Eastwood

Blue Lines, Coal Country and the Sun Inn

A blue line is painted straight onto the pavement, running from the junction of Greenhills Road and Mansfield Road down to the Three Tuns on Three Tuns Road. Follow it and you pass four different houses D.H. Lawrence's family lived in, plus six other addresses connected to him, laid out like a trail because that is more or less what it is — modelled on Boston's Freedom Trail, the first of its kind in England. It is being extended into a fuller 6.2-mile route this year, taking in the former Moorgreen Colliery site and the Brinsley Headstocks. But you can do the short version on foot in under an hour, and it ends, usefully, at a pub.

Eastwood sits in gently rolling country about nine miles northwest of Nottingham, close enough to the Derbyshire border that the nearest railway station, Langley Mill, is technically over the line. The town runs along a ridge, with the ground falling away east towards Moorgreen Reservoir and a belt of woodland that Lawrence, writing from his family's house on Walker Street, once described looking out at: "Crich on the left, Underwood in front — High Park woods and Annesley on the right." He called it, in the same breath, "the country of my heart" — a generous way to describe a landscape built on coal, and worth remembering before you reach the parts where he called it "ugliness, ugliness, ugliness." He held both views. So might you.

The Sun Inn, on Derby Road, is the obvious place to start a visit and not just because it has fifteen en-suite rooms. It is a Greene King coaching inn dating to around 1750, and the food is straightforward — fish and chips, mac and cheese, katsu chicken, steak and ale pie — with a seniors menu running Monday to Friday until 5pm (two courses for £7.95, three for £8.95) and a lunch club that gets you a dish, chips and a drink for one price, Monday to Saturday, midday to five. Thursdays bring discounted steak, Fridays a bottle of fizz for £12.99. None of it is showing off; it is a pub doing sensible things to get people through the door on a Tuesday afternoon. Reviewers describe the result as relaxed, with staff called "super accommodating and friendly" and a garden big enough that more than one guest has mentioned it unprompted.

That garden, and the building generally, has form. On 16 August 1832, a group of Nottinghamshire coal owners met at the Sun Inn and proposed extending the Mansfield & Pinxton Railway all the way to Leicester. The scheme went to a public subscription meeting at the George Inn in Alfreton, came back to Eastwood for formal approval on 26 September, and was reported in the Derby Mercury three weeks later as the new Midland Counties' Railway — a direct ancestor of the Midland Railway, one of Victorian Britain's largest rail networks. It started as men in a pub arguing about track routes, in a room you can still order a pint in.

Pubs and Local Provisions

Down at the other end of the Blue Line Trail is the Three Tuns, a proper wet-led pub — drinks only, no kitchen — divided into several spacious rooms, with three cask ales on rotation: two regular Wadworth beers and a changing guest. It has a thirty-space car park, fifty covers outside, and a large garden at the rear, plus live music on Friday and Saturday nights and the standard complement of pool, darts and dominoes. One reviewer describes bringing in a small dog and being offered dog treats and a walk by the staff.

The Wellington Inn, on Nottingham Road next to the library, is the most central of Eastwood's pubs and has been serving since 1876, when James Hopkin first got his licence. It was refurbished in 2013 and changed hands again in November 2025 under new owners. Broxtowe Borough Council registered it as an Asset of Community Value in 2023, following a nomination from CAMRA's Nottingham branch — a formal way of saying the town would rather it stayed a pub than became anything else. Reviewers call the beer "clean and crisp," with a walled garden to the side and, every other Sunday, a disco.

For something smaller, the Dog & Parrot on Nottingham Road is a micropub, opened in March 2017 by David and Kathryn Boam, built on two things: no kitchen, dogs welcome. It runs to seven cask ales and six ciders, plus cider and Pilsner on keg and a substantial range of flavoured gins and vodkas, with low-alcohol and gluten-free options too. A Tripadvisor reviewer called it "possibly the best micro pub in the area," which for a town with four other pubs to compare it against is not a small claim.

Eastwood's food shopping is thinner on named independents than its pubs, but a short drive out to Watnall gets you Watnall Farm Shop, which runs its own bakehouse and a butcher's cutting room on site — a proper range of beef, lamb, chicken and pork joints, plus meat pies, pork pies and sausage rolls, with online ordering and local delivery if you would rather not carry it home. On the edge of town at Moorgreen, Beauvale Manor Farm sits on New Road. Local news comes from the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, published every Friday.

Church, Walks and Lawrence's Reservoir

St Mary's Church, Grade II listed, has had a harder run than most. A church has stood on the site since at least 1250; a small brick building went up in 1787 and was enlarged in 1826; the Victorian church that replaced it in 1858 seated 740 people and lasted until 5 March 1963, when it burned down in an arson attack. Only the tower survived. What stands now — brick, concrete and glass — was consecrated in September 1967, built around that surviving tower.

