Kingston on Soar

The Green and Village Life

The green at Kingston on Soar is three-cornered, lined with trees, and has a red K6 telephone box standing on it that nobody much needs any more but nobody has taken away either. Kingston Brook comes down off the Wolds, runs through the grounds of Kingston Hall and feeds a lake there, then carries on through the village to the River Soar, which marks the county boundary with Leicestershire a short walk to the west.

There is no pub in the village, and it's better said plainly than worked around. The nearest is over the river in Kegworth, about 0.7 miles away, and that's also where the shops are — Kingston on Soar, home to around 300 people, has neither. Soar Valley community buses stop on Kegworth Road and on The Green, and there's a weekly market bus to Loughborough on Thursdays.

What the village does have is a village hall, built in 1935 and standing on The Green. Tai Chi, a choir, table tennis and Morris dancing run through the year, along with a Harvest Festival Supper and an annual Beer Festival, which given the pub situation seems to be carrying some weight.

The Babington Chantry and Its Legend

The reason to walk up to the church is the Babington Chantry. St Winifred's is Grade I listed and included in Simon Jenkins' England's Thousand Best Churches. Inside is a pillared canopy built in 1538 by Sir Anthony Babington, carved with around 200 tiny babies sitting in barrels — a rebus on the family name — twenty-eight of them arranged as boys and girls in a ring of roses around two of the capitals. Above it is a Last Judgement: Christ, Michael and Gabriel with trumpets, the saved climbing up, the damned going the other way.

The younger Anthony Babington, who plotted to free Mary, Queen of Scots and was executed for it in 1586 aged 25, is said to have hidden here when the plot fell apart. Arthur Mee, writing in 1938, recorded that he "is said to have hidden for a time on the top of this canopy after the discovery of the plot which cost him his life."

Most of what you see today is an 1899–1900 rebuild, paid for by Henry Strutt, 2nd Baron Belper, in memory of his son William, who died in 1898. The old Babington stonework was kept throughout. Three walnut trees still grow in the churchyard.

Kingston Hall and Chinestan

Kingston Hall, just beyond, was built in the 1840s for Edward Strutt by Edward Blore, who had earlier worked on Buckingham Palace. The alabaster columns in its entrance hall came from gypsum dug on the estate — there was a mine and a tramway running gypsum down to Kegworth station until the 1980s. The Strutts sold the hall in 1976; it has been twelve separate dwellings since 1980.

Before any Strutt arrived, Domesday Book recorded the place as Chinestan, split across four separate landholdings. Earl Hugh of Chester's share alone fell in value from thirty shillings to ten between 1066 and 1086.

Paths, Transport and John Berridge

The Midshires Way runs through the parish, and a ten-mile circular walk goes from Kegworth through the village and on to the West Leake Hills, passing Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station — the last coal-fired station in the country, closed in 2024, its cooling towers not due to come down before 2029 — before looping back through Sutton Bonington. East Midlands Parkway is the nearest station, with journeys to St Pancras of around 90 minutes, and the M1 is two miles off at Junction 24. Roads into the village carry a 7.5-tonne weight limit, and the railway bridge on Kegworth Road takes nothing taller than 12ft 6in.

John Berridge was born on a farm here in 1716, well before any of that, and grew up to become an evangelical preacher so forceful that his congregations were reported to suffer "strange convulsions" during his sermons. He's buried in Bedfordshire, not Kingston. The farm, as far as anyone has recorded, is still just a farm.