Lowdham

Gold Postbox and Village Pubs

The postbox outside Lowdham Post Office is painted gold, for Richard Whitehead, the Paralympic sprinter, and it stands on Main Street between the Co-op and the pubs as a fact nobody's made a fuss about.

There are five pubs for a village of just over three thousand people. The Old Ship Inn is the oldest, with a landlord on record since 1788, and does a Sunday roast — beef at £14.95, or turkey, pork, chicken breast or nut roast, with cauliflower cheese on the side for £3.75. A blue plaque on its wall marks Harold Cottam, the wireless operator who picked up Titanic's distress call aboard RMS Carpathia in 1912 and retired to Lowdham, where he died in 1984. The Railway, next to the station, has walls hung with railway memorabilia and has been named Best Pub in the East Midlands; it runs a quiz on the first Sunday of the month. The Springfield Inn sits back from the road with fields on three sides, does mushroom pie and fish cakes alongside its Sunday roast, and takes dogs of any size — one visitor was seated in a quiet corner with a Labrador. The Magna Charta, a Greene King house with an L-shaped bar, has been licensed since at least 1876 and once had the footballer Tommy Lawton as landlord. The World's End, on Plough Lane, used to be called the Plough.

The Bookshop and Festival

For thirty years the village had its own bookshop. Jane Streeter opened The Bookcase on Main Street in 1996, and in 1999 she and Ross Bradshaw, then the county council's literature officer, met and — as they put it — "after an hour we decided to run a book festival." It began in 2000 with an interview with the novelist Alan Sillitoe in the Village Hall and grew into what its founders called the flagship book event for the whole county, filling the halls and pubs each June. It carried on the year the village flooded. 2026 is the twenty-sixth and final festival: the shop closes on 1 September, thirty years to the day after it opened, as Jane Streeter retires.

Old Lowdham and St Mary's

The old part of the village sits west of the bypass, up lanes cut by the local dumbles — steep wooded valleys where streams have worn through the clay plateau. St Mary's is there, a 13th-century church heavily restored in the 1860s, with the effigy of Sir John de Lowdham lying in the chancel in chain mail, a dog carved at his feet to mark him as a warrior. Domesday recorded the settlement as Ludham: three households and one ploughland, among the smallest quarter of places in the book.

Walking and Railway Links

Walking routes head out along Dover Beck and the Trent — a loop taking in Gunthorpe and Caythorpe, or a longer stretch past Hoveringham Mill — and Lowdham station, on the Nottingham–Lincoln line since 1846, gets you into Nottingham in around sixteen minutes.

A Final Festival

The last Lowdham Book Festival will still open in the Village Hall, the way the first one did in 2000, with a third of the crowd arriving on foot down the lanes because that's how it's always been. The shop that started it all closes a few months later, and the gold postbox will carry on standing outside the Post Office regardless.