"Guaranteed English Trapped Rabbits"

I love ghost signs. The last ones I posted - from Northampton - were hard to read: it was having three of them on the same gable end that made me want to share the photograph.

This one was easier to read, and I hope a little fiddling with the brightness and contrast has made it easier still.

The words "GUARANTEED ENGLISH TRAPPED RABBITS" strengthened my view that in exploring Highfields, Crown Hills and North Evington, which have both become home to a large Muslim community, I was discovering the remnants of a lost civilisation.

Maybe it is snobbery or an exaggerated fear of appearing racist - both faults endemic to the British left - but you rarely hear the question of what happened to the white working class who used to occupy these streets debated.

If you watch the film on slum clearance in Leicester, under which streets in nearby parts of the city were razed, you will hear only the positive side of the procedure. The idea that there might have been good things about the streets that were lost is nowhere mentioned. It is like something our of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe and I did not last till the end when I tried to watch it.

Still, there are ironies here. As I blogged earlier this year:

When I worked in the Highfields of area during the Leicester South by-election of 2004, I was struck by how traditionally English this Muslim area was. There were still corner shops and children playing in the street.

As to the precise location of this ghost sign, that will have to remain a mystery.