The Blue Bell Inn on Low Street is the only pub left in a village that used to have two. The other, the Old Harrow Inn on Top Street, is a timber-framed 17th-century cottage now, brick and pantile, with nothing pub-like left about it but the listing description.
The Blue Bell closed for a period and came back under new owners, family run. Time a visit for Sunday: food is served lunchtime only, 12:30 to 8pm, and the roast is what people come back for. Three real ales rotate through with no permanents, often Batemans or something from the Pheasantry brewery. There's a beer garden, a car park, and outside seating for the warmer months.
"Best pub by miles around here, a real gem, an oasis for walkers, cyclists, locals and dogs," runs one review, which is a lot to claim for a pub that's shut on Mondays. The dog-and-walker part checks out — it sits on a country lane that gets both.
Beyond the Blue Bell there isn't much to shop for. East Drayton has 266 people and no butcher, baker or farm shop of its own; you come here to eat and walk, not to browse.
The village itself is four streets — Top Street, Low Street, Church Lane and North Green — meeting at a crossroads with St Peter's Church in the middle. It's Grade I, almost entirely Perpendicular outside, with a 15th-century south porch carved with human heads and animal figures under a ribbed stone vault built to look like timber. Inside there's a wooden rood screen of the same period and a 14th-century incised floor slab with a simple cross cut into it.
The Domesday survey recorded the place simply as "Drayton" — the "East" was added later to tell it apart from West Drayton, four miles off. Thirty-three households, thirteen plough teams, held by the king both before and after the Conquest.
Nicholas Hawksmoor was born here around 1661, son of a farming family, though nobody can pin the date down because the parish's baptism records for those years are missing. Wren heard of his "early skill and genius" and took him on as a clerk at eighteen. He went on to work with Vanbrugh on Blenheim and Castle Howard and to design six London churches, Christ Church Spitalfields among them, and still owned land in the village he'd left by the time he died.
A circular walk starts three miles east at Dunham Toll Bridge, over the tidal Trent, passing three churches — Fledborough, Ragnall, Dunham — with views of Fledborough Viaduct, fifty-nine brick arches built from nine million bricks. A cycle route follows the old Chesterfield–Lincoln railway across the same river. The land here is flat Trent Valley clay, easy walking, and Cottam power station's cooling towers came down in August 2025.
East Drayton Sports Club, half a mile off the A57, has a football pitch and a cricket square reckoned among the best in Bassetlaw, plus a pavilion with a tea room. Retford station, on the East Coast Main Line, is seven miles east; the 89 bus runs three times a day.
Up in the church tower's ringing chamber, painted onto the wall, are rings the bell-ringers call "cheeses" — commemorating local weddings dated between 1769 and 1865, still there.
