Leicester was eviscerated in the 1960s by modernist town planners. They scythed through the medieval core of the city with two inner ring-roads, and multi-lane highways were built to provide fast access to the M1 motorway. The city, like many others, became dominated by cars: congested despite the width of the radial roads and dangerous for anybody not protected by a metal cage. Leicester was once a great English medieval city, like York, Durham or Lincoln. It has many Grade I listed buildings and, with the Jewry Wall, one of the tallest Roman structures still standing in Britain. But with its history smothered in tarmac and blocked off with concrete, Leicester became unremarkable, anodyne, an East Midlands city far from the tourist trail.

This changed three years ago thanks to Leicester’s oldest economically active citizen. Dug up from beneath a council car park, King Richard III is now a welcome and valuable tourist attraction, known to locals as KRIII. Leicester is using the remains and the romance of the last Plantagenet king to push for cycleways and more pedestrianisation in the city centre, trimming some of the space previously devoted to cars. Much of the city’s transformation was planned before the timely reappearance of KRIII, but deposing King Car is much easier when you’ve got a real one to put in its place.

The Belgrave flyover, which was demolished last year. Photograph: The Story of Leicester

There’s a new Richard-themed walking route linking many of Leicester’s medieval buildings, some of which had been obscured by multi-lane highways since the 1960s but, thanks to road remodelling, are now accessible again.

Over the last 10 years, Leicester’s new breed of town planners have been slowly reclaiming the city for people by nibbling away at the space dedicated to motorists.

The city mayor is accountable to the electorate – this means you can take bold decisions. As a council leader, you can’t Sir Peter Soulsby

This nibbling – known by transport wonks as the “reallocation of road space” – is far from finished, but before-and-after photographs displayed at public consultations for the Connecting Leicester urban plan show that designing cities for cars results in an excess of vehicles. Leicester’s fight back includes narrowing a four-lane gyratory, with the fourth lane converted into wider pavements and bike paths. A flyover close to the city centre was demolished in 2014. The elevated highways that long hemmed in a 15th-century gatehouse – the Magazine – were removed some years ago, and have not been mourned.

“This walkway used to be one of the ramps up to the road that passed the Magazine,” says Andy Salkeld, Leicester Council’s cycling coordinator, as we walk along a packed pedestrian plaza. Opposite, a short stretch of low white wall, emblazoned with “Welcome to De Montfort University”, is the only other remnant of the former gyratory. It had been part of the retaining barrier along what had been in effect an urban motorway.

Nibbler-in-chief is Sir Peter Soulsby, Leicester’s first elected mayor. A former member of Leicester Spokes, a 1980s cycle campaign group, Soulsby started putting the city on a “road diet” soon after he was elected in 2011. Connecting Leicester is his plan – initially wheeled out in 2012 – and it aims to tame the car. The plan was boosted by his re-election in May 2015, two months after he had been so prominent in the successful campaign to bury King Richard in Leicester cathedral. Opponents of Connecting Leicester stress they’re all for the Richardisation of the city, but they label the mayor as “anti-car”.

Leicester’s first elected mayor Sir Peter Soulsby

Speaking from his expansive and airy office in the City Hall, the mayor says he is proud of Leicester’s wider pavements and the new stretches of city-centre cycleways. Newarke Street, once one of the city’s most important and historic thoroughfares, was carved up for cars in the 1960s, and became a racetrack in all but name. Now one lane has been taken from motorists and handed over to people on bikes.

“The changes we’re making are transforming Leicester into a much more liveable place,” said Soulsby. “At the beginning, there was a considerable amount of scepticism and even hostility. Taking out a whole lane of traffic in order to build a cycle lane was described as something that nobody would use, that it would create nothing but chaos for the remaining traffic, and that it didn’t lead anywhere. Each objection proved to be wrong.

“Now it does make connections, and it hasn’t led to chaos. We’ve found that just as many cars can get along the road as before, but now they don’t speed between the traffic lights, and the cyclists and pedestrians get a comfortable and safe route that didn’t exist before.”

We have a major problem with air quality. We can’t have cars idling on the roads Shopkeeper Dayle Flude

If Dayle Flude were mayor, she’d rip out Soulsby’s bike lane. “I’d take the cycle path out on Newarke Street – I’d put the motor lane back in and I’d send the cyclists down little lanes,” she told me from inside her framing and art shop in the medieval core of the city. “Traffic needs to be kept moving.”

