The Star Inn on Parkhall Lane is a whitewashed, brick-built pub from the late 19th century, and until last year the same tenants had run it for nineteen years. They retired in 2025 and handed the lease back to the owners; it's been on the market since, still looking for someone to take it on. Worth knowing before you build an evening around it, because everything about the place suggests it's worth the wait — an elongated interior split into four trading areas, a real fire, darts, dominoes and cribbage, quiz nights and live music, and a split-level patio with benches for eighteen plus an enclosed rear terrace by the kitchen. CAMRA once called it "a small, friendly local serving excellent, well-kept ales," with Marston's Pedigree on cask and a rotating guest ale alongside it.
Directly opposite, according to the 1848 Tithe Survey, once stood the parish workhouse. There's no trace of it now, just houses, and a pub that isn't currently pouring anything.
Leigh Post Office holds down the village centre near the church — standard counter service, and not much else, the kind of shop that matters more for existing than for what it sells.
The real draw is All Saints', a Grade II*-listed cruciform church with a medieval crossing tower that survived a substantial rebuild in 1846, funded by the Bagot family of Blithfield. Inside, the nave arcade runs on cruciform piers with pointed arches and carved head-stops, and the chancel and crossing carry rib vaulting springing from foliated corbels. In the south transept is an alabaster tomb to Sir John Aston of Park Hall, who died in 1523: he and his wife lie in plate armour and long dress, his feet resting on a lion. There's also an 18th-century pulpit with its sounding board still in place, a chalice dated 1596, and three bells cast in 1450, 1627 and 1729.
Leigh's civil parish runs to nine outlying hamlets around the clustered village of Church Leigh — Withington, Upper and Lower Leigh, Morrilow Heath, Middleton Green, Dodsley, Godstone, Nobut and Field — spread across rolling, intensively farmed land in the vale of the River Blithe. Leigh Village Hall, in the centre, started life in 1857 as the village boys' school and now sits on two acres of landscaped grounds. All Saints C of E First School still serves the village, with Denstone College, Thomas Alleyne's and Painsley Catholic College among the schools nearby.
The Domesday Book records Leigh as "Lege," held by Burton Abbey after Wulfric Spot, Ealdorman of Mercia, gave it to the monastery in 1002. Its value rose from five shillings to twelve between the abbey's acquisition and 1086, worked by one free man and ten households between five plough teams. Monastic ownership lasted until 1178, when the abbot sold the church to Robert Fitz Ulviet for five marks — the first layman to hold it.
Leigh's own railway station opened with the North Staffordshire Railway in 1848 and closed in the Beeching cuts of 1966; the nearest stop now is Uttoxeter, six miles east on the Crewe–Derby line. The village sits well under a mile south of the A50, which puts Stafford and the M6 within easy reach, and Alton Towers about half an hour's drive. Five minutes the other way is Denstone Hall Farm Shop & Café, a working farm shop and butchery that's picked up national awards including Best Large Farm Shop Retailer in the UK.
Somewhere along the way, the font at All Saints spent a stretch of its working life as a cheese press, before it was restored to the church in 1897. It's back doing the job it was built for now, and nobody seems to have written down why it left in the first place.
