Thomas Cook's Leicester home

We have seen the statue of Thomas Cook near Leicester station and the plaques to him in Market Harborough and Kibworth.

Since then a reader has told me of another plaque in Barrowden in Rutland, and there is a significant building in Leicester with Cook connections that is under threat. I shall show you that one day soon.

In the mean time, here is Thorncroft, the house in London Road, Leicester, where Thomas Cook lived with his wife Marianne towards the end of his life. It is now the headquarters of the county's Red Cross.

There is a tragedy associated with the house. On 7 November 1880 Cook found his only daughter, Annie Elizabeth, dead in her bath. She was 34 and had died from inhaling carbon monoxide poisoning from one of the first gas water heaters to be installed in a house in Leicester.