This house, which once occupied the site of Stoneygate Court, was built c1841 for Charles Burt Robinson, the manager of the first Leicester Gasworks in Belgrave.
Since 1823 he and his brother Henry Martin Robinson had leased the works from the Leicester Gas Company and turned it into a successful business which paid a steady dividend while reducing the price of gas in Leicester to one of the lowest in the country. The brothers also ran a gas fittings business which had a monopoly of the fitting trade from the Leicester Gas Company.
According to an article ‘The Changing Face of Leicester: When Knighton was an isolated village’ by R.G Waddington in the ‘Illustrated Leicestershire Chronicle’ of 25th April 1931, Charles Robinson was a friend of garden designer, architect and engineer Joseph Paxton (a director of the Midland Railway) and persuaded him to create the garden for The Shrubbery.
The estate remained in the Robinson family for some years after the death of Charles’ widow. In the mid 1880s they seem to have sold off land in Albert Road to the Levy family to accommodate Lyndhurst and to the Mackennal sisters for Stoneygate College. The house was eventually demolished some time between 1934 and 1937.