That's how we roll...

Each city has a unique flavour intrinsic and at times strangely tangible. That flavour is wrapped up in the people, architecture, streets, gardens, homes, and life of the city. You breathe it in and it envelopes you and you become part of it. As a slight synesthesiac, each place I’ve visited is represented not only by this feeling, this flavour, but also by colour.

New York is a fast pulsating cascade of silver with some bright green streaks. Philadelphia is a dripping, meandering brownish red. Amsterdam is the warmest milky cream. Copenhagen is a careless, relaxed yellow-orange. Durham is a smooth flowing deep blue.

Then there is Leicester.

Leicester is a reddish dark grey, heavier on the grey. It’s a bit of a difficult one for me to really describe. It isn’t exuberant like New York, it isn’t relaxed like Copenhagen. It’s a bit confused, as though it isn’t quite sure what it is or what it wants to be. It’s historical, but it’s modern. It’s English, but it’s incredibly diverse. It’s a university city, but it remains an industrial city at heart. What even is Leicester?

I can’t answer that question really. Not yet anyway. Maybe it isn’t a question that ever needs an answer. Though as an academic and researcher, I feel compelled to get to the bottom of this place, to understand it and to know it; to breathe it in and allow it to envelope me and so that I can become a part of it.

As part of this endeavour I decided that it would be good to take in some local entertainment. What is it that people do for fun around here on the weekend? It just so happened that my friend and fellow PhD in arms, Oonagh had an answer.

“Sunday morning at 10:00 you know they’re blowing up the building at the end of New Walk,” she confided over Facebook messenger only a few nights ago. “Want to go watch?”

How could I resist a demolition only three blocks from my flat? Images of the grandest explosions flashed through my mind (my brain is brilliant at escalating reality to the realms of the most absurd hyperbole). The council had the announcement up on their website so that people who wanted to go have a watch would know where the exclusion grounds were and about what time the event would kick off.

“Absolutely,” I typed.

“Great. I’ve got some inside information that it’s going to blow at 10:00am. The website gives some vague window, but I know a guy,” Oonagh confided.

I laughed as I read. We made plans to meet at my flat at 9:45 Sunday morning, and walk down to New Walk to get a good vantage point.

The condemned on its last full day of existence. It was a shockingly beautiful day here and so I went for a walk and decided to capture it one last time before the fall.

Sunday morning rolled around and after having a most excellent (if I do say so myself) tomato basil and cheese omelette and cup of tea, I settled in to tackle some potential articles for my Qualitative Methodology course. I was halfway through a real corker (read: sarcasm) when I looked up and noticed it was already 9:40. I quickly tossed on my boots and coat and sent Oonagh a text. She was running a bit late so I slowly started the walk on my own. I had rounded the corner and began heading past DeMontfort University when I realised the doomed building lay dead ahead. I had never noticed it before on my walks and I laughed to myself to think I certainly wouldn’t ever notice it again.

“Jen!”

I turned around and saw Oonagh half walking half jogging just across the street.

“Hey you made it!” I replied.

We chatted a bit about her morning adventures and decided that we should stay where we were as the view was pretty great. The people of Leicester had come out to witness this most exciting event. Cars had pulled up at the bollards and people with cameras and families lined the walk to get a good view of the proceedings.

It was five to ten and I decided if I was going to get a video, I had better start rolling as timing on these sorts of things is never certain. Then only a minute or so later we heard a BOOM and what felt like thirty seconds after the floors of the building began to collapse in a perfect domino of dust and concrete. It was brilliant. It was probably the most exciting thing I had seen in Leicester. In less than twenty seconds, we were staring at empty sky where once a building had stood. A building I had passed every day since moving to the city.

Sorry for the expletives...it was exciting.

Oonagh and I smiled and with the rest of the voyeurs of Leicester we turned and headed back to our daily lives.

So in this first experiment about understanding the essence of Leicester what has this researcher discovered?

In Leicester, we build things and then we blow them up. That’s entertainment.