The railway crossed built-up Leicester on a Staffordshire blue brick viaduct, incorporating a series of fine girder bridges.

[1] The viaduct's construction required a large area of land to be acquired by compulsory purchase with the GCR agreeing to re-house at its own expense the inhabitants of around 300 houses which had to be demolished; the area principally affected by the works was the working class Blackfriars district (near modern-day Frog Island), where the slums in Sycamore Lane, Charlotte Street and Friars Road were entirely swept from the map, to be replaced by Great Central Street.

The tracks ran north-east to south-west, crossing the A50 Northgate Street on a "bowstring" girder bridge before splaying out on either side of a large 1,245 ft H-shaped island-style platform upon which the station was built.

[3] The southern end of the new station and its viaduct required building over Jewry Wall Street and some of the houses that stood on it.

Although number 53 was demolished the Great Central undertook to preserve the Roman floor within the structure of the southern northbound platform that was built around it.

A second entrance was in Jarvis Street where a subway 20 ft below the platforms led through to the main booking hall, a light and airy space topped by a glazed roof.

So began "several years of deliberate neglect and decline and retrenchment"[7] designed to reduce the former busy trunk route to a state whereby closure could be easily achieved.

Much of the Great Central's viaduct through Leicester had been demolished by the beginning of the 1980s and the bowstring bridge over Northgate Street was dismantled in 1981.

[10] The Roman pavement was removed from the site in 1976 and is now on display in the close by Old Jewry Wall Museum, about 100 metres (110 yards) from its original location.