Leicester wins its rainwear town status because Next has its HQ in Leicester - or, actually, in Enderby which is just Next to Leicester.

What's specially rainy about Next? It sells fashion raincoats, yes, but that's not really enough, since fashion raincoats are not really REAL raincoats: they have the embarrassing feature of letting in the rain, if only it is sufficiently insistent.

No, the thing is, Next took over a large chain of shops called Kendalls in the 1980s and Kendalls really did sell rainwear. Real rainwear. (And umbrellas, almost entirely neglected on a rainwear site on the incontestable grounds of being something you put up but not on.)

By the 1980s people in the UK had got cars and houses and worked in offices with roofs (NOT openplan as often reported) and thought they could get by with the silicon spray. So Kendalls with its superb umbrellas and its rubberised mackintoshes felt a bit beside the point and were snapped up by Terence Conran, who at that time was Chairman of a Gentleman's Outfitter called Hepworths. Hepworths and Kendalls got wed, and the lovechild was Next.

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