Humberstone and Hamilton

The ward takes its name from the historical village of Humberstone and the modern housing estate and ancient Roman and Saxon village of Hamilton. The place-name 'Humberstone' is first attested in the Domesday Book of 1086, where it appears as 'Humerstane'. The name means 'Hunbeorht's stone'.[2] The "Humber stone" is a granite monolith of unknown (perhaps glacial) origin that lies in a field in Hamilton. Until 1750 it had been fully exposed, but was then truncated and the remainder buried by a farmer. In the 1980s it was partially uncovered and made accessible to the public. It was then fenced in when the Leicester north ring road was built and had a sign erected at the site, describing the stone's history.

Hamilton was named after a deserted medieval village in the civil parish of Barkby Thorpe, just outside the Leicester city boundary. The name is being revived for new developments on the A563 road, east of Rushey Mead.[3]

The village of Humberstone has been inhabited for many centuries. Part of the wall around the local St Mary's church is an original cob wall. There is also a thatched cruck cottage dating from a similar time. The oldest parts of the church are the tower and the walls of the chancel,which are medieval. The chancel windows are nineteenth century. The rest of the church was rebuilt in 1857–8 to the designs of Raphael Brandon. Inside he used locally obtained Humberstone alabaster for the carved capitals of the pillars in the nave and other details. The church contains a slab with a picture of a knight incised on it. This was from the tomb of Richard Hotoft who died in 1451.[4]

Most of the houses in Humberstone were built in the 1920s on land that used to be part of the estate of Humberstone Hall. Some of the gardens in the area bear testament to this as they still have parts of the century-old orchard trees in them.

Humberstone was annexed to the city in 1935. In the late 1980s and early 1990s several private gardens were sold to property developers, but a combination of local hostility and a crash in the property market resulted in the land becoming disused. It has since been taken over by the council and converted into a public garden.

The development of Humberstone Garden was based on the principles of the Garden city movement. Garden suburbs modified the principles of garden cities to allow for residential "garden suburbs" without the commercial and industrial components of the garden city. They were built on the outskirts of cities, in rural settings such as Humberstone.

The Humberstone Garden Suburb is notable because it is the only example in which a UK workers cooperative has created a housing cooperative and built a housing estate for its members. The Anchor Tenants Housing Association was formed in 1887 by the workers cooperative of the Anchor Boot and Shoe Co-operative Society which was a cooperatively run boot and shoe works in Asfordby Street, Leicester. The members of the cooperative contributed a percentage of their wages and bought a plot of land just outside Leicester by the village of Humberstone and built 97 houses. The first houses were in use by 1908 and the Anchor employees were let houses by the association at a rent that was collected to cover the upkeep of the properties.[5] The original houses were designed by George Hern in a roughcast cottage style at a density of seven to eight houses an acre. The suburb consists of houses in Lilac Avenue, Laburnum Road, Fern Rise, Chestnut Avenue and a part of Keyham Lane. The names of the new streets were chosen to emphasise the garden nature of the scheme.[6]