We recently decided to have a bit of fun here in the Uplift Digital office, and had the idea to try and create something completely new and interesting.

If you live or work in Leicester, or have just been unfortunate enough to be stuck on the inner ring road, then you’ll know there’s a lot going on in terms of road works. Because of this, we thought it would be a good creative exercise to get our thinking caps on and try to imagine what a tram network in Leicester might look like.

We teamed up with our friends at Leicester design agency Studio Rokit to create this Leicester tram map (click the image to see a bigger version):

The first decision we had to make was what to call each of the different lines.

After much debate, we settled on the King Richard III line for the central looping line – both because the late king is quite topical in Leicester at the minute, and because the line covers a lot of the ‘Castle Ward’ of Leicester where Richard III was found and where his remains now lay in Leicester Cathedral.

The Soar and Fosse lines are named quite simply – much of the Soar line follows the River Soar through Leicester city centre, and the Fosse line links the East of Leicester and the city centre with Fosse Retail Park.

For the remaining line, we decided to use the name of an important and influential Leicester figure. Many names were suggested, including Gary Lineker and Englebert Humperdink, but we eventually settled on the Attenborough line.

We would be interested to see what names you might give the lines of a Leicester tram map – so feel free to make suggestions in the comments at the bottom.

The next, much harder, step, was choosing what landmarks should be the tram stops and organising them into each particular line.

We first of all came up with the ‘outside’ stops, and made sure there was a tram stop in every corner of Leicester.

We also wanted to make sure that each of these stops on the outside of Leicester would require just one tram to get into the centre of Leicester, and no more than one tram change to get to the other side of Leicester – e.g. from Oadby to Beaumont Leys Shopping Centre.

We think we’ve done a pretty good job – and we had a lot of fun putting it together.

What do you think? Is there anything you would change about the tram map? Or something obvious we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments below…