The Stamford Arms started life as the house of William Everard, born in Groby in 1821, who went on to found Everards Brewery. His house became a pub in 1921, which means the brewery's founder is now, in a sense, permanently hosting. It won Leicester CAMRA's Country Pub of the Year in 2020, and the beer list — Beacon Bitter, Tiger, Original, Sunchaser, plus rotating guests — runs to six cask ales before you get to the ciders, the craft lines, and a gin selection that suggests someone behind the bar has a hobby.
The food is harder to summarise. The main menu does a Mixed Grill with rump steak, gammon, chicken, and Cumberland sausage. It also does Crispy Beef Noodles with baby sweetcorn, mange tout, chilli, and charred lime. Then there's a tapas bar — Chorizo De Miel Y Vina Roja, halloumi souvlaki, king prawn paella — and a deli counter serving breakfast all day, including Eggs Alla Puttanesca and American pancake stacks on Hambleton's bread. Sunday roasts run noon to six.
It is the only pub in the brief, and it appears to be doing the work of four.
Groby sits about five miles northwest of Leicester, on the southern edge of Charnwood Forest, where the suburbs give way to pre-Cambrian rock and dry stone walls. The A50 runs you into the city centre. Bus 29 does it every twenty minutes, taking about twenty-one. There's a Co-op on the main road and the usual amenity shops.
The walking is the thing. Groby Pool is a 38-acre lake on the village's southern edge — reputed to be the largest natural body of open water in Leicestershire, though it may have been formed by monks from Leicester Abbey damming the Slate Brook sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which complicates the word "natural." It's been an SSSI since 1956. You can walk the circumference and watch the birds. Martinshaw Wood, between Groby and Ratby, is ancient woodland with good shade and notable trees. If you want distance, the Charnwood Peaks Walk is a fifteen-mile waymarked route through the four peaks of the forest, and both the Leicestershire Round and the Ivanhoe Way cross nearby.
Bradgate Park is adjacent — 850 acres of deer park, open to the public, and one of Leicester's most popular days out.
It is also where the history starts getting serious. The ruins of Bradgate House stand in the park. Lady Jane Grey was born there in 1537, proclaimed Queen of England in July 1553, deposed nine days later, and beheaded at the Tower of London the following February. She was sixteen or seventeen.
Her family, the Greys, had been at Groby for generations. Elizabeth Woodville married Sir John Grey of Groby before his death at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461. She then petitioned Edward IV for return of confiscated lands and ended up marrying him instead. Two Queens of England from one Leicestershire family.
St Philip and St James, the village church, stands in the grounds of the old castle. It was built in 1840 by the sixth Earl of Stamford, and its architect was William Railton — the same man who designed Nelson's Column that year, which is quite a side project. When the chancel was extended in 1912, builders found the foundations of the Norman castle underneath. Elizabeth Woodville had lived in the house above those foundations before she became queen.
The Domesday surveyors recorded it as Grobi. The '-by' ending is Viking — Danelaw territory — and 'groo' is thought to mean pit, probably a reference to the quarry. The quarry is still working. Diorite, locally called granite, has been pulled out of the ground here since at least 1832, when the Leicester and Swannington Railway — the first steam-worked public line carrying passengers and freight in the Midlands — shifted 4,622 tonnes of stone from Groby in its first six months. Receipts for granite carriage came to £82 12s 1d.
The village valued at sixty shillings in 1086 now has a pub that serves halloumi souvlaki and eggs puttanesca before noon. The Domesday surveyors would have had questions.
