Apostille vs. Embassy legalisation for Kenya
The short answer comes first: an apostille is not accepted for Kenya, and no amount of correctly filling in the FCDO's form ever changes that fact, however carefully the form is completed. The certificate is genuine, the signature is real, and none of it matters, because Kenya is not part of the system that makes an apostille mean anything at all on arrival.
The longer answer is that document legalisation for Kenya runs the older way instead — a chain of approvals ending with a foreign authority linked to Kenya adding its own separate stamp, not a single UK certificate standing in for the whole chain of steps. Apostille for Kenya, as a phrase, describes a product that simply is not sold to this particular destination.
Kenya's Hague status & what it means
The United Kingdom has belonged to the Hague Apostille Convention since 1965, and that membership only does anything useful when the receiving country belongs to the same agreement too, on its own side. Kenya does not, so the shared trust an apostille depends on is entirely missing on one side of the exchange, no matter how the UK side behaves.
That is not a technicality to work around with slightly better paperwork or a cleverer form; it is the entire reason the process looks so different here. Apostille issued in Nottingham for use in Kenya is not a real product, whichever way the search happens to be phrased, because the destination itself never agreed in advance to recognise it at all.
The Nottingham → Kenya route step by step
The underlying paper still comes first, exactly as it would for any destination at all, Kenya included. A civil record should be a fresh certified copy from Nottingham Register Office rather than the one original a family holds, since that original is not easily replaced if something goes wrong partway through a longer process.
What you need for an apostille for Kenya, once that paper is sorted, turns out to be nothing at all in the end — apostille from United Kingdom to Kenya is simply not the next step to take here. The real next step is finding out precisely what Kenya's own legalisation route requires, a process that sits entirely outside the FCDO's postal apostille service in every respect.
Cost & timing for this route
For a destination where the apostille route does genuinely apply, the FCDO charges £45 per document by standard post, or £40 next-day for registered businesses only, with a wait of up to 25 working days plus postage each way. None of that figure means anything for Kenya, since it prices a certificate Kenya will never use at all in practice.
Legalisation cost and timing for Kenya sit with whichever authority handles that separate stage, not with the FCDO, and neither number appears among what this page can safely state without guessing at either one. Anyone planning around a fixed date should expect the legalisation track to run longer than the familiar apostille figure, never the same and certainly never shorter.
Destination-specific requirements
Kenya's own government authorities decide what a foreign document needs before they will accept it, and that decision sits well outside anything the FCDO controls from its own office in Milton Keynes. No UK stamp, apostille or otherwise, ever substitutes for that specific Kenyan decision, however official the UK stamp itself looks on the finished page.
None of this changes because the document started out in Nottingham rather than anywhere else in the UK, or in any other city in the country entirely. The honest starting point is treating a Kenya-bound paper as a legalisation case from day one, not an apostille case that merely happens to need a different, more specific office.