In 1965 a historian named W. G. Hoskins published a book called The Midland Peasant, a meticulous study of Wigston's social history from the earliest records down to the nineteenth century. Hoskins, one of the founders of modern English local history, chose this particular town because its records were unusually complete and because nothing dramatic had ever happened here. That was the point. Wigston was an ordinary midland village, and Hoskins wanted to know what an ordinary midland village had actually been like for the people who lived in it. The book is still in print. It traces the slow shift from medieval open-field farming to nineteenth-century enclosures, the gradual emergence of a working population that no longer farmed but worked the framework knitting machines in their own cottages, and the eventual subsumption of the village into the suburbs of Leicester. It is a portrait of how an English place becomes itself.

George Davenport was a notorious local highwayman of the eighteenth century who robbed travellers on the road between Leicester and London. Abigail Herrick was born in Wigston in the 1640s and became the mother of Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels and one of the savagest satirists in the English language. Harry Ellis attended Bushloe High School here before becoming the England rugby team's scrum-half. Howard Riley grew up in Wigston and went on to play for Leicester City, scoring the decisive goal in the 1964 League Cup Final. Henry Davis Pochin was born here, made a fortune in manufacturing chemistry, and later bought the Bodnant estate in north Wales whose gardens are now one of the National Trust's most visited. Most strangely, Graham Chapman of Monty Python lived in Wigston police station around 1951 because his father was the police inspector there, and attended South Wigston Junior School before going on to medical training and the surreal comedy that gave the world the Spanish Inquisition sketch.

Framework knitting was the industry that made Leicestershire what it was for two centuries. The frame itself was a complex mechanical apparatus, invented in Calverton in 1589 by William Lee, that could knit stockings far faster than any hand. By the seventeenth century the East Midlands was full of cottage workshops where knitters leased the frames from a hosier, paid weekly rent on them, and turned out stockings, gloves, and undergarments for whatever wages the hosier chose to pay. The system created independent skilled artisans and also made them desperately precarious. Wigston preserved one of these workshops, and it now operates as the Framework Knitting Museum, an institution that explains how stockings were once made by hand from yarn through finished sock, all on a machine designed in Elizabethan England. Hosiery manufacture continued in Wigston long after the hand frames disappeared, sustained by firms with names like Two Steeples, George Deacon and Sons, and the Wigston Co-Operative Hosiers, until the industry largely collapsed in the late twentieth century.

Until 2023 the offices of Oadby and Wigston Borough Council were in Bushloe House, a building started around 1850 and extended around 1880. The extension and most of the interior was designed by Christopher Dresser, one of the first industrial designers in the modern sense, who worked for Hiram Abiff Owston, the building's owner and a local solicitor. Dresser is now studied in design history courses worldwide; he designed silver, ceramics, glass, and furniture in a stripped-down geometric style that anticipated modernism by half a century. Most of his work is in museums. The Wigston house, with its Dresser interiors and furniture, was a quiet provincial example of an internationally significant designer's vocabulary, hiding behind a Victorian solicitor's front door. The council moved out in 2023. What happens to Bushloe House next is one of those choices that English towns make about which fragments of the past to keep.

Like a great many English market towns, Wigston's high street has slowly lost its independents to national chains and supermarkets. By the 2020s, supermarkets and chains accounted for around half the retail in the town centre. In January 2022, W. H. Cox greengrocers on Leicester Road, opposite Bell Street, announced it would close after 134 years of trading. Four generations of Coxes had sold fruit and vegetables in Wigston since 1888. That year, Queen Victoria was on the throne, Jack the Ripper was killing women in Whitechapel, and W. H. Cox first opened his shop. Closing it took the kind of family decision that always feels both inevitable and unbearable. The shop is now gone. The town's population of around 32,000 still buys its produce, mostly at the supermarkets, and the music hall star Gertie Gitana still rests in Wigston cemetery, a celebrity of the early twentieth century who married a local theatrical impresario named Don Ross and ended up here with him.