The Lodsworth Larder is a purpose-built timber shop, designed by Val Hinde and built with the woodsman Ben Law, and it won a Sussex Heritage Award in 2010. It is community-run, does a few Post Office jobs and pours takeaway coffee, and its shelves carry local asparagus, seasonal vegetables, bakery goods, meat and artisan cheese alongside the ordinary groceries. The named suppliers read like a directory of the surrounding country: Goodwood Dairy, Young's Butchers, Sødt Bakery, Trefoil Farm, Hennings Wines, Chilgrove Gin and the local Langham Brewery. Since 2026 you can also order a fish box from Johnson's of Portsmouth.
Langham brews half a mile away, at The Granary on Langham Lane, in a restored 18th-century granary barn where it has worked since 2005. The water comes from beneath the building. Charlie is the head brewer, and the taproom and courtyard pour the cask ales, the hop-forward Hip Hop golden ale and the lower-strength Voyager beers. Its beers are served at the pub as well.
The pub is the Hollist Arms, which faces the small green and describes itself as "a destination pub disguised as a village local." There is a bar, a snug, a restaurant, function rooms, tables out on the green and a raised garden behind. Dogs are welcome. The kitchen batters its fish and chips in Langham beer, and the rest of the menu runs from a chicken-liver parfait and French onion soup to a bacon-and-cheddar burger, a slow-cooked lamb sandwich, wholetail scampi and a kale-and-quinoa vegan burger. At weekends there is slow-grown Sussex free-range rotisserie chicken with skinny fries and spiced slaw; on Sundays the roast comes family-style — chicken, beef, pork or a vegetarian nut roast, with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and vegetables. The building is on record in a 1425 charter and is thought to have become an inn around 1630, under a run of names — The Crown, Mants, the Poyntz Arms — and kept a blacksmith's forge going until 1945.
The old village sits around Church Lane and Vicarage Lane and is 13th-century in origin; The Street, the "new village," is largely 16th-century. The houses are built of rough local sandstone and Lodsworth stone, which gives the place a warm, stony colour. The illustrator E. H. Shepard spent his last years here, at Woodmancote. In 1119 Henry I confirmed a grant and exchange by Richard de Belmas, Bishop of London, that created the Liberty of Lodsworth, a private jurisdiction local historians say lasted until 1536; the manorial gallows stood on the rise still called Gallows Hill.
St Peter's, Grade II*, has a 13th-century nave and west tower, a 14th-century chancel, and transepts and aisles added in the 19th century. Inside there is a plain font and a conspicuous neo-Norman window in the south transept.
The walking is good in every direction. A nine-mile circuit from Cowdray loops through the estate and its golf course, Selham and Ambersham and back beside the River Rother, largely flat, with a pause at the Three Moles in Selham. For something shorter, Black Down lies to the north — an easy two-mile National Trust round through heath and woodland to the Temple of the Winds, a curved stone seat looking out over the Weald and the Downs. Tennyson walked these hills. Dogs are fine on the lead, since livestock graze up there.
Lodsworth sits north of the A272, midway between Midhurst and Petworth, with Petworth House and its Capability Brown deer park nearby in one direction and the Cowdray ruins in the other. The nearest railway stations are Haslemere and Pulborough; neither is in the village, so a car or taxi connection is normally needed. Back in the village, the hall opened in 2000 has recreation grounds behind it — a tennis court, playing fields, a children's playground and free parking.
In the churchyard at St Peter's stands the gravestone of William Morley, who died when the Titanic went down, cut alongside the names of his parents, James and Mary.