Thurnby is a village in the Harborough district of the county, on the eastern border of Leicester itself. St Luke's is in the village centre and is a large cruciform building with a 3-bay aisled nave with a S porch. The chancel is 19thc, the N transept contains the organ and vestry, and the S transept forms the termination of the nave aisle. At the W end of the N nave aisle is a modern parish hall. The lower stage of the tower is 12thc, but the heavy crossing piers have been refaced and their multi-scallop capitals look 19thc. The tower's upper stages are successively 13thc and 14thc. The nave arcades are of the late-13thc., but Slater and Carpenter's restoration of 1870-73 was effectively a complete rebuilding. In the S porch is a rebuilt chevron arch, and this is the only feature recorded here.

Thurnby is not mentioned by name in the Domesday Survey, and it was probably included in Hugh de Grandmesnil's large holding that passed to the Earls of Leicester in the early 12thc and subsequently to the Earls of Winchester. Nothing is known directly of the subtenants of Thurnby or its neighbour of Bushby before the mid-13thc, when the Lords of the Manor were the Dubois family, however in 1143 Ralph the Butler gave the church of Thurnby to Leicester Abbey, with the consent of Earl Robert le Bossu.

The presence of voussoirs of two different patterns in the reassembled arch points to a doorway of at least two orders (or two doorways) in the 12thc church.