A lost frontier revealed: regional separation in the east midlands - By Alan Fox
The ‘holy grail’ for academic local historians over the past 50 or so years has been the search for regions, a search conducted partly out of genuine interest, partly as a parallel to regional geography, and partly from motives of self-preservation resulting from fears that ‘local history’ conveyed the impression of being parochial and antiquarian. W. G. Hoskins, for whom the Department of English Local History at Leicester University was set up after the Second World War, was unashamedly a parish historian, notably demonstrated through his important study of Wigston Magna, Leicestershire, The Midland Peasant (reprinted in 2009 by Carnegie), but he was not an antiquarian. Hoskins believed in seeing the study of the individual parish as throwing light on wider patterns of change in communities well beyond the borders of his chosen village. In his wake came a number of Leicester-based scholars, most recently Charles PhythianAdams, who has been Alan Fox’s mentor and guide in preparing this study of a region spanning the Leicestershire-Lincolnshire border near Grantham.