The King William on Manchester Road does a Sunday roast with three meats, goose-fat potatoes, honey and thyme carrots and parsnips, crispy bacon cabbage and a Yorkshire pudding. It's a Robinsons house, pouring Dizzy Blonde and Unicorn, done out with a Peaky Blinders theme.
The Swan Inn, on Swan Street, is probably the oldest pub in the town — a traditional interior with low ceilings. It was one of three coaching inns on the Manchester–London turnpike in the early nineteenth century. "When the stage arrived from Manchester, fresh horses were brought out of the stables at the back and off they went to London and Birmingham." In 2016 it was rebranded as Anthology to draw a younger crowd. That closed in early 2024 and the old name went back up.
The Coach & Four, next to Sainsbury's, started as a coaching inn in the eighteenth century and has free live music every Friday. The Wilmslow Tavern, just off the A34, welcomes dogs in its beer garden and pours Marston's Pedigree, though regulars note the absence of hand-pumped ales. The King's Arms, off Fulshaw roundabout, keeps its original features and houses a Thai restaurant called Chilli Banana.
For food, A. Lang is the butcher on Lindow Parade and the Cheshire Mercantile is an independent food and drink shop on Church Street. Grove Street is the traditional independent-retail street, and the town runs on smart shops and café culture.
The River Bollin runs through The Carrs, a 71-acre park linking the town centre to open countryside. There are two play areas, a zip wire, a skate park and free tennis courts, and in summer children paddle in the shallow stretches — water shoes recommended. Henry Boddington gave the first playing fields to the public in 1925.
A surfaced, flat riverside path follows the Bollin for just under a mile to Twinnies Bridge, pushchair- and wheelchair-friendly the whole way. From Carrs Park you can carry on to Styal Woods and the National Trust's Quarry Bank Mill, about two miles along the river. Alder and willow line the banks; there are brown trout, dippers and kingfishers if you look, and bluebells and wild garlic in spring.
The station sits twelve miles south of Manchester Piccadilly on the West Coast Main Line, with Avanti trains to London, Northern services via the Styal line and the airport four miles off. The A34 bypasses the town to the east.
St Bartholomew's, Grade I listed, is mostly early sixteenth century, with a crypt chapel of around 1300 reached by a spiral stone staircase. It holds the oldest brass in Cheshire — Sir Robert del Booth and his wife Douce, from 1460. William Gladstone studied at the rectory here for four months in 1828.
Alan Turing bought a house at 43 Adlington Road in 1950 and died there in 1954; there is a blue plaque.
And out at Lindow Moss, in August 1984, a peat-cutter named Andy Mould took what he thought was a piece of wood off the shredding machine and threw it at his colleague. It was a man about two thousand years old, garrotte still round his neck. The hospital radiologists called him Pete Marsh. He is in the British Museum now, and the bog he came out of is a tenth of the size it was.
