Qualla: King Richard III Visitor Centre

King Richard III Visitor Centre: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harold9595959, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most museums about kings are built somewhere else and the king is shipped in. This one is built where the king actually was. You walk through a Victorian school - red brick, tall sash windows, the kind of building Leicester has plenty of - and the route bends, the ceiling drops, and you find yourself looking down through a glass floor at a rectangle of plain earth. A projector throws the outline of a skeleton onto the dirt: head twisted slightly to one side because the medieval friary's grave was too short and the gravediggers had not bothered to dig a longer one. This is where the bones of Richard III lay between August 1485 and August 2012. Five hundred and twenty-seven summers of being walked over without anyone knowing. The Alderman Newton's School, decommissioned and ready for demolition before the dig, instead became the unlikely architectural envelope for one of the most specific museum experiences in Britain.

Image: Harold9595959 | CC BY-SA 4.0

King Richard III Visitor Centre: A School That Was Almost Demolished

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0. Alderman Newton's School sat next door to the Social Services car park where Philippa Langley and the Richard III Society had pushed for the excavation in 2012. The building was Victorian, no-frills, and structurally unremarkable - a state school of the kind built in industrial c...

Image: Richard Croft | CC BY-SA 2.0

King Richard III Visitor Centre: The Grave Room

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. The journey through the centre is structured to delay the moment you see the grave. You move first through galleries about Richard's life - his Yorkist upbringing, his brother Edward IV's reign, the disputed events of 1483 when he took the throne, the controversies that have foll...

Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0

King Richard III Visitor Centre: Curatorial Choices and the Question of Richard

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. Five and a half centuries is a long time to argue about a man. Was Richard III the murderous usurper of Shakespeare's history play, the man who almost certainly arranged the deaths of his two young nephews in the Tower? Or was he the conscientious northern administrator and refor...

Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0

King Richard III Visitor Centre: What the Building Does with Memory

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. The site is now a scheduled monument; in December 2017, Historic England formally scheduled a significant part of the former Greyfriars friary, recognising the archaeological potential even though the medieval buildings themselves have long been gone. The visitor centre's adjacen...

Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0