Few people in Leicester these days know the city long ago had three mainline railway stations, including a very grandiose terminus. The old Belgrave Road station opened in 1883 and, back in the day, Leicester folk used to begin their trips to East Coast holiday resorts at the station. But the station’s promoters had got their ideas badly wrong. It […]

“All times are times of transition,” wrote Flora Thompson in the late 1930s, recalling her childhood of the 1880s. I have been reading her well-known book, Lark Rise to Candleford, for the first time, having previously been mildly put off it by what I remember of a likeable but rather sentimentalised adaptation by the BBC. The book itself, with its […]