Sunday, April 10, 2016

Filbert Street: Where Leicester City used to play

Take a look at these houses. It looks like just another Victorian terrace in Leicester, apart from the oddly bodged ground floors.

The reason for those is that there used to be a gap here. Until 2002 that gap was the entrance to Leicester City's Filbert Street ground - a wonderful symbol of how professional football used to fit into working-class life.


Go round the corner into Filbert Street itself and you will find the former ground is largely a wasteground. There is, of course, a block of student education - "Filbert Village" - but much of the land remains undeveloped.

It used to be a car park, appreciated by people going to Leicester City's new ground, the nearby King Power Stadium, but the council had it closed.

I am not one to moan about land not being developed for student accommodation, but I would have liked to find more remains of the old ground - perhaps a crumbling terrace colonised by buddleias.

Filbert Street, rather wonderfully, is but one of a number of streets named after nuts. There's Walnut Street, Brazil Street and Hazel Street too.

Lineker Street, which runs across the wasteland, was named after the ground was demolished. At least the graffiti artists seem to have anticipated City's miraculous 2015-16 season.

Thanks to the Leicester Mercury for sending me down to Filbert Street.


1 comment:

Phil Beesley said...

The Leicester Mercury story should alert us to prescriptive rules and unforeseen consequences: it has to be easy and cheap to dispose of household rubbish. Fly tipping occurs because it is too hard for people to dispose of waste legitimately.

Mercury: 'A spokeswoman added that officers would contact the site owners and urge them to remove the abandoned junk piles.'

Stig of the Dump presumably looks after the unabandoned junk piles.

Mercury: 'She said: "The land on the corner of Filbert Street and Lineker Road is privately owned.
"We are in the process of serving a formal notice requiring the owners to tidy the site.
"If they fail to do so, we may take the landowner to court, and/or tidy the land for them and charge the landowners for the cost of the clean-up."

Thus the land owners will potentially be punished twice. Firstly by having rubbish dumped on their land, secondly by a City Council enforcement notice.

And if the land was to be used as a car park, there would be an incentive to keep it clear from rubbish.