The essay describes the development of the West End of Leicester from 1860 to 1900, and sets this
against local and national contexts.CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT IN
THE WEST END, LEICESTER
FROM 1881
Sharon North
MANUFACTURING PASTS
www.le.ac.uk/manufacturingpasts
Sharon North, University of Leicester
This essay is part of the Manufacturing Pasts collection of open-access learning
materials, available for download at
http://www.le.ac.uk/manufacturingpasts
Front page photo: Bruanstone Gate Leicester c. 1983 by chrisdpyrah, Flickr
1953 Ordnance Survey: Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland
on MyLeicestershire.org
Opposite: Westcotes Latimer St. Leicester 1988 by chrisdpyrah, Flickr
CHANGE AND
DEVELOPMENT IN THE
WEST END, LEICESTER
FROM 1881
Prior to 1881 there was little development along the Narbor-ough
Road, south of Braunstone Gate. The following essay de-scribes
the development of the area from 1860 to 1900, sets this
against local and national contexts and tests this against the ‘sub-urbanisation’
theme covered on the ‘Victorian Cities’ module.
F.M.L. Thompson wrote in ‘The Rise of Suburbia’;
‘The nineteenth-century surburban dream was a middle-class
dream; the nineteenth-century surburban reality was a social
patchwork’ (Thompson 1982).
His article gives an overview of contemporaneous research on
suburbs. In it he describes the complex layers that determine
how and what sort of suburb is created. Thompson twists and
turns through the accepted theories of surburbanisation, draw-ing
on examples to demonstrate that there is no single explana-tion
for the creation of suburbs. He suggests that each suburb is
a unique creation attributable to a differing mix of common fea-tures
and occurrences. Furthermore he goes on to dispel the ac-cepted
myth of a suburb as a single class entity;
1953 ORDNANCE MAP FEATURING
WEST BRIDGE OVER RIVER SOAR
from myleicestershire.org
2
Change and development in
the West End, Leicester
from 1881
’The creation of a single class suburb was an illusion. In part
this conclusion is an effect of the boundaries which are cho-sen
to define the area of an individual suburb’ (Thompson
1982)
This article began to answer some of the questions I had
struggled with when researching the development of the
West End in Leicester. In the early days of my research the
social mix of the area and the pattern its development had
taken confused me. Based on previous reading I perceived
that there would be clear and obvious reasons for the develop-ment
of this suburb, neatly replicating the ‘five important in-fluences’
described by H. J. Dyos in ‘Victorian Suburb’. I also
had a mental image of a single class suburb of the type de-scribed
by Rodger in ‘Slums and suburbs’, an idyllic setting
of ‘semi-detached villas and enclosed gardens’ that ‘inocu-lated
its middle-class residents against the harsh realities of
downtown life’.
I have attempted to work through theories presented by both
Dyos (in his work on the development of Camberwell 1961)
and Thompson (in his overview of research on suburbs in
1982) and blend this with the evidence I have found in my re-search
to piece together the economic, social, geographical
and political elements at play that have created the West End
suburb. Taking a lead from Thompson, I have, for the pur-pose
of the following narrative, defined the boundaries of
this suburb myself, to include the an area formerly known as
the Westcotes Estates. It is bounded by the Hinckley Road to
the north, Narborough Road to the east, the Burton-
Leicester Railway Line to the south and Fosse Road to the
west.
The ‘conditions of development’ described by Dyos are
demographic (population growth); increasing ability and will-ingness
of people to increase their journey to work and for
businesses to move into the suburbs; the availability of capital
to finance the suburbs; the quest for social exclusiveness, and
finally; the force of local circumstances affecting develop-ment
and land ownership (Dyos 1961).
The ‘suburb’ I have focussed on is on the west side of the
River Soar and the ‘local circumstances’ which apply are
those which explain why development of the area in question
started later than in other parts of the city. Expansion of the
city of Leicester outside the historic city boundaries was not
really an issue until 1840. Up to this time urban density sim-ply
increased with infilling (Pritchard 1976). In 1841 the
population of Leicester was just under 50,000. This is signifi-cant
as Thompson notes;
‘..by mid-century it is likely that every place with more than
50,000 inhabitants thought of itself as possessing some sub-urbs’
(Thompson 1982).
