Stays near Rugby

Rugby is a market town in eastern Warwickshire near the River Avon, with 78,117 residents at the 2021 census, the second largest town in the county; the wider borough had 114,400. It sits close to the borders with Leicestershire and Northamptonshire and is the easternmost town in the West Midlands region, about eleven and a half miles east of Coventry.

Early Iron Age settlers used the hill above the Avon as a natural lookout and the Roman town of Tripontium grew up on Watling Street about three miles to the north-east. The Anglo-Saxons took the settlement over around 560, Domesday records it as Rocheberie and it became a market town in 1255.

Rugby School was founded in 1567 under the will of Lawrence Sheriff, a local man who had made his fortune supplying groceries to Elizabeth I. Thomas Arnold, headmaster from 1828 to 1842, made it the model for the Victorian public school. Legend says William Webb Ellis first ran with the ball here in 1823; three pupils wrote the first rules of the Rugby game in 1845 and Tom Brown's Schooldays, published in 1857, is set at the school.

The town stayed small until a major railway junction arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. Rugby has had a station since 1838 and the present one dates from 1885, a principal stop on the West Coast Main Line with frequent trains to London Euston, Birmingham New Street and Northampton. Between 1899 and 1969 a second station, Rugby Central, served the Great Central line.

East of the town, the Rugby Radio Station opened in 1926 with masts 820 feet high that were a landmark for decades until the last came down in 2007. Its site is now Houlton, a large new housing development. A Rugby Parkway station is proposed on the Northampton line to serve Houlton and Hillmorton.

Hillmorton itself is known for its flight of locks on the Oxford Canal, consistently the busiest on the national canal network, with 9,000 boats passing through in 2019. The locks were built as single chambers between 1769 and 1774 and doubled in 1840 when the canal was crowded with working boats.

Stoke Lodge and Stoke House are about 11 miles by road from Rugby, Humber Hub about 12 miles and Sullivan Heights about 14 miles. For crews working between Coventry and Rugby, a whole house with free parking gives a settled base for the week.