Two shops in Bakewell sell the original Bakewell pudding, and both of them mean it. The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop and Bloomers each guard a secret recipe they insist is the authentic one, which is a hard position for both to hold at the same time but has not stopped either from holding it for well over a century. The pudding — not the tart, which came later and is a different thing entirely — was supposedly an accident. Around 1820, Mrs Greaves, landlady of the White Horse Inn, left instructions for a jam tart; the cook spread the egg-and-almond mixture on top of the jam instead of stirring it into the pastry, and the result was good enough to survive the mistake. The first printed recipe appeared in Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845. Everything after that is disputed. The Old Original shop, housed in a cottage that once belonged to the town's tallow chandler, still sells its puddings and a tea towel that lists the ingredients with "a secret pinch of…?" left blank for you to work out.
The town sits on the River Wye in central Derbyshire, the largest settlement and the only town inside the Peak District National Park. A five-arch medieval bridge, thirteenth century and Grade I listed, carries the road across the Wye at the bottom of town; there are always ducks on the water below it and a weir a little downstream. Approaching from the valley you see Bakewell rising in honey-grey stone with All Saints' spire on the hill above. The centre stands at around 410 feet, and the limestone dales of the White Peak climb away from it in every direction.
The Manners, on Haddon Road, is the pub most people mean when they say the pub. It's a Robinsons house with a large garden, a separate tap room, three cask ales including Unicorn and Dizzy Blonde, and a resident dog called Ziggy who gets fresh water and treats without having to ask. The kitchen does a steak and ale pie it lists as the "steak and Unicorn pie," pork belly, hanging kebabs, a cheese pie, seafood pasta, and Sunday roasts from noon to six. One reviewer calls it "a real local heart of Bakewell pub, very friendly," and singles out the landlady, who is "just so lovely, always smiling and very helpful."
The others hold their ground. The Wheatsheaf on Bridge Street is a food-led Marston's pub rebuilt in 1963 around the bones of a vanished pub called the Anchor, refurbished again in 2016, and hung since with the sort of awards pubs give each other — Marston's Turnaround Winner 2017, a service prize in 2019. It runs up to four Marston's and Wychwood real ales and a beer garden one review calls spotless. A few doors along, the Queen's Arms is wet-led and unbothered about it: a long single-room bar, a games room with a pool table and dartboard, and no menu to speak of. The Peacock is a two-hundred-year-old coaching inn cooking everything on the premises from local ingredients, pouring Peak Ales, and carrying a TripAdvisor review titled, flatly, "Best Pub Food in Bakewell." The Castle Inn, sixteenth century and named for earthworks that are all that survive of Bakewell's medieval castle, has a beer garden and pet-friendly rooms.
The Rutland Arms holds Rutland Square, a Georgian coaching inn built in 1804 for the Duke of Rutland on the site of that same White Horse Inn where the pudding was born. It is also the source of one of the town's more persistent fictions — that Jane Austen stayed here and turned Bakewell into the town of Lambton in Pride and Prejudice. The tale first appeared without evidence in a 1905 guidebook, was embellished by a 1936 council guide that went so far as to name a specific room, and was later debunked. Austen almost certainly never came. Her biographer Elizabeth Jenkins was, by one account, "taken aback" to find the story still circulating in 1958.
Serious cooking has arrived more recently. Restaurant Lovage, opened in 2020 by chef-patron Lee Smith — who worked his way up from pot washer to head chef and once held a Michelin star — carries a Michelin Guide listing and two AA Rosettes. The tasting menu is not compulsory; there's à la carte and a £23 market menu, and the standout dishes across reviews are a rabbit agnolotti, pickled trout with blood orange and three different parts of the fennel, cauliflower soup with curry granola, and venison with date ketchup. Smith also runs Coffee by Lovage nearby, a daytime café doing truffled scrambled eggs and a ham-and-cheese croissant, dogs welcome, Wednesday to Saturday. On Bath Street, Piedaniel's has served mainstream French cooking since 1994 under Eric Piedaniel, from Normandy, and his wife Christiana — double-baked blue cheese soufflé, beef bourguignon, brill in lemon butter, crêpes Suzette. One reviewer described it as "a well thought-out and perfectly executed luncheon held in a small corner of France in the centre of Bakewell."
