Distance: 1 mile
Difficulty of the terrain: easy
Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk from central Leicester through the city’s inner suburbs via the New Walk and Victoria Park to the University of Leicester home to Jame Stirling’s Engineering Building and the Attenborough Arts Centre.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
The Midland’s Best Modernist Panorama?
Perched on top of a ridge on the edge of the city centre, the University of Leicester has a commanding position.
One enhanced by the fact that the southern end of the campus is marked by three distinctive, and rightly noted towers, each designed by one of the most notable British architects or structural engineers of the postwar era.
To the north of the cluster stands Denys Lasdun’s Charles Wilson Building, a squat brutalist tower rising to a sharp point. In the middle of the grouping is the Ove Arrup engineered Attenborough Building, or Arts Tower, a decidedly space age structure, which until relatively recently was home to one of the UK’s last surviving paternoster lifts. To the south stands the most famous building of the lot, James Stirling’s strikingly innovative Engineering Building. Which was constructed in the early 1960s, and while definitely modernist, and in its terracotta brick construction reminiscent of his later Faculty of History Building for the University of Cambridge, also possesses elements of the high-tech and postmodern styles that became architect’s avant garde from the 1970s onwards.
The University of Leicester’s story is similar to that of its northerly eastern Midlands peer the University of Nottingham. Like Nottingham, Leicester’s origins lie in the Nineteenth Century, and a desire by various groups in the city for locally accessible higher education. As with the University of Nottingham and its relationship with Nottingham Trent, the University of Leicester’s early years are bound up with those of De Montfort University, in that the cluster of initiatives and institutions which emerged in the city in Victorian times form the kernel of both universities existing today.
Also like Nottingham, the institution which became the University of Leicester, was established as a university college in the years after the First World War, partly as a memorial to those who fought and died in the conflict. University College Leicester came into being in 1921, starting to award degrees through the University of London in 1927.
The institution that became University College Leicester has been on the site adjacent to the city’s Victoria Park where the University of Leicester remains to this day, since 1921. The institution’s initial main building was constructed in 1837 as an asylum. After being used in World War I as a hospital for injured soldiers it became the home of the university college, and then in time, the university. The old asylum building, now nearly two hundred years old, remains a key part of the university’s fabric, teaching, and administrative space to this day. In 1957 University College Leicester received its own degree awarding powers becoming the University of Leicester.
University College Leicester’s second Principal, in post between 1932 and 1951, was Frederick Attenborough, father of Richard, David and John Attenborough who spent part of their childhood in the city. Connections which proved to be lifelong as Richard Attenborough left his collection of Picasso ceramics to the city. As well as being key in establishing the University of Leicester’s Attenborough Arts Centre, based on the university’s campus, which was founded in 1997 with the vision that ‘Art is not an elitist gift for a few select people; art is for everyone.’
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
This walk to the University of Leicester campus home to the early James Stirling’s structure The Engineering Building and Attenborough Arts Centre starts from Leicester Railway Station.
On exiting across the porch like structure that comprises the station forecourt turn left upon reaching the London Road pavement.
Walk up London Road passing a little TESCO.
Soon on the right there is a set of traffic lights which you use to cross the road.
Having crossed London Road via the traffic lights, turn left, then right onto De Montfort Street.
Walk straight down De Montfort Street, passing through a small tree lined square partway up Leicester’s famous pedestrianised New Walk.
At the bottom of De Montfort Street turn left, crossing over the road and continuing straight uphill along Regent Road. The northern part of the University of Leicester’s campus is off to the right on the far side of the road.
Upon reaching a bend in the road, cross over to the right and enter Victoria Park.
On entering Victoria Park turn right and walk straight along a path leading around the edge of the park. Straight ahead of you, you see the tall shapes of James Stirling’s Engineering Building, as well as the Arts Tower in the centre of the University of Leicester campus.
Continue straight ahead across the park approaching this part of the campus.
When you reach the campus turn left, making your way past the Arts Tower heading towards the square in front of the university’s centrally situated David Wilson Library.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
As the station is at most a mile from the University of Leicester campus it is very straightforward to retrace your steps either fully or via a different parallel route. It is also a short walk north from the campus into Leicester city centre where the bus station with services to destinations across the county is situated. Alternatively, at the time of writing in November 2024, the 48 bus ran frequently throughout the day from University Road to the city centre bus station.