Stays near Southam

Southam is a market town and civil parish in Stratford-on-Avon district, about six and a half miles east-south-east of Leamington Spa, with 8,114 residents at the 2021 census. The name comes from the Old English for south village, or possibly south hemmed-in land.

Its ties to Coventry are old. Southam was a royal manor until 998, when Ethelred the Unready granted it to Earl Leofwine. When Coventry Priory was founded in 1043, Leofwine's son Leofric, Earl of Mercia, gave Southam to it and the priory, later the first Coventry Cathedral, kept it until the Dissolution.

The town grew where several roads met: the main road between Coventry and Oxford, now the A423, the road from Warwick to Northampton by way of Daventry and the ancient drovers' road known as Welsh Road. The monks won a market charter in 1227 and three yearly fairs followed.

Southam's Holy Well, in the Stowe valley, was first recorded in 998 and is Grade II listed and a scheduled monument. Fed by a mineral spring, the water pours from the mouths of carved stone gargoyles and for centuries it was the town's main water supply.

Humber Hub is about 12 miles by road from Southam, Stoke Lodge and Stoke House about 13 miles and Sullivan Heights about 14 miles. For a team working on HS2 or other sites in south Warwickshire, Humber Hub is the nearest house.