The Star Inn on Nottingham Road keeps pygmy goats in its beer garden, beside the children's play area. It's a deceptively spacious brick building, split by pillars onto a patio and garden. The kitchen runs classic — Lincolnshire sausage and onions, a mixed grill, a Sunday roast reviewers praise for its portions. Chris and Lisa run it, with Marston's Pedigree and a changing guest ale, plus a dartboard.
Two more pubs share the village. The Cuckoo Bush Inn on Leake Road takes its name from the legend of villagers who fenced in a cuckoo to keep spring forever — self-preservation, as it turns out. Inside, it's the oldest-feeling of the three: a long narrow room with banquettes, a carpeted lounge, and a snug with a tiled floor and low beams. Recorded as a public house in 1876 under Joseph Talbot, it closed for years and is now due a roughly £111,000 refurbishment. Dogs are welcome everywhere except the dining area during service.
The Sun Inn faces St Lawrence's Church across the square, built in 1840 as the Peel Inn — a coaching inn once popular with Nottingham gentry at weekends and, apparently, a honeymoon destination. Gary and Simon took over as licensees in June 2024 and have expanded the cask range from one ale to five, across nine hand pumps.
There's a newsagent, a fish and chip shop, and a convenience store with a Post Office counter. The village has lost its butcher's — Jim and Freda Adcock ran one on East Street, Eric and Jean Pepper's grocer's nearby — both now private houses.
Gotham sits on its own hill, part of the West Leake Hills ridge, two miles south of the Trent and seven miles from Nottingham. St Lawrence's Church, opposite the Sun Inn, dates from around 1180, its Norman nave topped by a 13th-century tower and broach spire — the largest of five churches straddling the A453 known locally as "The 453 Churches."
The best walk is the Gotham Hill Wood Circular, a six-mile loop over Gotham Hill and the West Leake Hills into the flat Trent valley, past Thrumpton Hall's gatehouse and the Cuckoo Bush Mound — a Neolithic barrow linked to the cuckoo-fencing tale, though it predates the story by thousands of years. A footpath also follows Kingston Brook to Kingston on Soar.
The cuckoo was the least of it. Villagers, in the tale, also tried to drown an eel and rolled cheeses downhill, convincing the king's men that the place was unfit for a royal road. "We ween there are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it," they reportedly said of themselves. The tales were published in 1540 as stories of the "mad men of Gotham"; later editions changed "mad" to "wise."
Washington Irving borrowed the name for New York City in 1807, and Bill Finger later borrowed it from Irving for Batman. The village sign has since been stolen at least three times by fans after a souvenir.
East Midlands Parkway is the nearest station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, and Gotham sits on the A453 within five miles of the M1. Buses run a route once operated by the South Notts Bus Company, based on Leake Road until 1991.
Somewhere between the goats at the Star and the missing road sign, Gotham has settled into not taking itself entirely seriously — which, for a village whose name means "goat homestead" in Old English, seems about right.
