Petersfield

The Square, the church and an old inn

In the middle of The Square, a lead statue of William III sits on horseback dressed as a Roman emperor. It was cast in 1753 and then spent decades being moved about the town, from St Peter's Road to New Way, before it settled here in 1812; the sculptor Robert Colton restored it in 1912. It presides over a market square that fills with stalls every Wednesday and Saturday, with a farmers' market on the first Sunday of the month. Food, cooked food, clothing and general goods change hands where they have changed hands for something close to nine hundred years.

St Peter's dominates the other side of The Square. The Grade I-listed church began in the second quarter of the twelfth century as a cruciform building with a crossing tower, put together from local sandstone and ironstone rubble with herringbone flint. Inside there is a carved chancel arch from that first century of work, with billet and chevron ornament and waterleaf capitals, and a surviving twelfth-century south doorway. Arthur Blomfield rebuilt the chancel in 1873 and added the north porch in 1885, and a fire in 1962 led to a further restoration by Thomas Ford the following year. There are monuments to the Jolliffe family, one of them to George Jolliffe, who was killed aboard HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of the Nile. In the churchyard lies John Small, a cricketer from the Hambledon era whose tomb remembers him as the father of English cricket.

For lunch without leaving The Square, The George is the natural stop. It is a bistro-style pub with two drinking areas, pavement tables and a large courtyard at the back. The kitchen runs from fried squid with lemon-and-coriander mayonnaise and a smoked-haddock fishcake to bangers with bubble and squeak and onion gravy, a Moroccan salad, a buttermilk-chicken burger and sourdough pizzas such as brie, caramelised onion and ham. It is one of the oldest continuously trading businesses in the town, once a coaching inn of three buildings, of which the tap-bar survives; a stranger who died there in 1592 was buried across the square at St Peter's.

A coaching road full of inns

Petersfield has a notably strong pub tradition, and the reason is the old road. It sat on the London-to-Portsmouth route, and the naval traffic that grew from the later seventeenth century kept the coaching trade and its inns busy. Daniel Defoe passed through and called it "a town eminent for little but being full of good inns." The A3 bypass took the through traffic away in 1992, but the inns stayed. The Good Intent, a sixteenth-century former coaching inn on College Street, still presents itself as a country pub in town, with split-level rooms, an open fireplace, a restaurant and regular live music; it makes its own pies, welcomes dogs, has a garden and, usefully, its own parking. A little further along College Street, the Red Lion occupies another former coaching inn, now a Wetherspoon, whose fabric runs back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century. A 1696 document names a Lion here; a 1734 one describes the Red Lion as lately built on the site of the former Sun. The Freemasons bought the rear of the building in 1820 and put up the Masonic Hall behind it. The pub keeps a pair of teak doors said to have come from a fort in Rajasthan.

The Square Brewery, back on The Square, is a traditional local run by Melissa and Daniel Oates, with a real fire, games, a covered courtyard and homemade seasonal food. The premises date to about 1739. George Gale & Co bought it in 1907 and shut its small brewery soon after, which is where the name comes from. Round the corner on the High Street, The Townhouse is a relaxed independent with three handpumps, nine keg fonts and a fridge of local and Belgian bottles to take away, including its own t'otherone craft beer, brewed with 81 Artisan Brewery. It has served pie and chips, loaded fries, a ploughman's and a chicken burger with slaw. Dogs and children are both allowed, and there is a small patio at the back. If you want to drink rather than eat, the Black Sheep on Sheep Street is a plain town-centre local with an L-shaped bar, live sport, two changing cask ales and a patio garden; and the Escapist on Chapel Street, opened over the May bank holiday in 2025 by the brothers-in-law Steve Pottinger and Tom Owen, is a micropub with an industrial fit-out, an old motorcycle in the window and seven changing beers. There are also the wine bars and restaurants: The Folly on College Street does rosemary-and-garlic baked Camembert, beer-battered fish and chips, chicken schnitzel and a beef burger with Brie, bacon and onion relish; and Annie Jones on Lavant Street, a restaurant and cocktail bar with a courtyard, has been part of the town for more than thirty-five years and cooks in a style it describes as French-ish.

