The Woodlark Inn on Church Street keeps a coal fire going through the winter and has no fruit machines. It's a red-brick former beerhouse with a bare-brick, beamed bar, and it runs its own microbrewery alongside a kitchen that sources seafood from award-winning Cornwall suppliers. The specials board has carried calamari with garlic mayo and lemon, and slow-roasted duck with mashed potatoes, cranberries and green beans, alongside the standing Sunday lunches and steaks. Three changing cask ales sit next to two regulars, Theakston Best Bitter and Timothy Taylor Landlord. LeftLion's Lizzy O'Riordan called it "the traditional pub and microbrewery located in one of Nottingham's cutest residential areas... a really friendly atmosphere, with a snug interior and a heated outdoor area." Tripadvisor has it at 4.8 out of 5, 21st of 1,249 restaurants in Nottingham. There's a beer festival in June and another in September, and Tapas & Tunes on the last Sunday of the month from April to September.
A few doors down the road at 82 Main Street, the Robin Hood Inn is smaller and plainer, a two-roomed local with a mix of carpet and flagstone floor. It's been licensed since 1855, under this and its former name, the Robin Hood & Little John. The kitchen does a big Yorkshire pudding with mash, gravy and vegetables, homemade chips and fish, shepherd's pie and stone-baked pizzas. There's a quiz on Thursdays, pool, darts, dominoes, and Wainwright Amber on cask.
The pub on Main Street itself has had three names since 1855: the Nag's Head, then The Lambley after a 2023 refit, and now the Lambley Village Kitchen, since the previous operators left in January 2026 to concentrate on their other pubs. The Sunday roast survived the changeover — leg of lamb, dry-aged topside of beef, homemade Yorkshire pudding — and locals still rate it.
Spring Lane Farm Shop has been trading since 1962. It bakes farmhouse, granary, wholemeal and multi-seed bread on site every day, runs its own butchery for beef, lamb, pork and game, and keeps a deli counter of local cheeses and pork pies.
Walk out of the village either side and you drop into the dumbles — steep, wooded ravines that glacial meltwater cut into the bedrock about ten thousand years ago, thick with ferns and wildflowers. The full Lambley Dumbles Circular is 5.5 miles, taking in a ridge with views across to the Vale of Belvoir; a shorter 2.5km loop starts and ends in Gedling. The local historical society has also mapped out four heritage trails, from a 1.7km nature walk to a 7.5km version of the Top Trail.
Holy Trinity Church is Grade I listed and almost entirely Perpendicular in style, rebuilt around 1470 with money from Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Treasurer of England, who was born in the village and later built Tattershall Castle. His badge, a bulging purse carved in stone, sits in panels beside the east window. Pevsner called the church "one of the few entirely Perp. village churches in Notts, all of a piece and of felicitous proportions." Grooves worn into the outer walls, where medieval archers sharpened their arrows in the churchyard, are still there to look at.
Domesday recorded the manor as Lambeley, worth 60 shillings, unchanged from the time of Edward the Confessor, with two mills and twenty acres of meadow. Framework knitting arrived later and stayed for a couple of centuries — by 1844 there were 381 stocking frames in the village, and the long weaver's windows built to light them are still visible on cottages along Main Street and Green Lane.
The village show runs every September on Catfoot Lane, with a scarecrow competition through the streets beforehand, a dog show, a tug of war, and the WI serving breakfast cobs from nine in the morning.
