Thursday, April 07, 2011

The green men of Belgrave

You can no longer get into St Peter's, Belgrave, to see its green men, but it seems they are still to be found in the streets around the church.

The Green Man in the City reminds us that "over a hundred years the Green Man has looked down at us from the lintels above the doors and windows of the terraced houses of Leicester".

And, intriguingly:
Having covered almost all of the city's Victorian small terraced housing I have now found around 150 examples of these faces, just over half of which are Green Men. Almost all are on houses dating from 1888-1900, mostly above ground floor doors and windows, and just under half are on the streets off the Belgrave/Melton Road to the north of the city, the rest being fairly evenly distributed to the south, east, and west.
So you can still find green men in Belgrave. Just don't expect any help from the Church of England.

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