Sutton-in-Ashfield sits about 12 miles north of Nottingham as the crow flies (nearer 17 by road), in the Ashfield district of Nottinghamshire — about four miles west of Mansfield and only a couple of miles short of the Derbyshire border. That places most of a Sutton lesson well outside Nottingham’s ring road and city-centre one-way systems, on a genuinely different set of roads from a lesson based in Nottingham itself.
The town’s defining test of nerve is the Kings Mill roundabout, where the A38 bypass — a wide single-carriageway built along Sutton’s eastern edge, opened in 2005 — meets the A617 Mansfield and Ashfield Regeneration Route (MARR) beside Kings Mill Hospital: a large, multi-lane roundabout that’s ideal for early lane-discipline practice. Junction 28 of the M1 is barely two miles further along the same road, making a supervised motorway lesson an easy add-on later in a course. Nearer the centre, the roads reverse character: Alfreton Road, Outram Street, Priestsic Road and Kirkby Road were laid out for a Victorian coal-and-hosiery town, not modern traffic, so tight junctions and parked-up streets around the Idlewells Shopping Centre call for a slower, closer-quarters style of driving just minutes from that same open roundabout.
For the test itself, Watnall — reached south via the A611 through Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Annesley and Newstead, then Hucknall’s B6009 Watnall Road — is the closest of Pass Mee’s three DVSA centres to Sutton-in-Ashfield by a clear margin, and lessons can be built around that actual route rather than a generic one.