South Wigston is a late Victorian ‘suburban village’, created in the 1880s from bare fields alongside a railway junction 4 miles south of Leicester, by brick manufacturer and builder Orson Wright. It forms part of the civil parish of Glen Parva and South Wigston.
All the places of worship are in South Wigston village, and include St Thomas’s Anglican church, built in 1893 to replace a mission hall of 1886.
A Congregational chapel was built in 1886 on Blaby Road, with 400 sittings.[1] A Wesleyan chapel also stood on Blaby Road by 1895, and there was a ‘Christian meeting house’ in Canal Street.[2] By 1916 a further Methodist chapel had been added, on Countesthorpe Road.[3]
In 2015 there are Congregational, Methodist and United Reformed Churches in South Wigston.
Notes
[1] Kelly’s Dir. Leics (1916), p. 85
[2] Kelly’s Dir. Leics (1895), p. 76
[3] Kelly’s Dir. Leics (1916), p. 85