Local History

One man in Leicester in on a one man crusade to preserve some of Leicester's remaining history.

The Gaiety theatre, popularly known as the the Hippodrome, is where the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick made his first stage appearance.

The building on Wharf Street was demolished to make way for flats, but the company behind the work have managed to salvage the dark coloured frieze from the top of the building.

Listen: The Tile Rescuer

BBC Radio Leicester's Khush Sameja spoke to William Eyre, who runs the salvage yard Lost World in the city, to find out why he's doing this...

The company rescued 150 bricks and tiles all together - they know this as each of the hand made blocks have been numbered by the maker.

William hopes that a developer might buy them up and incorporate the tiles back into the city.

"This would've been in a landfill. While I'm alive it's not going to happen."

William feels it's everyone's responsibility to take note of, care for and remember the history of Leicester:

"Once it's gone, it's gone. We're a fast moving world of young people that 99 per cent doesn't really care about this.

"A lot of people wouldn't think there's hardly any architecture in this but Wharf Street is a really old street and it deserves to be preserved."

"A lot of people don't walk around looking up. We have got some fantastic architecture that still needs looking at and we need to preserve it by folks like myself dismantling it, reusing it, and just giving it a bit of thought."

Listen: Interview with Richard Gill

BBC Leicester's Ben Jackson spoke to local historian Richard Gill about the significance of the theatre and its demolition...

Richard believes the destruction of the Gaiety Theatre is very sad as it is one of the last old entertainment venues in the city.

"On the whole we, and I mean that as a nation not just Leicester, aren't really very good at passing on to rising generations the sense of what we have inherited in bricks and mortar.

"Increasingly people are coming to Leicester on Thomas Cook tourist trails seeing where this, the most now important global industry came from, and we are kinieving in its will for destruction. It's lunacy."

He commented that Leicester now only has a few links left now to Joseph Merrick, who became known as The Elephant Man because of severe physical deformity.

Joseph was born in Lees Street, which is now roughly where Lees Circle rests, and had stints at a Leicester workhouse before starting his stage show career at the theatre.

Richard described William Eyre's salvage if the elaborate Victorian tiles linked to so much history as "heroic".

"You can't keep everything but the kind of mental health of cities I think relies upon there being a visual reminder of its own history."