Attenborough

Pubs, cafés and the Nature Centre

The Bird Hide, a micropub on Attenborough Lane, keeps six gravity-dispensed cask ales on at a time, plus two keg lines, four ciders and a mead from Sherwood Forest. The beer garden seats up to 48 under a rain cover. It opened in 2021, shuts Mondays and Tuesdays, and runs a Wise Owls quiz on alternate Thursdays.

The Blue Bell on Nottingham Road has traded since at least 1832. It's a Greene King house now, refurbished in 2018, built around a flaming grill for steaks and burgers — the Monday and Tuesday steak deal at £5 each has been called possibly the best-value lunch in Nottingham. Dogs are welcome in the bar, there's a garden at the back and a patio at the front, and Greene King Abbot and IPA sit on permanent draught alongside four rotating guest beers.

Long Lane has the Park Bistro, a café by day and licensed bistro by evening, next to a playground and open field: home-cooked food, a breakfast menu, cakes, dogs allowed in the covered outdoor seating. South of the village, the Nature Centre café serves fairtrade and organic food in an eco-award-winning building.

Wetland and medieval stone

That building sits inside Attenborough Nature Reserve, 145 hectares of flooded gravel pits and wetland where the Erewash meets the Trent. Dug from gravel workings between 1929 and 1967, it was opened in 1966 by Sir David Attenborough, who returned to open the Nature Centre in 2005. Over 250 bird species have been recorded since, and roughly 500,000 people visit a year, some for three generations running. Paths fan out from the visitor centre — the Trent Valley Way runs from Long Eaton to West Stockwith, and a circular route loops past the railway to the riverbank and back through the village, with views south to Thrumpton and Barton in Fabis.

St Mary's, Grade I listed, took around three hundred years to build, its stone brought upriver from Derbyshire. The tower dates from the 14th century; the octagonal spire, added in the 15th, was rebuilt in 1848 to 130 feet. Inside, the nave arcade capitals are carved differently on each side — gentle classical carving on the north, grotesque heads and monsters on the south. Thoroton thought the place "rather to be called a Church than a Village, having but few houses, and no Fields."

Ireton and the Chilwell dead

Henry Ireton was born here in 1611 and baptised at St Mary's that November. He went on to marry Cromwell's daughter Bridget, sign Charles I's death warrant, and die near Limerick in 1651.

The churchyard holds a harder memory too: on 1 July 1918 an explosion at the shell-filling factory in nearby Chilwell killed 134 workers, most buried here in a mass grave for the more than 130 never identified, marked since 2018 by a Corten-steel Celtic cross bearing a stainless-steel sword.

Village life and a lasting clock

There's a football club founded in 1947, a cricket club on the green, and Lucy Brown Village Hall, built in 1956 for £8,200. The village has its own station on the Nottingham–Derby line, and Beeston, a mile and a half away, adds direct trains to London; the 510 bus stops on Long Lane.

A millennium clock hangs inside St Mary's, paid for by a £3,000 bequest from a parishioner named Percy Barsby — the kind of gift that outlasts the person who gave it, still keeping time over the churchyard where the village buried its neighbours.