Calverton

Framework Knitters and Village Pubs

Main Street still carries terraces built for framework knitters: narrow cottages with wide upper windows designed to flood a knitting frame with daylight. More survive here than anywhere else in Nottinghamshire.

The Gleaners Inn dates to 1876, when William Wibberley was landlord. The former Home Ales pub retains an historic turn-of-the-century photograph, a beer garden and two changing cask ales, and is dog friendly. It became an Asset of Community Value in 2016.

The Village Centre

The Admiral Rodney serves tapas, pizza, loaded fries and classic dishes, with a Derbyshire-beef Rodney Burger among the menu highlights. Everards ales, a rear patio garden, sports screens, a children's playroom and the Galleon function room give it a broad village-pub character; live music is part of its programme.

The village centre has a Sainsbury's Local and a separate convenience store on St Wilfrid's Square.

Church Stones and Woodland Paths

St Wilfrid's Church is Grade II* and has a mostly 14th-century core; its nave and tower were rebuilt in the 1760s. Nine carved sandstone panels in the clock chamber depict seasonal occupations, and the church appears in the Domesday survey, one of 85 Nottinghamshire churches recorded in 1086. Calverton was valued at £2 to the Archbishop of York.

Paths follow the Dover Beck to Oxton, Woodborough and Lambley through Thorndale Plantation, while high ground near Oxton and Woodborough gives views back over Calverton and Dorket Head. Nearby Papplewick Pumping Station preserves a Victorian waterworks about 2.7 miles from Calverton in a straight line; the road journey is longer.

William Lee and the Stocking Frame

Calverton's best-known claim is that William Lee invented the stocking frame here in 1589, a story that links the village to the East Midlands hosiery industry. Historian Negley Harte found no evidence that Lee was Calverton's vicar or even in Holy Orders, while around 300 stocking frames were working in the village by 1832.

Calverton Folk Museum occupies an old stockinger's cottage next to the Baptist Church and contains four rooms of period furniture, clothing, fossils and domestic-room displays, including an actual Victorian frameworker's knitting machine.

From Colliery Village to Commuter Settlement

Calverton became a colliery village when the pit opened in 1952; coal extraction began the following year, and employment reached around 1,600 before production ended in 1999. The settlement then turned towards commuter life. Trentbarton's “calverton” service and Nottingham City Transport's Sky Blue Line connect the village with Nottingham, about seven miles south-west; Lowdham station is about four miles away.