Laying a new lawn on soil with rubble

We move into a house two years ago and the garden was pretty much all lawn. Over the two years we have re-built the house and what was the lawn is now a mixture of soil (a lot of what had been excavated for foundations elsewhere) mixed with bits of rubble (picture attached).

I can remove by hand most of the large rubble and stones, and thought I could get a digger in to level the soil, but wanted some advice of what else I would need to do to lay a new lawn.

I would like the lawn to look great quality and even all over, as well as being completely flat.

Being a complete novice to this, I have the following questions:
- Assuming the soil is leveled with a digger, do I then need to rotovate it?
- Do I need to remove every stone from this soil, or just the bigger pieces?
- I assume I would need topsoil, but roughly how much (the lawn will be around 10 metre square)?
- What times of year are best to seed the lawn?

Any advice very gratefully received!

Thank you!

 

Sorry - to add to this, we currently have lots of thistles, stinging nettles and other things growing in this area. Does laying grass stop these growing through, or is there something else I would need to do first?

 

Wow, thanks you for all these responses, really handy.

The soil I think is probably okay - it's quite hard at the moment with the weather we have been having, but apart from that it's all stuff that came out of the ground where there was previously grass growing.

Will/does topsoil help at all?

 

We have a trade independent garden supplier on our road (Landcare, Old Sodbury), so hopefully whatever we buy would be the 'good stuff'!

Our garden is sloped, and we are looking to level the grass area, so the large pile you mentioned will be spread and evened out, and then the thought was to apply top soil on top of this.

 

If you are in a hurry you could use rolls of turf it is fairly expensive £2.20 per sq meter or thereabouts. As above you have to prepare well. And this time of year will need watering.
Just a thought.

 

I'm not in a rush, so was thinking October for laying the lawn. Assuming money and time was no object, what would garner the best results, seed or rolls of turf?