When from 1840 the city needed to expand it was held back
by the river to the west. Access was limited although Braun-stone
Gate had been a feature on maps since 1722 as an en-trance
to the city. By the mid nineteenth century this area
supported a number of residential properties, shops and
workshops. Simmons described its hinterland thus;
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‘….the Bow Bridge Mills in the 1820s, West Bridge Mills
about 1848; and in the fifties a few houses followed along the
Hinckley Road and Watts Causeway, renamed King Richards
Road. But the total area built up was small’. (Simmons 1974)
The river crossing at West Bridge was described as ‘inconven-ient,
unsafe and a contributing cause of periodic flooding’ (El-liot
1979) prior to its improvement in 1841. The more intrac-table
problem of flooding brought not only its share of mis-ery
to local residents but contributed to death and disease in
the city. The flood prevention scheme began in 1876 and saw
the widening and deepening of the river, cutting of a new
mile long channel and rebuilding of West Bridge once more
in 1891 (Simmons 1974). Along with the new sewerage sys-tem,
this represented a great leap forward in terms of im-proved
health and sanitation of the city. For the area west of
the river it loosened the stranglehold of poor access enabling
factories and commercial enterprises to open up along the
Soar Valley. These were close to distribution routes provided
by the canal and the Swannington railway that had opened
in 1832 to bring coal to the area around the mills and
wharves further to the northeast. The improvements were to
pave the way for the opening of Great Central Railway in
the valley creating employment but requiring the clearance
of much working class housing in the area.
There were other factors that held back development and ex-pansion
into this area, particularly concerning land owner-ship.
In the mid nineteenth century the land to the north of
King Richards Road was owned by Danet’s Hall estate. This
was sold in 1861 and bought by the Leicester Freehold Land
Society (Simmons 1974). However, lack of local controls and
regulations lead to plans for the ‘respectable’ development of
the estate land soon to be thwarted;
‘The ample gardens thus provided for were soon, however,
crammed in many cases with an intervening row of cottages,
with no road frontage, and approached only through passage-ways
built into rows of houses facing onto the street’ (Elliot
1979 p117).
4
Wooden lifting bridge which carried the Leicester and Swanning Rail-way
over West Bridge. Photo c1980s by Ned Trifle on Flickr
The Westcotes Estate had formerly been the home of the
Ruding family but was bought in 1843 by Joseph Harris, a so-licitor
from Worthington. The William and Mary mansion
house, ‘Westcotes’, situated close to the junction of Hinckley
Road, Narborough Road and Braunstone Gate was the only
significant building on the estate at this time. These being the
‘local circumstances’, the issue to be addressed is what impact
Dyos’s four other ‘important influences’ had on the develop-ment
of this area over the next 60 years?
Dyos describes population growth as ‘the first and most fun-damental
stimulus to suburban development’. Dyos was de-scribing
circumstances peculiar to London, which can be-cause
of its size and organically different setting be described
as sui generis. Provincial towns and cities across the country
were, however, experiencing similar growth, albeit at differ-ing
times and for differing reasons. In Leicester this growth
has been well documented. The population increased rapidly
in the period from 1861 to 1901 and in percentage terms
most markedly at the beginning of this period in the 1860s
(Simmons 1974). This was largely due to the rapid expansion
of the boot and shoe industry and industrialisation of hosiery
manufacture. Many immigrants to the city came from the sur-rounding
countryside and specifically from Northampton
and Coventry. Pritchard shows in his study of the spatial
structure of the city that in the 1870s the area immediately to
the north of Westcotes Estate was expanding rapidly in terms
of new housing and that there was also a relatively large pro-portion
of immigrants to the city in this area. Some of this
growth could no doubt attributed to the development of the
Danet’s Hall estate land. Census records from 1881 of Braun-stone
Gate provide evidence of this expansion with 41 per-cent
(152 of 374) residents in the street recorded as being
born outside the city. 25 per cent of residents were employed
directly in the shoe, hosiery and worsted yarntrades. How-ever,
to what extent this expansion can be described as subur-ban
is debatable. It seems more appropriate to use Thomp-son’s
description;
5
Braunstone Gate, 9 March 2003. Photo by Colin Hyde on
myleicestershire.org
‘..lateral expansion by simple accretion at the town edges of
buildings and street patterns that reproduced and continued
with the character of the established town, in new quarters
with mixed residential, commercial, and industrial functions,
and with intermixed residents from different social classes’
(Thompson 1982).
As noted previously, Leicester had reached the threshold
point at which a city needs to break out into suburbs back in
1841. In the 1860s, Stoneygate on the other side of the city
was already emerging as a:
‘..truly suburban location, physically distinct from the main
mass of the city’ (Pritchard 1976).
At this point in time development of the Westcotes Estate
had hardly begun. In 1867, West Leigh was built at the south
east corner of the estate (on the Narborough Road and close
to the railway line) for Archibald Turner, owner of the elastic
web factory on King Richards Road. In the mid 1870s Sub-stantial
new homes were built for the expanding Harris fam-ily
- Westcotes Grange and Lodge and a few years later, Syke-field,
on higher ground further away from the Narborough
Road. This indicates that this family, three generations of so-licitors
and two of clergymen, were making plans to stay
along with many newer immigrants to the city from both the
middle and working classes.