She lives 23 miles away, commutes to the Cank Street Gallery in the shop’s van, and blames the recent “road reallocations” for a build-up of noxious fumes, because with less space for cars, they have to idle at traffic lights instead of motoring through at speed.

“We need our customers to be able to get to us easy and efficiently,” she told me, as a customer double-parked, calling in for a framed artwork. “We have a major problem with air quality. We can’t have cars idling on the roads.”

Talking about the council, she said: “They’ve reduced the capacity on the ring road. They’ve taken down a complete flyover. They have narrowed major junctions coming in from the M1 which is causing hold-ups. One cycle experiment was just bonkers.” Flude claims the support of 360 other retailers.

Traffic calming measures on Worthington Street. Photograph: Carlton Reid

“Peter Soulsby is doing a lot of good things for the city but he’s too anti-car,” she says. “It’s not the business community that voted him in.”

Perhaps not, but with a thumping majority, Soulsby has the mandate to transform the city, and he’s able to use his power in a way he couldn’t when he was the city’s council leader, or the MP for the city (a position he gave up when he first ran for mayor).

“The position of city mayor is accountable to the electorate,” he stresses. “This means you can take bold decisions. As a council leader, you can’t. I know that because I was the council leader for 17 years. Mayors know they’re going to get a kicking if their decisions don’t work – my accountability is at the ballot box.”

A survey found that 18% of people travelled to the shops by car, 42% walked, 28% cycled and 9% took the bus

The Conservative government is very much in favour of city mayors and localism of all kinds, so there’s little chance that Soulsby will have his wings clipped nationally, but that’s now Flude’s last remaining hope.

“All we can do is petition central government not to give him any more money for what he’s doing to the business community,” says Flude.

When I ask her how customers travel to her shop, she says she doesn’t know. But there is evidence that, as is common in other cities, the use of cars is nowhere near as prevalent as retailers tend to think. In Leicester, a survey carried out for the council in 2014 found that 18% of people travelled to the shops by car. The majority – 42% – walked, 28% cycled, and 9% took the bus. Further support for Connecting Leicester was provided in a survey by the Department for Transport. It asked 57 businesses what they thought of the reallocation of road space on Newarke Street – 14% reported they had benefitted from more custom, and very few reported less custom.

Soulsby says Connecting Leicester, importantly, has the support of the local newspaper. “The Leicester Mercury has been supportive of the changes we’ve made to the public realm. I think the business community recognises that Leicester is a better place today than it was before.”

Cycling is permitted in pedestrianised areas of the city. Photograph: Carlton Reid

Many of the changes are being rolled out in the name of the car park king: thanks to KRIII, the city has a brand, a reason to visit.

Many of Leicester’s nationally significant buildings, including the timber-framed Guildhall and the 12th-century church of St Mary de Castro, would have been familiar to the king, but were marooned in the 1960s and 70s. The Grade I listed Magazine was originally a gate into Leicester’s medieval fortifications, and King Richard III rode beneath the gateway’s arch when departing for his final battle. It’s likely his mutilated body returned this way, too, before being hastily buried in the Greyfriars Priory, a church demolished in the Reformation, later capped with buildings – and, eventually, the famous car park. (Richard’s grave is now the centrepiece of a new visitor’s centre.)

Leicester’s medieval core was sliced and diced by the Leicester Transport Plan of 1964, largely the work of Polish town planner Konrad Smigielski. He claimed his plan was the first to “Say ‘no’ to the motor car scientifically”, but, when it was put into action, it instead resulted in ring roads, underpasses, flyovers and multi-storey car parks. (According to Soulsby, this concreting of Leicester was tantamount to “vandalism”.)

Smigielski’s original plan for Leicester had included a monorail and a labyrinth of aerial walkways for pedestrians. The monorail stayed a black and white line drawing, but there were some pedestrian skyways erected over high-speed city centre gyratories. One of them, the little used Harvey Walk footbridge, is in the process of being been dismantled. Like much of the car-centric infrastructure that’s already been removed, my guess is that most people won’t miss it.

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