Turn off the A52 towards Aslockton and the road signs get in first: Thomas Cranmer's coat of arms, repeated at every entrance, announcing the village as his birthplace before you've seen a house. The primary school is named for him, so is the pre-school, so is the church hall. A local blogger at Notts Villages once called the effect "a bit of a one-trick pony."
The village sits on the north bank of the River Smite in the Vale of Belvoir, a couple of miles east of Bingham and about ten from Nottingham. Main Street is lined with nineteenth-century cottages, farmhouses and detached houses. Aslockton has a Grade II listed station on the Nottingham–Grantham line, and the Trent Barton Villager 2 bus stops on Main Street.
The Old Greyhound, a Grade II listed inn on Main Street, closed in 2007 and stands boarded up, awaiting redevelopment into a restaurant. It was once run by John Robertson, the Nottingham Forest winger who scored in the 1980 European Cup final. That leaves the Cranmer Arms, also on Main Street, as the village's only pub.
Inside there's a painting of Cranmer on the wall, a real fire, darts, pool, table football and a skittle alley. Cask ales rotate through Wye Valley HPA, Black Sheep Best Bitter and Timothy Taylor Landlord. The dog-friendly beer garden has swings, a slide and a climbing frame. Food reviews swing hard, warm one year and withering the next.
Cranmer News, the shop and post office at the Thomas Cranmer Centre, handles parcels, bill payments, euros and National Express tickets. It's open Monday to Friday, 08:45 to 17:00, and Saturday mornings until noon.
The playing field has swings and a zip wire; the tennis club runs two floodlit courts with coaching from Stephanie Barling; the cricket club has a match on record from 1815. A flat, five-mile walk links Aslockton to Whatton and Orston — no stiles, no hills, though it turns to mud after rain — and a footbridge reaches Whatton-in-the-Vale directly.
St Thomas's looks older than it is: built 1891–92 to replace a medieval chapel that fell from use after Cranmer's death, when the parish moved to worshipping at Whatton. Pevsner found it insensitive to the scenery. Its windows are worth a look — one shows Christ revealing his hands to Doubting Thomas, a nod to Cranmer; the other shows the 1890 wreck of the Quetta off Australia, which drowned Whatton's vicar. His mother funded the church as his memorial.
Domesday valued Aslockton at five shillings and two pence in 1086, unchanged from 1066: two freemen and a smallholder, half a ploughland, eight acres of meadow. The population doubled between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, from 974 to 1,937.
Thomas Cranmer was born here in 1489 and left the village at fourteen for Jesus College, Cambridge. He wrote the Book of Common Prayer and was burned at the stake in 1556. The motte beside his family's manor, a twelfth-century earthwork now called Cranmer's Mound, still rises within the manor grounds by the River Smite, amid the moats and fishponds that once served the house. Local tradition says the boy climbed it to listen for the bells of Whatton church, ringing across the river he would later have to cross to reach them.
