Stays for Daventry and DIRFT

Daventry is a market town in West Northamptonshire close to the Warwickshire border, with 28,123 people at the 2021 census, the sixth largest town in the county. It lies 14 miles west of Northampton and about ten miles south-east of Rugby.

Borough Hill, 653 feet high on the eastern edge of the town, has been used since prehistory. Remains of two Bronze Age barrows and a Roman villa have been found there, along with two Iron Age hill forts, one of them the fourth largest in Britain. The town's name may be Anglo-Saxon, Dafa's tree, formed in the same way as Coventry, Cofa's tree.

In 1925 the new BBC built a transmitting station on Borough Hill. From 1932 the Empire Service, now the World Service, broadcast from there, making the call Daventry calling known around the world. On 26 February 1935 the transmitter carried the Daventry Experiment, the first practical demonstration of radar by Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold Wilkins.

The town stayed small until British Timken opened a large factory in 1955 and the first stretch of the M1 opened nearby. In 1961 Daventry was designated to take overspill from Birmingham, whose council bought nearly 1,000 acres for homes and industry. By 1972 more than 1,000 families had moved in.

Daventry now has the M1 on two sides, at junctions 16 and 18. DIRFT, the rail freight terminal at junction 18, is about six miles north of the town. Humber Hub is about 18 miles by road from Daventry, Stoke Lodge and Stoke House about 19 miles and Sullivan Heights about 21 miles.