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 2025 the broadcaster Gyles Brandreth unveiled a blue plaque to Wolfit at the theatre.

The Trent and nearby Kelham

Averham stands near the Trent, with the Trent Valley Way crossing land north of the village. Kelham Bridge is an 1857 road crossing on Newark Road. Farther east, John Smeaton’s 1770 Causeway Arches carry Great North Road across the river’s flood plain.

For a pub meal, The Fox Inn is in neighbouring Kelham and serves Sunday lunch. It also offers motorhome stopovers.

The church above the Trent

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 Averham as Aigrun. The manor was worth £10 1s to its lord in 1086, up from £6 in 1066; its recorded resources included a mill and 80 acres of meadow. Sweyn held it before the Conquest and Gilbert Tison afterwards.

Onward to Newark

Newark Air Museum occupies part of the former RAF Winthorpe airfield east of town.

The A617 links Averham through Kelham to Newark. Bus 28 connects the village with Southwell and Newark, and Newark’s railway station provides a rail connection.

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.