Qualla: Wigston

Wigston: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wigstan was a Mercian prince, the grandson of two kings and the heir to a third, when he was assassinated in 849 by a relative who wanted his mother for a wife. The English saint who emerged from this murder, venerated as a martyr, made several posthumous journeys before settling in Evesham. One of the stops on that journey was a small Leicestershire village that took his name and kept it across eleven centuries. The town has since been called Wichingstone, Wigston Magna, and now mostly just Wigston. In the Middle Ages it was called Wigston Two Spires, because it had two medieval churches at a time when neighbouring villages were lucky to have one. Both still stand, four miles south of Leicester, and the older of them remembers a murdered prince whose name they share.

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Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wigston: The Midland Peasant

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. 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 b...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Wigston: The Highwayman, Jonathan Swift's Mother, and the Bass Player

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Craigy (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 sa...

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Image: Craigy (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wigston: The Framework Knitters' Museum

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clive Cartwright, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 M...

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Image: Clive Cartwright | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wigston: Bushloe House and a Designer's Mind

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 w...

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Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wigston: A 134-Year Greengrocer Closes

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0