In Camberwell, Dyos noted that the second stimulus to subur-ban
development ‘..came,as it did elsewhere from improved
transport facilities’ (Dyos 1961).
Alongside ‘West Leigh’, the first group of houses appeared in
the 1870s at the southern end of the estate. These are de-scribed
by the City Council, in the Supplementary Planning
Guidance for Ashleigh Road Conservation area as;
‘..built for the rising middle classes’ with ‘robustly detailed fa-cades
reflecting their owners’ wealth and aspirations’. There
is no record of omnibus services along the Narborough Road
until close to the end of the century. Residents of these prop-erties
would have had to make their own way to work by pri-vate
or hired carriage. Indeed the Planning Guidance goes
on further to note that there is evidence of ‘provision of
some coach houses and stables’. The walk into the city centre
would have been approximately a mile past fields and or-chards
along the Narborough Road (an old roman road). The
outskirts of the city were nearer by about half a mile at
Hinckley Road and Braunstone Gate. Working class residents
here could walk to work in the local mills and factories at
Bow Bridge and near the Swannington Station. The presence
of this residential housing created demand for local retail fa-cilities
at the time concentrated along Braunstone Gate.
Premises featured in the 1881 census and Kellys’ directories
include greengrocers, dressmakers, bakers, confectioners, fish-mongers,
butchers and even a bicycle agent. This would have
in itself created a source of employment and have reduced
the need for local residents to travel into the city for retail pur-poses.
For those with jobs and business to attend to in the city
this was, at less than a mile away, within walking distance.
Horse drawn omnibus services began running along the
Hinckley Road on their way to Fosse Road in the 1880s. How-
6
ever this form of mass transport (if it can be called mass
transport) did not feature on Narborough Road until the very
end of the nineteenth century (Kellys Directories). While
transport may have had an impact in Dyos’s Camberwell, it
appears not to be the case here. Thompsons’ explanation
would appear to have more prevalence;
‘New transport ventures are rather more likely to be designed
to cater for an established traffic than to create an entirely
new one, even though once operating they have great poten-tial
for stimulating large increases’ (Thompson 1982).
From Kelly’s directories it can be seen that there are at the
same time a number of services running from the Clock
Tower to other parts of the city. There were plenty of compa-nies
already in operation who could run their services into
the West End when they perceived it was profitable to do so.
If improved transport did facilitate the development of this
‘suburb’ then it was by attracting business to the area rather
than transporting people to and from their place of work. It
has been noted that improvements to West Bridge and the
River Soar improved access but also provided new locations
for factories and warehouses.
There is a parallel here with Dyos’ observations in Camber-well;
‘It is more than probable for example, that one contribution
of the Grand Surrey Canal to the suburban development was
to confer special advantages on the factories, timber yards,
coal wharves, and miscellaneous businesses which congre-gated
its banks, and that their need to workers led to the
populating of the neighbourhood’ (Dyos 1961).
The occupation data from the Braunstone Gate census re-turn
of 1881 would appear to support this theory, with a high
percentage of residents involved in the hosiery and shoe
trades which were expanding in this area. The ‘Age of build-ings’
map produced by the City Council Urban Design team
shows that from the time of the completion of flood preven-tion
scheme and widening of West Bridge, factories and ware-houses
were being built along the River Soar.
7
Bow Bridge, 2005. Photo by Alun Salt on Flickr
In conclusion it is difficult to be clear about the impact that
transport had, as Dyos states;
‘..it is seldom possible to identify with certainty the precise
contribution of such transport facilities to the development
of particular neighbourhoods because there is no way of dis-criminating
accurately between contemporaneous influences
on suburban development which were not recorded at the
time in some reliable statistical form’ (Dyos 1961).
Dyos describes the rate of development of suburbs as being
‘powerfully influenced by the availability of capital with
which to finance the process’. This theory is based on simple
economics; houses will only be built when there is available
capital to supply them at a profit and the demand to buy
them. If a major programme of commercial building is
needed, with the potential of a higher profit, then it will be at
the expense of house building. The pattern of house building
in the West End suburb follows three distinct phases. From
mid 1860s to the end of 1870s, house building is limited to a
small number of upper middle and middle class houses for
the Harris family, Archibald Turner at West Leigh and a
smattering of Houses in Westleigh Road. Westcotes Drive
was developed with middle class houses very slowly from the
mid 1880s to after the turn of the century. The next signifi-cant
period of house building in the area is from 1885 to
1895 with terraces of flat fronted houses opening onto streets
which themselves open onto Hinckley Road at the very north-ern
end of the estate. From 1900, Upperton Road and ter-races
of bay fronted houses, between here and Westcotes
Drive are built. This follows the fluctuations in new house
building in Leicester noted by Pritchard;
‘In the early 1870s, there was a high level of activity, followed
by a slump in the 1880s, a recovery to a very high peak in the
year around the turn of the century, again followed by a re-cession
which continued through the First World War’ (Prit-chard
1976)
Pritchard’s research also shows the number of empty houses
in each year over the period as a means of demonstrating the
relationship between supply and demand. This appears to in-dicate
that supply exceeded demand. Working class tenants
might therefore have had the option of moving out of less sat-isfactory
accommodation in the centre. It is likely that the
equilibrium of the housing market shifted resulting in re-duced
rents and higher incomes due to the economy boom-ing.
