Lutterworth is a small market town in the south of the country. We started to research its history in 2010, and since then we have had the help of many volunteers, and the town’s history has been the focus of two summer projects run with student volunteers from the University of Leicester who were studying for a degree in history.
It is a fascinating place. As the enter the town a sign proudly proclaims that Lutterworth was ‘the workplace of John Wycliffe and Frank Whittle’. Being near the county boundary, Lutterworth’s medieval market served people from Leicestershire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire. In later centuries it benefited from the coaching trade, and much of the town was rebuilt between 1780 and 1840 from these profits. The local vernacular in this period was very strongly Greek Revival, on a domestic scale. The town declined between 1840 and 1900, as it failed to get a railway station until 1899, but the economy then picked up. There was never a single dominant employment, but foundry work, engineering and textiles were all important.
The research is now nearly complete, and we are writing it up for publication as a paperback. This will be the first Leicestershire market town in the paperback series, and we aim to see this published in 2022.