Averham

A wooden theatre with a gilded interior

The Robin Hood Theatre seats 150 people inside a wooden building in the old rectory garden, and from the outside you would take it for a large shed before you took it for a theatre. Inside there is gold leaf and proper plasterwork, built by the village carpenter, Robert Lee, in 1913, for a rector called Joseph Cyril Walker whose amateur troupe called themselves "The Country Bumpkins."

Donald Wolfit made his stage debut here as a teenager, cycling over from school for a wartime musical comedy, and was knighted in 1957. Performances were timed to full moons during the First World War, so the audience could get home without lights. It has closed and reopened more than once since — nearly demolished in 1967, saved when Wolfit bought the freehold himself — and performers passing through include John Cleese and Bill Oddie. By 2014, supporters including Judi Dench had helped raise over £50,000 toward its restoration. In 2026 the broadcaster Gyles Brandreth unveiled a blue plaque to Wolfit at the theatre.

River paths and the nearest pub

The village itself sits on a bank of the Trent, where the river splits into two branches that do not rejoin until north of Newark. A riverside path runs from Staythorpe through the grounds of Kelham Hall to Kelham Bridge, an 1857 crossing near the eighteenth-century Causeway Arches, built by John Smeaton. The Trent Valley Way runs the length of the parish, and a longer circular walk to Rolleston and back — about twelve kilometres — follows the river past Staythorpe Power Station.

There is no pub in Averham itself. The nearest is the Fox Inn, half a mile away in Kelham, under the same parish council, dog-friendly with a fenced play area and motorhome hook-ups, known for its Sunday roast and its wood-fired pizza on Saturdays.

The church above the Trent and Aygrum

St Michael and All Angels stands high above the river with a cedar tree over the churchyard wall, "lifting its branches above the tower," as Arthur Mee put it in 1938. The herringbone masonry in the south wall is Norman, possibly older, and the church has since been the subject of a peer-reviewed paper on its pre-Conquest origins. Inside, three heraldic shields mark the Sutton family, who held the manor from the thirteenth century; a wall monument to Robert Sutton, first Baron Lexington, is rumoured locally to have his heart buried in an urn above it, and the gargoyles outside are described locally as having cats' ears and lions' manes. In 1984 vandals cut the praying hands from the effigy of Sir William Sutton, a courtier to Elizabeth I.

Domesday recorded the place as Aygrum, worth £10 1s to its lord in 1086, up from £6 twenty years earlier, with a mill valued at five shillings and 80 acres of meadow — held before the Conquest by a man named Sweyn, afterwards by Gilbert Tison.

Light aircraft and onward connections

Beside the river, Rectory Farm Airfield takes light aircraft on a grass strip for a suggested landing fee of £10.

The A617 runs through Averham on its way from Kelham into Newark, and buses 28 and 29 follow the same road toward Southwell, about twenty minutes off. Newark Castle station is the nearest stop for trains, and Newark itself — Norman gatehouse, underground passages, an air museum on the old Winthorpe airfield — is a few miles east.

Say it like a local

Averham has 215 people, according to the last census, and a name that locals pronounce without the v — closer to "HEIRHAM" than anything written down would suggest.