The Roebuck sells a burger made entirely from ingredients sourced within a hundred yards of the pub. It's called the Totally Locally Leek Burger, and it comes out of a Tudor-style building that has stood since 1626. Behind the bar are somewhere between ten and thirteen cask ale pumps, said to be the most in the Staffordshire Moorlands. If a burger with a hundred-yard supply chain isn't your thing, there is a toasted bacon, brie and cranberry sandwich that a reviewer summed up as "What perfect sandwiches. Toasted bacon, brie and cranberry mmm."
Leek does not run short of places to drink. The Fountain Inn keeps up to eight real ales and was CAMRA's Staffordshire Moorlands Urban Pub of the Year in 2023. The Wilkes Head, one of the town's oldest pubs and dating to the 1700s, has the oldest cellar in Leek and has been in the Good Beer Guide for twenty-four years running. It is named after John Wilkes, the eighteenth-century politician, journalist and hell-raiser, which is a lot of billing for a free house.
For something different there's Den Engel, a Belgian bar that has run for over twenty-eight years and stocks four real ales alongside a hundred-plus bottled beers. The Earl Grey Inn started life as a registered "Beer-House" in 1831. Out at Denford, on the embankment of the Caldon Canal, the Hollybush Inn pours award-winning ales from a converted flour mill.
The town's market has been running on Wednesdays since King John granted the charter in 1207, and it hasn't stopped since. There are Friday and Saturday markets too, a farmers' and craft market on the third Saturday with sixty-plus stalls, and a Totally Locally Sunday Supplement of up to eighty. The refurbished Victorian Butter Market hall holds fresh produce and four hot-food outlets. Getliffe's Yard is a courtyard of early-nineteenth-century cottages turned over to independent shops. The local speciality to eat is the Staffordshire oatcake.
St Edward the Confessor's Church is Grade II* listed, thirteenth-century at its core and rebuilt after a fire. It holds windows by Morris & Co. — a north-aisle east window by Edward Burne-Jones — and examples of the Leek School of Embroidery, founded in 1879 by Lady Elizabeth Wardle. Leek was a silk town: William Morris himself came to Thomas Wardle's dyeworks between 1875 and 1878 to learn natural dyeing, drawn by a "raven-black" dye made with water from the River Churnet.
Leek is built on the slope and crown of a hill, above 600 feet, and it calls itself the Gateway to the Peak District without much exaggeration. The Roaches escarpment rises to 1,657 feet minutes from town, a four-mile circular over Hen Cloud with views on a clear day as far as Snowdon. Tittesworth Reservoir is a seven-minute drive; Rudyard Lake has a flat circuit and a narrow-gauge steam railway.
There is no station. The old one closed in 1965 and is now a Morrisons; you arrive by the A523 or A53, or on a First Potteries bus.
Around the summer solstice the sun sets behind a hill six miles off, slips into a hollow, and sets a second time. Robert Plot recorded this Double Sunset in 1686, and people still climb up to the churchyard to watch it happen.
