Leicester switches on Diwali lights as Golden Mile crowd reaches 40,000

An estimated 40,000 people packed Leicester’s Belgrave Road on Sunday evening for the switching-on of the city’s Diwali lights, the start of four weeks of celebrations that the city council says are the largest outside India and this year include a 10-metre illuminated lantern and a street food market running until the festival itself on 8 November.

The lights, 6,500 of them strung along the mile of shops, sari houses and sweet centres known as the Golden Mile, were switched on at 7.30pm by a group of children from Belgrave’s three primary schools after a programme of dance, fireworks and a Bollywood singer on a stage outside the Belgrave Neighbourhood Centre. Police closed the road from 3pm, and the city’s bus company laid on 60 extra services.

The switch-on has been held since 1983, when it was organised by shopkeepers with 300 bulbs. It is now run by the council at a cost of £180,000, with the street food market, sponsored by the city’s business improvement district, added this year to keep visitors on the road through the week. About 35 stalls sell dishes from Gujarat, Punjab and the city’s east African Asian tradition. The council says the Diwali period brings £3m into the Belgrave economy.

“My grandmother stood on this road in 1983 with a paper lamp,” said Priya Chauhan, 34, who had brought her two children from Oadby. “The lights were the whole of Belgrave Road and nothing else. Now there are people here from Birmingham and London and the fireworks are better than the city’s own. It is the one night a year when the whole of Leicester is on one street.”

The lantern, a steel and fabric structure in the shape of a diya lamp, has been placed on the roundabout at the junction with Loughborough Road and will stay lit until the new year. It was built by a Nottingham firm that makes Christmas displays and cost £65,000, which the council said was met by a local property developer.

The festival is a test of the city’s policing after disorder in the east of the city in 2022. Leicestershire police had 180 officers on duty on Sunday, with a drone and a mounted unit, and reported two arrests, both for drunkenness. Chief Inspector Amrik Bhogal, who commanded the operation, said it had been “a family night, which is what it has always been”.

Traders reported their best day of the year. Bharat Mistry, whose family has run a sweet shop on the road since 1976, said he had sold 400 boxes of mithai by 9pm. “We make for Diwali from August,” he said. “Tonight is when it starts to go out of the door.”

The Diwali day celebrations on 8 November will include a fireworks display at Cossington Park and a procession of the deities from the Shree Sanatan Mandir temple along Belgrave Road. The lights will come down in early December, to be replaced by the city’s Christmas ones, which the council switches on from the same lamp-posts.