Walking is where Eastwood earns its keep, and the routes east of town are the better ones. The Greasley circular starts at the small car park by Colliers Wood Nature Reserve — the former Moorgreen Colliery, closed in 1985 and replanted with ponds and wetland — and takes you on past Moorgreen Reservoir, Felley Priory and the site of Greasley Castle to St Mary's Church, Greasley, whose fifteenth-century tower holds two medieval glass roundels rescued from Beauvale Priory. A longer, roughly eleven-kilometre route heads through Moorgreen and Felley Woods, past Felley Mill — the model for Strelley Mill in Lawrence's The White Peacock — to the ruins of Beauvale Priory itself, founded in 1343 for Carthusian monks under a vow of absolute silence. Lawrence used it for his short story "A Fragment of Stained Glass." Further afield, the thirty-mile Erewash Valley Trail follows the river and its old canal towpaths along the county border, passing the Bennerley Viaduct, a 1,400-foot wrought-iron structure from 1877 and one of only two of its kind left standing in England.

Moorgreen Reservoir turns up in Lawrence's fiction twice — as "Willey Water" in Women in Love, where a drowning scene was based on a real incident there, and as "Nethermere" in The White Peacock. It was built in the late eighteenth century to feed the Erewash, Nottingham and Cromford canals, and it looks, from most angles, like nothing more dramatic than a reservoir. That is rather the point of reading Lawrence here: he made literature out of the landscape people actually lived and worked in.

Lawrence's Eastwood and Its Coal Seams

Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at 8a Victoria Street, the first of four family homes in the town. The family moved to Breach House on Garden Road in 1887 — fictionalised as "The Bottoms" in Sons and Lovers — then to a new house on Walker Street in 1891, and finally to Lynn Croft in 1905, where they stayed until 1911. His father Arthur, and before him his grandfather, worked at Brinsley Colliery as a "butty," a mining sub-contractor, and young Lawrence would walk to Durban House — built in 1896 as the colliery's wages office — to collect his father's pay. Durban House later became a heritage centre, closed in 2016, and reopened in 2022 as a community hub; it now anchors the start of the Blue Line Trail. Sons and Lovers renames Eastwood "Bestwood" and Barber, Walker & Co, the colliery firm that employed most of the town, becomes "Carson, Waite and Company" — a thin disguise for anyone who knew the place.

The mining history goes back further than Lawrence and explains most of what Eastwood looks like today. In 1086 the Domesday surveyors recorded the settlement as "waste" — no villagers, no plough teams, just three furlongs of woodland and a value that had collapsed to nothing since 1066, when it had been worth five shillings under a lord named Ulfkil. It stayed small for another seven centuries; the population was still only around 170 when James I took the throne in 1603. What changed it was the Erewash Canal, opened in 1779, which made it viable to move coal out in bulk, and the Barber and Walker partnership, which began sinking collieries from the 1860s onward — High Park, Moorgreen, Watnall, Brinsley, Selston — and took annual output from 150,000 tons in the 1850s to over a million tons by the 1890s. The population went from under 1,000 in 1801 to around 5,000 by 1880, the fastest density increase of any parish in the county. Eastwood Hall, built in 1810 for the Plumptree family and later bought by the Walkers, became the mining company's head office in 1916, then the National Coal Board's regional headquarters after 1947 nationalisation. It is a hotel now, run by Principal Hotels since 2007.

For anyone travelling with children, Coronation Park on Plumptre Way has football pitches, a skatepark, a basketball court and a bowling green open for casual play, and is home to Eastwood Community FC. Hall Park Playing Fields on Mansfield Road hosts Eastwood Athletic FC, and Eastwood Park has a free public tennis court alongside the town's tennis club. None of it asks for a booking fee beyond what the tennis court requires in advance.

Nearby Landmarks and Arriving

Further out, Newstead Abbey — Lord Byron's former home, with Japanese gardens and grounds you could lose an afternoon in — is a short drive away, as is Wollaton Hall, the sixteenth-century mansion set in its own deer park in Nottingham. Attenborough Nature Reserve, 358 acres of lakes and wetland, sits about five miles southwest of the city. Nearer at hand, the Brinsley Headstocks — the preserved twin winding gear from the colliery where Lawrence's father worked — stood in for "Beggarlee" colliery in the 1960 film of Sons and Lovers.

Getting there without a car means changing your expectations slightly. Langley Mill station, just over a mile off and technically in Derbyshire, has direct trains to Nottingham, Sheffield, Chesterfield and Manchester. The A610 runs straight through the middle of town via Giltbrook and Kimberley, putting Nottingham city centre about eight miles and twenty minutes away; go the other direction and it meets the A38 at Ripley. Trent Barton runs buses from Gilt Hill into Wollaton Street in Nottingham roughly every ten minutes, a twenty-eight-minute ride, which for a town this size is a better service than most.

Lawrence spent most of his adult life leaving Eastwood and writing about it from a distance — Italy, New Mexico, the south of France — and it took him until 1918, writing home from wherever he happened to be, to admit something had shifted: "For the first time in my life I feel quite amiably towards it. I have always hated it. Now I don't." He never moved back. But he kept writing the same streets, the same reservoir, the same view from Walker Street, for the rest of his life, which is as good a character reference as a town gets — not that it was loved uncomplicatedly, but that it was impossible to put down.