Old timey town hall.
So this post is a few months old after the sightseeing involved...but better late than never I guess. While pursuing some hard digging investigative journalism pursuits, I had time to explore some of the sights of Leicester down in, what is known in Scotland, as "Englandshire."
First off let me say that it's a bit of a hellish drive. The Scotland outside Edinburgh and the northern part of England are pretty boring. There's not a whole lot there once go to into and then out of Newcastle. However, once you hit Leeds, the cities come flying at you fast and furious.
In Leicester, the highlight was the Richard III Visitor Center (Centre as they say down there). You might have been forced to read Shakespeare's Richard III in school, but it turns out he was also a real guy.
And he was buried unceremoniously in a car park.
Miss out on your schooling? Here's a bit of Gandalf in a modern take (he's a Nazi, so he's evil - get it?) on Richard III. Yes, that's also Robert Downey, Jr. in there and, as the YouTube comments aptly pointed out, this is the movie where Magneto takes on Iron Man.
To be technical, the car park wasn't there when they buried Richard III. In fact, cars wouldn't be invented for another 400 years. In 1485, it was the grounds of a monastery and it was believed that Richard's body was buried there to keep it safe from no-gooders who wanted to molest it further.
Dude in old timey jail
When I was visiting at the time, they were 99% sure it was Dicky Three. They'd exhumed the skeleton and checked it against the physical description of the king and everything seemed to match up. They even found the hump. As of 2015, they're pretty sure it's him.
There was also a pretty cool English-y looking building in the center of town, kind of like something you'd see in Bard's Tale (1980s reference for the older readers) or Oblivion (for the hip kids of today) complete with - you guessed it - creepy mannequins!