The newest and largest arrival is the Charleston, an Art Deco bar and restaurant opened in 2026 in the Grade II-listed former Royal Bank of Scotland, dormant since 2018 and brought back at a cost of around £2.5 million. The old strong-room is now a private dining room called the Speakeasy, seating up to ten, and there's a baby grand piano with live music every night. It's the work of Longbow Venues, whose founder Rob Hattersley grew up in the trade — his parents ran a Bakewell wine bar called Aitch's from 1982 to 2004. "My hospitality career started at Aitch's when I was 14," he has said. "Since it closed, people have often said there's been a gap." The menu runs from brunch — a waffle sandwich of buttermilk chicken and maple bacon, a "Florentine Gatsby" — to brasserie plates in the evening.
Thornbridge Brewery is a Bakewell business too, founded in 2005 on a second-hand ten-barrel kit in the outbuildings of Thornbridge Hall. Its first beer was Lord Marples, a 4% bitter still brewed today, but the beer that made its name was Jaipur, a 5.9% IPA. Demand outran the old kit, and a larger brewery went up at Riverside in 2009, with a taproom now open beside it. Thornbridge ales turn up across the local pubs, including the Packhorse at Little Longstone, a couple of miles out and a favourite start-and-finish for Monsal Head walks.
For the day-to-day, the Monday market has run every week of the year — bank holidays included — for centuries, some 140 stalls along Market Street and Granby Road, and it is the only market inside the National Park. Across the Wye, the livestock market at the Agricultural Business Centre, run by Bagshaws, is one of the largest cattle markets in the county. The rest of the town is courtyards and independent shops: delis, butchers, a florist known as the Pink Building set in a medieval courtyard with lopsided walls and latticed windows. For cake specifically, the Bakewell Tart Shop on Matlock Street has made its tart — the tart, not the pudding — to a century-old recipe for generations, and the Honey Bun Café is the place for a Bakewell slice.
The walking starts from the door. The Monsal Trail runs 8.5 traffic-free miles along the old Midland railway line, flat and well-surfaced and passable in winter, through four reopened, lit tunnels, and level enough for pushchairs and wheelchairs. Follow it northwest and you reach Monsal Head, where the five-arch Headstone Viaduct spans the dale — a structure so loathed when it was built that John Ruskin raged the valley was "gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour." It is now the celebrated view. Longer circuits run south to Haddon Hall and up Lathkill Dale, an 8.8-mile day through open fields and ancient tracks, or across the parkland to Chatsworth by way of the estate village of Edensor. At Hassop Station, a mile or so out, you can hire hybrids, electric mountain bikes, kids' bikes and child trailers, and eat wood-fired pizza on summer evenings while the children work through the Wendy houses.
Families rarely run short. The Recreation Ground, a few minutes from the square, has a play area, a splash pad open May to September, two tennis courts, football and cricket pitches, and two croquet lawns, all beside the river with picnic spots and ducks to feed. Chatsworth, three and a half miles northeast, keeps a farmyard of Suffolk Punch and Shire horses, Albion cattle and Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs, linked by a "secret tunnel" to an adventure playground with a zip wire and an Archimedes screw for hauling stream water. Getting here is easiest by car — the A6 runs through, Matlock station is about six miles south, and buses like the 218 Peakline connect Sheffield via Chatsworth roughly every half hour.
The history underneath all this is older than the puddings by a thousand years. Edward the Elder built a fortified burh here in 920, the same year All Saints' Church was founded; two well-preserved ninth-century Anglo-Saxon crosses still stand in its churchyard, and the Vernon Chapel inside holds the tomb of Sir George Vernon, the "King of the Peak," and monuments to his daughter Dorothy, whose elopement to John Manners of Haddon Hall became one of the county's favourite stories. The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Badequella, a King's manor held by William with eighteen ploughlands, eighty acres of meadow, and a mill worth about ten shillings. A market charter came in 1254. In 1637 an Earl of Rutland built a bath house over a warm spring, hoping to make Bakewell a spa to rival Buxton; it never did. Richard Arkwright dammed the river against the wishes of two dukes and built a cotton mill at Lumford that employed over three hundred; the industry is gone now. The railway that Ruskin hated arrived in 1862 and closed in 1968, leaving the Monsal Trail behind. Sir Maurice Oldfield, who ran MI6 in the 1970s and is thought to have helped inspire both Le Carré's Smiley and Fleming's M, was educated a mile away at Lady Manners School.
Every July, in a tradition the town keeps up, the wells are dressed with pictures made from flower petals, and the carnival includes a wheelbarrow race in which teams of two push each other around Bakewell, stopping for a drink in every pub on the way.
