St Matthew's

The St Matthew's estate is an area of inner city Leicester. It lies immediately to the North-East of the city centre and is bounded by the A594 ring road to the South-West, the Belgrave Road to the northwest and Humberstone Road to the South-East. To the North-East it is separated from Belgrave by former railway land.

It has a population of approximately 4,000 and is named after the Anglican church of St Matthew's. The area previously consisted of small factories and slum housing - much of it back-to-back houses - and was redeveloped in the 1950s as council housing. The vast majority of the housing stock is local authority owned. The area is isolated (with no adjacent residential areas and is cut off from the city centre by the dual carriageway ring road). It is, statistically, the most deprived neighbourhood in Leicester today.

St. Matthews is particularly deprived in terms of income and employment and research carried out in 2003 (St. Matthews Area Plan) indicated that more than 50% of households had an income of less than £6,239 - a staggering £14,161 below the UK average.

The population is extremely diverse with large numbers of new arrivals, and is home to West Indian, Portuguese, Russian, Montserratian, Zimbabwean, Kurdish, Somali and Irish residents amongst others. Although the estate clearly faces some significant challenges, local residents participating in a recent consultation project indicated that they felt some pride in the estate and that it had improved substantially in recent years. Standards of housing have improved as a result of the government's 'Decent Homes' programme, and the area is perceived to be safer than it was in the past. Issues relating to drug dealing, drug taking and street drinking remain a major concern for some of St. Matthews residents.

St. Matthews has a strong entrepreneurial spirit and local people have developed several new Voluntary and Community Sector organisations in recent years to serve the needs of the community. There is a particularly positive relationship between the estate's residents and the Police which is unusual for a neighbourhood with such high levels of deprivation.