Qualla: Gotham, Nottinghamshire

Gotham, Nottinghamshire: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Vince, CC BY-SA 2.0. When Washington Irving needed a name to mock the foolish self-importance of New Yorkers in his 1807 Salmagundi Papers, he reached for a village in Nottinghamshire that the English had been laughing at since the Middle Ages. Bill Finger later chose the name for Batman's city - he spotted "Gotham Jewelers" in a New York phone book, a name already freighted with Irving's irony. The original Gotham still sits on a hill in Rushcliffe, population 1,567, with a parish council and three pubs - one of them the Cuckoo Bush Inn.

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Image: Richard Vince | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gotham, Nottinghamshire: The Wise Men Were Not Fools

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Murray-Rust, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Old English name means goat home. The story it became famous for has nothing to do with goats. Sometime in the reign of King John - tradition is vague about the exact year - the king's surveyors came through Nottinghamshire mapping a royal highway. A road through Gotham would...

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Image: Alan Murray-Rust | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gotham, Nottinghamshire: From Joke to Manhattan

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Murray-Rust, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Wise Men of Gotham became a stock figure of English humour - foolish on the surface, ingeniously practical beneath. By the time Washington Irving was a young satirist in the new United States, the joke had crossed the Atlantic. In Salmagundi, Irving's mock newspaper of 1807, ...

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Image: Alan Murray-Rust | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gotham, Nottinghamshire: The Bush, the Cuckoo, and the Pub

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Beniston, CC BY 3.0. There is still a Cuckoo Bush. There is also still a Cuckoo Bush Mound at the edge of the village, which is in fact a Neolithic burial mound roughly 3,000 years old, excavated in 1847 and almost certainly the site the legend latched onto. The medieval villagers, in other words, we...

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Image: John Beniston | CC BY 3.0

Gotham, Nottinghamshire: Gypsum and Tornadoes

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Slater, CC BY-SA 2.0. The hill west of the village, Gotham Hill, holds Britain's largest deposits of gypsum, the mineral that becomes plaster and plasterboard. From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, a two-mile branch off the Great Central main line carried the output of the gypsum mines and...

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Image: John Slater | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gotham, Nottinghamshire: What the Village Gave Away

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Murray-Rust, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most places struggle to be famous for one thing. Gotham gave the world a stock phrase, a major American city's literary nickname, and, eventually, the most iconic urban setting in comics - and it did so by playing dumb. The trick the medieval villagers worked on King John's knigh...

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Image: Alan Murray-Rust | CC BY-SA 2.0