Independent tables and shelves

The eating extends well beyond the pubs, and much of it is genuinely local. Madeleine's Kitchen on Lavant Street began in 2011 when Antonia Troth and Kathryn Rodbert were supplying soups and cakes to shops, and grew into a British deli selling cheeses, quiches, ready meals and composed salads such as Puy lentil with roast beetroot and tomato. A few doors along, the Natural Food Deli has been a health-food shop, cafe and restaurant since 2012, sourcing where it can from within fifty miles. Fez, on Bakery Lane, is a Turkish meze bar of more than fourteen years' standing; La Piazzetta, in a Grade II-listed building on The Square that dates to around 1534, is a family-run Italian with a Neapolitan chef named Pasquale; and Spice Lounge occupies the first floor of another listed building on The Square, said to be five hundred years old. For bread there is the Real Bread & Food Company, which bakes with organic flour and a sourdough culture said to be eighty-five years old, sold through stockists including Juniper, a refill shop that sells dried rice, oats, chickpeas, chocolate and dried mango loose, alongside refillable cleaning products.

Two bookshops sit at the heart of the town. One Tree Books was founded in 1994 by Tim O'Kelly and contains Ginger's, a fully vegetarian, dog-friendly cafe with home-baked cakes; a serious fire on Lavant Street in July 2025 forced the shop to move out for a few months, but it was back in its original premises by that November. The Petersfield Bookshop on Chapel Street is older and quieter, a second-hand and antiquarian dealer founded in 1918 that still handles maps, prints and bookbinding. Dr Harry Roberts started it; Frank Westwood bought it in 1958, and it remains in his family. Out on the Rogate Road, Durleighmarsh Farm Shop combines pick-your-own crops with local cheese, organic meat, wine and cider.

From hanging woods to ancient heath

The town sits in a bowl of countryside, with Butser Hill and the chalk Downs to the south, the wooded Hampshire Hangers to the west and north, and higher ground at Hill Brow and Durford to the north-east. That mix of chalk scarp, hanging woodland and greensand heath is why the walking is so varied. The gentlest option is the Hangers Way to Buriton, two and a half miles across fields and shallow valleys with the Downs scarp ahead, about an hour each way and the opening stretch of the full twenty-one-mile route. Walkers who would rather not retrace their steps can take the Ramblers' 5.8-mile circular, starting at the station and returning by a different route after Buriton's pond and church and the climb for Hangers views. From the museum there is a self-guided walk of just under four miles that follows the medieval borough boundary along the Drum and Criddle streams, the same watercourses that once supplied the tanneries and, in the eighteenth century, an ornamental water garden made by the Jolliffe family. For something steeper, the route up to the Shoulder of Mutton reaches the chalk coombe above Steep and the memorial stone to the poet Edward Thomas, who lived at Steep for ten years and was killed at Arras on Easter Monday in 1917. The climb is steep, and the reward is a broad view over the Weald.

Closer in, Petersfield Heath is sixty-nine acres of common land with a twenty-two-acre pond, boating and fishing, a play area and wildfowl. It is also a scheduled Bronze Age barrow cemetery: twenty-one burial mounds survive, of the bowl, disc, saucer and bell kinds, which makes it a nationally important lowland site rather than a stray hump in a park. On 6 October, unless the date falls on a Sunday, the Heath holds the Taro Fair, a funfair that took its name from an old horse fair. West of the centre, the Physic Garden occupies a walled medieval burgage plot given to the town in 1988; Sylvia Landsberg designed it in a seventeenth-century style with medicinal beds, a knot garden, topiary and an orchard, planted with woad, selfheal and white horehound, in memory of the Petersfield botanist John Goodyer. The heated open-air pool has been running for more than sixty years, and the Avenue Playing Fields have tennis courts and room for pétanque and croquet.

Collections, connections and continuity

The museum is worth an hour whatever the weather. It fills the Victorian former police station and courthouse, keeping the old courtroom and cells, and reopened in 2021 after a four-million-pound redevelopment. It holds the paintings of Flora Twort, who lived and worked in the town from 1918 until her death in 1985 and recorded its markets and fairs from a studio at 1-2 The Square; Stanley Spencer was among the artists who visited her there. It also keeps the Edward Thomas collection and, from the town's old Itshide rubber works, the small building bricks marketed as Minibrix.

The station is less than half a mile from the shops, with South Western Railway trains reaching London Waterloo in a little over an hour and Portsmouth Harbour in about half that. The step-free access is by ramp rather than lift, so anyone who needs assistance is better checking ahead. Beyond the market days and the barrows and the good inns, what Petersfield really offers is continuity: the same square, the same streets, the same church, and a lead king in Roman dress keeping an eye on the stalls he has watched come and go for two hundred years.