This would have influenced supply (due to availability of
capital) and changed the nature of property demand. Prit-chard
remarks that, ‘the peak year for new construction was
1898-9’, and only from this point did the rate of empty
houses begin to rise. In effect to this point, supply, estimated
by Pritchard to be at a 20% increase from 1896 to 1900,
more than kept up with increased demand (Pritchard 1976).
Despite apparent oversupply, housing must still have repre-sented
a good investment of capital. It must be assumed
there was plenty of new money in Leicester made by entre-preneurs
in the hosiery boot and shoe and engineering indus-tries.
It was an economically vibrant city with the corpora-tion
putting money into public works and its residents were
8
largely enjoying steady employment. There was also a higher
than national average number of women also in work contrib-uting
to household incomes (Pritchard 1976).
In addition, mechanisms were being put in place to mobilise
the capital that was available. Pritchard notes that;
‘What became much more common in the last years of the
century were partnerships and companies’ (Pritchard 1976).
By 1900 in the West End Joseph, William and Henry Harris,
grandsons of Joseph Harris had set up a limited company
known as the ‘Westcotes Estate’ and had sold land for build-ing
in small plots. William Harris has been credited with
‘planning, developing and improving a large part of the West
End of the City’ (martyrs.org 2002). There were also lots of
small building firms ready and willing to take on the work. It
is known of Leicester building firms that;
‘in the second half of the nineteenth century, 70 per cent of
house building was in projects of five or fewer units.’ (Rodger
1993).
This is borne out by walking the streets of the West End and
looking at the detail on the houses. Even in apparently homo-geneous
streets there are often subtle differences between
small groups of houses. Houses in Westleigh and Ashleigh
Roads are built in pairs, threes or fours. In the rapidly built
terraces of the ‘Martyrs’ (Cranmer, Tyndall etc) there are
longer runs of houses clearly erected by the same firm but
they never extend to the whole street. The building industry
was buoyant and there was lots of competition, ‘The number
of men employed in the building trades more than doubled
in 1861-1881’ (Simmons 1974) and Kellys’ and Wrights direc-tories
of the time have column inches of builders and crafts-men
in their lists. The availability of capital is clearly signifi-cant
here, as is equally the ability of the economy to respond
by having the organisations in place to mobilise the capital,
plan the development and build the houses.
What motivated the Harris family to sell their estate is un-known.
What seems evident is that with their history of phil-anthropic
works and close links with the church (endowing
the Westcotes library in 1899, the Church of the Martyrs in
1890 and its vicarage some years later), they took an active
interest in the sale and development of their estate. Dyos
notes that;
‘In the course of the nineteenth century,too, more and more
manuals and handbooks were being written by surveyors and
barristers to indicate the pitfalls and the opportunities of sub-urban
estate development’. (Dyos 1961).
There would have been plenty of advice and information
available to the Harris’s, in the social circles they kept, to en-sure
they made the most prudent and socially responsible use
of land they inherited from their grandfather. Some of them
were solicitors and indeed, Henry Harris was the Chairman
of Directors of the first Garden City at Letchworth. It has to
be assumed that profit was one of their motives. Yelling de-scribes
how in Leeds, it was more profitable at the time to sell
freehold plots directly to developers;
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‘The Brown Estate trustees selling freehold plots directly to
builders achieved higher prices over the period 1883-1902 of
£992 per acre’, while ‘Estates which sold land for subdivision
to developers in the same period achieved rather less than
half this price’ (Yelling 2000).
There is evidence from the conveyance of land at Ashleigh
Road in 1900 that similar freehold transactions are taking
place on the Westcotes Estates land. There are indicators that
the Harris’s had significant influence; Street names reflect
their faith (e.g. Martyrs streets; Luther, Tyndall, Cranmer)
and their family connections (e.g. Barclay). Conveyances
have restrictive covenants covering buildings, fences and the
laying of sewerage pipes. The sale of beer and liquor is also
re
