Walking Leicester’s new Richard III trail – 530 years in the making

21.12.2023 - 11:54 / theguardian.com

Standing on a frozen ridge at Bosworth Field, my feeling is that there are certainly less attractive places to draw one’s last breath. On this frigid December afternoon, I’m looking out at a mist-shrouded hinterland of crisscrossing fields as a milky orange sun sinks behind a distant smudge of cloud. Somewhere out there on that bleak horizon in August 1485, King Richard III died a violent death, made all the more visceral by the gaudy array of spiked weapons hanging on a wall inside the nearby Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024.

It’s one of several upcoming anniversaries related to the last English king to die in battle, and the next morning I’m tackling the new King Richard III Walking Trail around the epicentre of Richard lore, Leicester. After the headline-grabbing discovery of Richard’s skeleton beneath a council car park in Greyfriars in August 2012, Leicester now seems entirely inseparable from the last Plantagenet king, as if a long-lost lover had returned in a blaze of glory after 500 years.

“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack; everyone was surprised when they found him,” says Phil Hackett, manager at the King Richard III Visitor Centre, also celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2024. “The press just went mad and it was an international story.”

Hackett is passionate about bringing Richard’s ever-evolving story to as many visitors as possible in a city that saw tourism numbers jump from 9 million a year to 12.3 million after the events of 2012.

The new trail is a zigzagging loop around the city centre that takes about an hour to walk, stopping at various sites relating to Richard along the way.

We begin at the site of the former Greyfriars Friary, where a charcoal-grey plaque on an elegant Edwardian bank informs us that this is where the king’s mangled body was interred after the Battle of Bosworth Field.

The narrow, gently arcing New Street looks north towards Peacock Lane and perfectly frames the steep spire of Leicester Cathedral between some handsome brick Georgian townhouses. The street also allows a glimpse into the notorious car park that once commanded the attention of the world’s media, and through the drizzle I’m reminded again how amusing it is that the lost king was unearthed somewhere so crushingly mundane.

The rain picks up as Hackett guides me south towards the Magazine, an imposing sandstone gateway built around 1410 under which Richard’s body would probably have passed on horseback after his defeat. It now sits incongruously on the busy Vaughan Way and looks even stranger next to the glassy turquoise frame of De Montford University’s Hugh Aston Building. I’d gawp at it longer, but the rain twinned with the groan of traffic