The Shrewsbury Arms is owned by several hundred people. Not a brewery, not a couple who fancied a change of pace, but shareholders in the Kingstone Community Society, who bought the pub at auction in April 2019 after it had stood closed for two years and reopened it that September. It's now a registered Asset of Community Value — the kind of status a village only bothers with once it's lost a pub.
Inside there's a real fireplace, a games corner for cribbage and dominoes, and a function room that seats sixty. Dogs are allowed in the bar, and there's a beer garden for when the weather cooperates. It's open Wednesday to Sunday, closed Monday and Tuesday, worth knowing before you turn up expecting a Monday dinner.
Everything on the menu bar the bread and ice cream is made on site — bread from Buckley Bakehouse, ice cream from Needwoods. Fish pie and the pie of the day both run £16, beer-battered haddock is £15, and there's a fixed-price lunch menu Monday to Friday, noon till five. Regulars on the bar are Marston's Pedigree and Uttoxeter Brewing Company's Paddock Porter, alongside one changing guest ale, usually local.
Head Chef Adam Bonner runs the kitchen; Emma Smith, Kay Hughes and Tracy Punchard manage the floor, having already turned round the Red Lion at Newborough before taking this one on. "At the end of the meal, we had a lovely chat with Kay, who runs the pub," reads one Tripadvisor review. CAMRA gave it a Rising Star award in 2020 and runner-up for Pub of the Year in 2022.
There's no independent shop, butcher or bakery in Kingstone itself — the nearest is Denstone Hall Farm Shop & Café, a short drive away in Denstone.
For walking, the Blithfield Reservoir route is the one to know: nine miles across farmland and woodland, following the River Blithe through the villages and farms on its way, with, by one account, "lots of stiles, some of them high." The wet meadows below the reservoir dam hold badgers, foxes, rabbits, herons, moorhens and kingfishers. Kingstone Wood is part of the old Bagots Forest.
The Manor Golf Club on Leese Hill, family-run since 1991, is a 6,092-yard parkland course, green fees roughly £18 to £28, visitors welcome daily. Kingstone Recreation Ground has a playing field, a tennis court and a children's play area.
The church, St John the Baptist, was rebuilt in 1860–61 in the Early Decorated style, replacing a church recorded here since at least 1175 that had been judged "very much decayed" by 1851. Architect David Brandon designed it, with the south aisle added later by G. E. Street. Sir Simon Degge, a 17th-century Staffordshire judge who built himself a private chapel at the old church, was buried there, and his memorial inscriptions were carried across into the new building.
Kingstone as it now stands dates only to 1862, when the parish church went up; the 2011 census counted 629 people, close to what it's been since. The Shrewsbury Arms takes its name from the Earls of Shrewsbury, whose seat, Wanfield Hall, stands nearby since 1924, when Alton Towers was sold off after the 20th Earl's death.
Uttoxeter station is 3.2 miles away, the village sits just off the A518, and the 841 bus runs to Uttoxeter and Stafford Monday to Saturday. None of which matters much once you're at the fireside table with a hand of cribbage and a pint of Paddock Porter, in a pub that several hundred people quite literally own a piece of.
