Sutton Bonington - Features and Amenities

Features and Amenities

The village boasts a number of small shops, a post office, a village hall & library, a primary school, a doctor's surgery and two pubs: the Anchor (in the Bonington part) and the King's Head (in the Sutton part). A small industrial estate exists just outside the village on Rempstone Road.

The village also has two medieval churches, a result of the merging of the two original villages (Sutton and Bonington); they are St Michael's Church (Bonington's parish church, located on Main Street) and St Anne's Church (Sutton's church, located down St Anne's Lane). The village has a large conservation area at its heart, with 25 Listed buildings contained within it. Sutton Bonington Hall and St Anne's Church are Grade II* (the remainder being Grade II). Sutton Bonington Hall is a country house largely erected in the Queen Anne period and is locally known as "The Hall". In 1825 it came into the ownership of the Paget family and remained a residence until 2000; it has since gone into commercial use as a location for weddings, conferences and parties. There is a Methodist church and a Baptist church in the Sutton part of the village.

Aside from the main village, the parish contains a number of outlying areas of settlement, including the university campus and the hamlet of Zouch. There are also two adjacent clusters of housing towards West Leake, at the junctions of Landcroft Lane/Melton Lane and Melton Lane/Pithouse Lane/Trowell Lane. Within the latter cluster is a 200 year-old public house called the Star Inn known locally as Leake Pit House, since it once incorporated a pit for cock-fighting. Between 1982 and 2004 specialist car manufacturer GTM Cars used buildings in Trowel Lane as their factory and offices. Since their departure to Coventry these have been used by Talon Sportscars.

In Zouch is the Rose and Crown pub. The Station Hotel was located adjacent to the former Kegworth railway station, lying just outwith the parish, but closed in 2011. Opposite the Hotel on Station Road are two further Listed buildings within the parish (in addition to the 25 in the village) at Sutton Fields — the House and its Lodge. The Kegworth Old Lock, replaced by the Kegworth Deep Lock in the mid-1980s, on the Soar navigation, also lies within Sutton Bonington parish, and became Grade II Listed on 12 October 1987.

The Kingston Brook runs to the northeast of the parish, forming part of the boundary with West Leake parish. The boundary with Leicestershire is the River Soar and runs along the centre of the river. In places the river has more than one channel, and the boundary then runs at the centre of the widest channel of water, resulting in a number of islands falling within the parish, especially near Kegworth and at Zouch.

Adjacent to the main university campus is the University Farm, a 400 hectare (4 km²) commercial research farm, and an associated high-technology dairy centre; the farm partly lies in the neighbouring parish of Kingston on Soar, as does the dairy. Between the university campus and the railway line are offices (formerly a residence called "The Elms") and a laboratory belonging to the Veterinary Laboratories Agency, and a new sports hall and associated pitches.