We ended up walking right round the building, which is quite big! The Heritage Centre gives a history of De Montfort University (which is interseting, actually!) and at the centre are some arches belonging to the Church of the Ascension. I had wondered if they had been moved here, or whether they had built the Hawthorn building round them! In fact, both had happened. They had found them while building, took them out, finished the building, and then put them back. Sorry, I don't have a photo of them, but they are shown on the poster outside. De Montford seems to own quite a bit of the historic buildings round here.
Here is the explanatory poster outside, plus a couplee of the displays that caught my eye. The bit about corsets was because the local newspaper had featured a fashion show by De Montfort students that was entirely underwear, which surprised us a little. This explains that.
Here are some things we saw while walking round the Hawthorn Building. I'm a bit worried about leicester regarding the Whipping Toms as a sport...
Castle Street, Leicester LE1 5WN - Website - free to enter, but you'd better check the opening hours! St Mary's was, in fact, two churches at once, existing side by side. One church served the castle, the other church served the townsfolk. This dual-purpose arrangement did not last, and eventually the two congregations were combined. The legacy of the dual-church is that the south aisle is extraordinarily wide, because it originally served as a nave. This 'church within a church' theme is obvious everywhere you look. There are blocked clerestory window openings in the aisle, and Norman arches that lead nowhere. There are two sedilia (stone seats for clergy) and two piscinas for washing holy vessels.
If you can't get in, it's worth walking round the outside:
I liked the carvings near the roof on this side of the church!
Here are some interesting pew ends inside the church:
Some buildings in the Castle area can only be visited on Heritage Sunday. This is on the last Sunday of the month in summer. Website.
This is distinctly strange! As you can see, it has a brick front, which dates to c1695. But inside there is a Great Hall, built in 1150. The castle was slighted in the Civil War (destroyed to prevent further use). It was converted to courts in 1856 (by dividing the hall in two) to provide the County Court. De Montfort University now owns the building.
The Magazine was built in the 1400s and is one of Leicester's finest surviving medieval buildings, originally constructed as a monumental entrance into the religious precincts of the city. In the 17th century, the gateway was used to stone arms and munitions during the English Civil War and later it was used as a WWI recruiting station.
This is a beautiful garden! It has formal bits, and wilder bits, and lovely views of the museums' building from the back, and Prince Rupert's Gate.
The Newarke, Leicester, LE2 7BY - Website -The Hospital of the Honour of God and the Glorious Virgin and All Saints (Trinity Hospital and Chapel) was founded in 1330 by Henry Plantagenet, the 3rd Earl of Lancaster and Leicester,a grandson of King Henry III and chief advisor to King Edward III. The hospital was built to care for the poor and infirm of Leicester. Behind the hospital was a garden which grew medicinal herbs for patients. Both Trinity Hospital (with chapel) and a re-established garden are owned by De Montfort University.
© Jo Edkins 2023