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Did You Know?

Thomas Cook himself, founder of today’s travel agent, created his first package trip in 1841. It was a train journey from Leicester to Loughborough.

Leicester is the Spiritual Home of Rock Music. It started back in 1980 with the first Monsters of Rock at Donington Park. It continues today with its awesome successor Download, the second largest music festival in Europe.

It's one of the oldest cities in England, with a history going back at least two millennia. The native Iron Age settlement encountered by the Romans at the site seems to have developed in the 2nd or 1st centuries BC.

In August 1485 Richard III spent the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field at the Blue Boar Inn. It was his last night alive, and his body was brought to Leicester afterward. In fact his skeletal remains were discovered under a Leicester car park. The car park stands on the site of the former Choir of Greyfriars Church where Richard, the last English king to die in battle, was hastily buried.

Famous people include:  Sir David & Lord Richard Attenborough, Gary Lineker & Peter Shilton; two of England’s most capped footballers,  fashion guru Gok Wan, reptilian bloodline theorist David Icke, Joseph Merrick (AKA the Elephant Man), Leicester’s largest son Daniel Lambert (he was 336kgs when he died), Monty Python’s Graham Chapman and Lady Jane Grey (Queen of England for just 9 days in 1553).

The City of Leicester was Britain’s first ‘Environment City’ and the ‘greening’ of the city was singled out for special praise at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, apparently. Quite how you ‘green’ a city, we’re not sure.

Leicester history stretches back over 2000 years. If you visit you will find the ruins of a Roman Bath House at the Jewry Wall Museum, and an even older Iron Age hillfort in Burrough on the Hill.

You’ll soon cotton on to the fact that the Leicester dialect is unique with its clipped vowels and ‘ey up me ducks, ‘Les-tohs’ and ‘oo-yors’ - but we bet you never knew that our fine city is the birthplace of the English language we use today.

Leicester’s main water course – which runs alongside the DMU campus – used to be known for its strange pink hue. This was all down to the city’s industrial heritage when it was famous for its textiles.

In the mid-1840s the Duchess of Bedford Anna Maria Russell came to Belvoir Castle to visit the 5th Duke of Rutland. Some time in the afternoon, she was suddenly taken by the need to quench her hunger pangs. The kitchen was instructed to bring up finger sandwiches and small cakes, along with some traditional English tea, and she loved it so much that it became a tradition for her

The city hosts an annual Pride Parade, a Caribbean Carnival (the largest in the UK outside London), the largest Divali celebrations outside of India and the largest comedy festival in the UK.