The Marquis of Granby has no kitchen, and hasn't needed one for years; on Thursdays a pizza van pulls into the car park and everyone eats outside instead. The building dates to 1760 or earlier, has York stone floors, yew bar tops, an open coal fire and an outdoor toilet, and it's now the only pub left in a village that once had two — the other, the Boot & Shoe, closed in 2015.
It is the brewery tap for Brewster's, based in Grantham and founded by Sara Barton, who runs the pub with her husband, Sean McArdle; Adam Purcell manages day to day. The regulars on the bar are Brewster's Marquis, a 3.8% session bitter, and Hophead, a 3.6% blond ale, plus four rotating guest beers from smaller breweries. The Great Food Club called it "an honest, down to earth and welcoming Vale of Belvoir boozer." It's dog friendly, and the car park doubles as a sun trap in good weather.
In 2022 the pub's disused kitchen became the Dragon Street Stores and Coffee Shop, paid for with a Pub is The Hub grant, serving coffee from Nottingham's 200 Degrees roasters and groceries — the nearest supermarket is a 9-mile round trip. Granby covers most of what a visitor might want without leaving Dragon Street, named for a dragon carved into the old Methodist chapel nearby.
A regional survey found only seven of 25 nearby villages still had an open pub; Granby kept its last one and won the Great Food Club's Classic Pub of the Year in 2020/21 and local CAMRA's Pub of the Year in 2022.
Walks start from the door. The Vale of Belvoir Ramblers' route out of the village runs about 7.5 miles; a second, to Long Clawson, is closer to seven. Footpaths cross to Sutton-cum-Granby and on to Barkestone in Leicestershire, through farmland with long views to Belvoir Castle. The black-and-white cows in those fields supply the Colston Bassett and Long Clawson dairies, which make Stilton.
A cast-iron village pump from the 19th century still stands on Sutton Green; the Notts Villages blog once noted the roads here "twist round in circles or suddenly stop altogether."
All Saints' Church, Grade I listed, has fragments from the 12th century and a heavily moulded 13th-century doorway now tucked inside a 1958 porch. The bench ends, carved around 1440, show mermaids, angels and grotesque animals. A Roman altar stone turned up in the churchyard in 1812; nothing else has since.
The pub's name is one of the most common in the country, after John Manners, Marquess of Granby, who commanded cavalry at the Battle of Warburg in 1760 and, outnumbered three to one, charged so fast he lost his wig and hat — a moment the Royal Horse Guards still credit as the origin of saluting bare-headed — before setting up his wounded NCOs as landlords. Granby's own Marquis claims to be the original bearer of his name.
Aslockton, two miles from Bingham on the Nottingham–Skegness line, is the nearest station; the A52 runs to the south and buses connect to Nottingham and Melton Mowbray.
On Wednesdays the village hall — a former school built in 1871 — puts out light bites, cake, tea and coffee for Welcome Wednesdays, and nobody seems in any hurry to leave.
