St Martin's Cathedral
Although St Martin's is one of England's smallest cathedrals, it is not without beauty.
Long regarded as Leicester's civic church, it was elevated to the status of a
Cathedral
on the reconstitution of the Leicestershire Diocese in 1927.
Now dedicated to St Martin, the missionary bishop of Tours (c.1400),
in medieval documents
the church is sometimes referred to as the Church of St Cross. St Martin's has always been the
civic church of the town, situated as it is near the Guildhall,
which for over three hundred
years served as the Town Hall.
Roman foundations were found when the tower was rebuilt in 1861. Although it is not known
to what use the Roman building was put, it can be conjectured that it may have been a pagan
temple on the site of which a Saxon Christian church was erected.
The oldest part of the present structure is a short section of a Romanesque stringcourse
in the eastern end of the north side
of the north arcade to the nave and, necessarily, part of the wall in
which it is embedded. This is probably a survival
of the ornamentation on the outside
of an aisleless Romanesque nave.