About
Kegworth Heritage Centre, formerly Kegworth Museum, occupies premises on the High Street of a Leicestershire village that sits almost exactly where three counties meet, on the River Soar a short way above its junction with the Trent. It is entirely volunteer-run, opens on alternating Sundays through the summer, and came close to closing altogether a few years ago before a group of villagers took it on. It has since achieved full Accreditation from Arts Council England — a serious standard for a museum with no paid staff, and a considerable achievement for the people who turned it round.
The village's older economy was framework knitting. From the seventeenth century onwards the stocking frame turned the villages of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire into a dispersed hosiery industry worked in cottages and small shops rather than mills, on machines hired from middlemen who also supplied the yarn and bought the finished work. It made a living and it made a grievance, and the pressures on frame rents and piece rates that produced Luddism in these counties are part of the story the centre tells. Kegworth's frames, tools, products and the households that depended on them sit at the centre of the collection.
Around them is the ordinary evidence of a village on a main road: the turnpike between Leicester and Derby, the Soar navigation and its trade, the church of St Andrew with its tall spire, the shops, chapels, schools and clubs, and the Midland Counties Railway station that served the village until the 1960s and whose sign the centre acquired. Older material includes the Redhill curse tablet, a Roman inscribed lead sheet found in 1990 at the Trent-Soar confluence, acquired by the museum in 2023 — an unexpectedly striking object for a small village collection.
Kegworth's modern history is dominated by infrastructure. East Midlands Airport opened alongside the village in the 1960s, the M1 was driven past at much the same time, and the two have shaped the place ever since; the village is also associated in the national memory with the air disaster of January 1989, in which forty-seven people died when an aircraft came down on the motorway embankment. Opening is limited, an upper gallery has its own access arrangements, and private visits can be arranged with two weeks' notice.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Check the current dates before travelling. The centre opens on alternating Sundays only, and the pattern is adjusted each year around other village events.
- If the Sunday dates do not suit, email at least two weeks ahead — private visits at other times are genuinely offered and are worth asking for.
- Read the centre's access policy before visiting if stairs are an issue; the upper gallery has its own arrangements.
- East Midlands Parkway station is two miles away, and the Skylink bus runs along the High Street, so the visit does not require a car.
- Ask to see the Redhill curse tablet and ask what the current research on it has established — the volunteers publish a spotlight series on individual objects.
- The framework knitting material is the heart of the collection; give it more time than its modest presentation might suggest.
- Walk down to St Andrew's Church and the Soar afterwards to see the older village behind the High Street frontage.
- Entry is free but the centre has no paid staff and came close to closing a few years ago — the donation box matters.
Highlights
Framework Knitting
Kegworth was one of the many East Midlands villages whose living came from the stocking frame, a complex hand-powered knitting machine worked in cottages and small shops rather than in mills. The centre's displays cover the frames themselves, the tools and the products, and the economics that governed the trade: frames hired from middlemen, yarn supplied on credit, piece rates squeezed and frame rents charged whether or not there was work.
That system produced both an industry and a grievance, and the Luddite machine-breaking of 1811 and 1812 in these counties grew directly out of it.
The Redhill Curse Tablet
A Roman inscribed lead sheet found in 1990 at Red Hill, where the Soar meets the Trent a short distance from the village, and acquired by the museum in 2023. Curse tablets were folded sheets on which a petitioner asked a god to punish a thief or an enemy, often naming suspects and specifying what should happen to them, and they are among the most direct surviving voices of ordinary Roman Britons.
Red Hill was a religious site at a river confluence, exactly the sort of place such objects were deposited, and this one is a remarkable holding for a village museum.
The Village on the Turnpike
Kegworth grew along the main road between Leicester and Derby, and the coaching and carrying trade that road brought shaped the High Street the centre stands on — inns, stabling, smithies, wheelwrights and the businesses that served travellers as well as villagers. Displays cover the turnpike, the tolls, the traffic and the effect on the village of being a place people passed through, and set that against the arrival of the railway, which took the long-distance trade away almost overnight in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Kegworth Station
The Midland Counties Railway reached Kegworth in the late 1830s, and the station served the village until closure in the 1960s during the Beeching contractions. The centre acquired the station's nameboard, and it anchors a display on what the railway meant to a village of this size: the movement of hosiery and agricultural produce, the daily travel it made possible, the jobs it provided, and the effect of losing it.
East Midlands Parkway, opened on the same line in 2009, now stands two miles away and serves an entirely different purpose.
Collections
The collection documents Kegworth and its immediate district in the Soar valley. Holdings include framework knitting material — frames, tools, hosiery products and records of the trade that dominated the village's economy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century; archaeological finds from the parish and the Trent-Soar confluence, including the Redhill Roman curse tablet found in 1990 and acquired in 2023; transport material covering the Leicester to Derby turnpike, the Soar navigation and the Midland Counties Railway, including the Kegworth station nameboard; shop, trade and agricultural objects from the village; church, chapel and school records; domestic objects, clothing and photographs illustrating village households across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and documentary and photographic archives covering the twentieth-century arrival of East Midlands Airport and the M1.
Displays are supported by ongoing research published as a spotlight series on individual objects.
The Stocking Frame Village
Framework knitting displays covering the machines, the products, the households that worked them and the economic pressures that produced Luddism in the East Midlands hosiery villages.
Kegworth Through Time
The village's history from Roman finds at the Trent-Soar confluence through the turnpike, navigation and railway to the arrival of the airport and the motorway in the 1960s.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.