Thousands of people lined up outside Leicester Cathedral on Monday to pay their final respects to King Richard III, who is lying in repose in the place of worship. At one stage people were being urged not to turn up with the wait to get in and file past the coffin reaching 4 hours.
In fact demand to get in to see the King has been so high that the Cathedral has extended it’s opening hours, to try and accommodate as many people as possible. The King’s coffin is being watched over by an honour guard made of ex-servicemen.
As we saw during Sunday’s procession, there’s been a huge influx of visitors from abroad into Leicester to witness the reburial, so it came as no surprise that the first person to enter the Cathedral this morning was an American, called Bradley Dubbs from Atlanta.
On Monday evening, the focus shifted to the Ramgharia Centre in Leicester where the city’s Sikh community held it’s own commemoration of the last Plantagenet king. The event started with parallels being made between the lives of King Richard and the founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak Devji.
Organised by the Leicestershire Sikh Alliance, the evening drew a multicultural audience who saw a display of classical music performed by local artists and also a spectacular display of gatka, a Sikh martial art.
Leicestershire’s police and crime commissioner Sir Clive Loader, who was one of the specially invited guests, described the event perfectly when he said it was a ‘very Sikh celebration for a very English king.’
