Leicester found its most famous figure under a car park.
Five centuries after his death, the bones of Richard III were uncovered beneath tarmac and paint markings – an English king reduced to an inconvenience in a city that had forgotten it had buried him. When the discovery was finally made, it was packaged as a curiosity and a triumph of archaeology.
But perhaps it should have been recognised as something else entirely: a metaphor for how the city has too often dealt with uncomfortable truths by covering them.
Leicester presents itself as untroubled: diverse, modern, quietly successful. But underneath the slogans is a city transformed faster than its institutions, politics, and communities were ever prepared to handle.
