The Cricketers Arms on Peter Street brews its own beer in the back yard. The Howzat brewery has been turning out house beers since 2020, and on any given day there are fourteen or fifteen hand-pulls on the bar. From Thursday to Sunday a garden hut serves stone-baked pizzas from four o'clock. It won CAMRA's National Pub of the Year in 2017, which for a family-run community local on a residential street is no small thing. Reviewers mention Northern Soul vibes and a proper locals' feel, and both seem to be true.
It is not the only pub worth the walk. The Turks Head on Cooper Street took Merseyside and Cheshire Pub of the Year in 2024. The Sefton does the traditional side — roast beef, fish and chips — with ales to match. The local CAMRA branch runs to over 700 members, so the real-ale scene goes deeper than three names.
For daytime, the parks do the heavy lifting. Taylor Park opened in 1893 and has a lake with swans, two playgrounds, a giant climbing net and a visitor centre. Sherdley Park is the big one at 336 acres, with an eighteen-hole golf course, a formal garden and a fenced play area for small children. Victoria Park, in the town centre, has a skate park and puts on concerts through the summer.
The better walks are out on the reclaimed colliery land. Sutton Manor Woodlands climb to the Dream sculpture — Jaume Plensa's 66-foot white head of a young woman with her eyes closed, 500 tonnes of it, standing on the site of the pit that closed in 1991. The ex-miners chose the design themselves. From the top, on a clear day, the view runs to Snowdonia and the Peak District.
Down in the valley, the Sankey Canal towpath makes for flat waterside walking. The canal opened in 1757 and has a fair claim to being the first modern canal of the industrial age, built to carry coal to Liverpool before the Bridgewater got the credit.
Glass is the industry that stuck. Pilkington, founded in 1826, is still the town's one large employer, and in 1959 Alastair Pilkington and Kenneth Bickerstaff worked out how to float molten glass on molten tin to make it perfectly flat — the process the world now uses. The World of Glass museum runs live glass-blowing demonstrations and takes you down into the Victorian furnace tunnels.
The town is named after a chapel — a St Elyn's chapel stood on the Ormskirk Street site by 1552, and the settlement grew up around it where four townships met. The present parish church, rebuilt in the 1920s after a fire, is the one Pevsner called "the focal point of the town." Up on North Road, St Mary's Lowe House — paid for by ordinary townspeople in hard times — is known locally as the Poor Man's Cathedral.
St Helens Central sits in the centre on the Liverpool–Wigan line, with the M62 running past the Dream sculpture at Junction 7. The Saints, the rugby league club, have been playing since 1873 and won four Super League titles in a row from 2019. Johnny Vegas grew up in Thatto Heath and still lives here, and still tells anyone who'll listen that they should visit.
