Gotham, a name with a long reach
An English folk tale, a nickname for New York, a fictional city across many genres, and a luxury hotel brand in Britain
Gotham is a short name with an unusually long life. It begins as a village in Nottinghamshire, becomes a joke about wisdom disguised as folly, crosses the Atlantic as a nickname for New York, and then settles into fiction as the dark city of Batman. Satirists, comic writers, filmmakers and hoteliers have all found a use for it. In Britain it is also the name of a luxury hotel collection. Few ordinary English place names have travelled so far, or gathered so many associations, without losing the older meaning underneath.
The wise men of a Nottinghamshire village
Gotham is a real village in Nottinghamshire, south of Nottingham. The place name is usually traced to Old English for a homestead where goats were kept, but the village is remembered less for livestock than for a medieval joke. The story most often told is that the people of Gotham, hearing that King John meant to pass through, acted the fool so thoroughly that the court turned aside. They raked the moon out of a pond, tried to drown an eel, and otherwise performed the labour of madmen. The point of the tale is the opposite of its surface. By looking stupid they kept the village off a road the king would have claimed.
Later readers called them the Wise Men of Gotham. Printed versions circulated in the sixteenth century as the merry tales of Gotham’s mad men, sometimes linked to Andrew Boorde, though that authorship is uncertain. What survived was the irony. A Gothamite was someone whose foolishness might, on a second look, be a strategy. The village had given the language a name for cunning dressed up as nonsense, and that name proved easy to carry.
How New York became Gotham
In 1807 Washington Irving and his collaborators used Gotham as a satirical name for New York City in the Salmagundi papers. The allusion was to the English village and its supposed wise fools. Irving was needling the city’s vanity, not describing a skyline. The nickname outlived the joke. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, American writers and newspapers reached for Gotham when they wanted New York with a slightly literary, slightly mocking edge.
The transfer mattered. An English parish joke had become a metropolitan label, and the metropolis kept it. When later writers wanted a city that felt like New York without being pinned to a map, Gotham was already waiting. The name had learned how to mean a great city while still winking at the village that lent it.
A fictional city across comics, film and television
The name’s widest fame belongs to Batman. The character first appeared in 1939, and his city was soon called Gotham City rather than New York. The naming is credited to writer Bill Finger, who wanted a place that felt like New York after dark without being New York on the page. Gotham City became the permanent setting: a dense, corrupt, rain-soaked metropolis of alleys, gargoyles and impossible architecture.
That setting has been retold in genres that only partly overlap. The comics move between detective fiction, gothic melodrama and superhero adventure. The 1960s television series played the same streets as pop-art comedy. Tim Burton’s films leaned into gothic fantasy. Christopher Nolan’s films treated the city as the stage of a crime epic. The television series Gotham, broadcast from 2014 to 2019, told the story before Batman, as a police drama. Animation and games have used it again for noir, horror and open-world crime. One place name now signals a shelf of tones: camp, dread, realism and myth. Readers and viewers do not need the Nottinghamshire tale explained to them, but the older joke is still in the word.
Satire, prizes and the wider culture
Outside the comic, Gotham still works as a label for the city and for a certain kind of American culture. Journalists write Gotham when they want New York in a single word, with Irving’s irony still faintly attached. The Gotham Awards, first presented in 1991, use the name for independent film and media rather than for capes and cowls. Bars, books and brands borrow it when they want night-time glamour, a hint of the illustrated page, or the older idea of cunning fools.
The word is short, easy to say, and already full. It does not behave like a coined trademark that has to be taught. It arrives with folklore, a real city, and a fictional one already attached. Each new use can pick a different layer: the folk tale, the satire, the gothic skyline, or simply the sound of a name that feels established.
Hotel Gotham in Britain
In Britain the name has also been used for hotels. Hotel Gotham is a luxury collection whose original house, in Manchester, opened in 2015 in a former bank headquarters on King Street, a 1920s building associated with Sir Edwin Lutyens. The hotel played the name theatrically: Art Deco rooms, a sense of private-club glamour, and a 1930s mood rather than a comic-book costume. Bespoke Hotels created that first property, and the idea was a brand rather than a single building.
Further Hotel Gotham houses opened in Newcastle upon Tyne, on Pilgrim Street, and in Bristol, at 15 Small Street. The Manchester hotel was later acquired by Leonardo Hotels. The Gotham name there was only licensed for a time, and in April 2026 that house was rebranded as The Rex. Newcastle and Bristol have continued as Hotel Gotham. The collection shows how the name behaves in hospitality. It suggests decadence, a staged past, and a city address, and it does so without dressing the building as a film set. A guest can take the name as luxury and theatre, whether or not they have read a comic.
Several meanings, still one name
Put together, Gotham is not a single reference. It is an English folk tale about intelligence disguised as folly, an American nickname for New York, the definitive fictional city of a global entertainment franchise, a prize in independent film, and a British hotel brand that chose it for luxury rather than for superheroes. That spread is rare. Most place names stay local. This one has been useful to satirists, comic writers, filmmakers and hoteliers for centuries, and each new use has left the earlier ones intact.
A reader can still hear the Wise Men of Nottinghamshire under the rain of Batman’s city. A guest can book Hotel Gotham in Newcastle without thinking of either. The name holds those meanings at once, which is why it has kept being chosen, in folklore, in print, on screen and on a hotel fascia, long after the village that started it could have been forgotten.