Lombard Street drops toward St Mary's church over worn cobbles, past tile-hung fronts pressed shoulder to shoulder, and the lanes leading off it are narrow enough that a delivery van becomes an event. This is a town rather than a village, and a compact one, hemmed along its western edge by the wall of Petworth Park, which runs for eight kilometres and puts a great landscaped deer park a few minutes' walk from the shopfronts. You arrive through a one-way centre where the A272, A283 and A285 all converge, and the streets do not widen to greet you. That is part of the arrival.
Petworth deals in old things. The official visitor directory claims it is the only town outside London with more than thirty art and antiques dealers within a mile; the density, at least, is not in doubt. Petworth Antiques Market gathers more than twenty-five dealers under one roof — English, Continental and Oriental furniture, garden statuary, clocks, silver, textiles and rugs. Augustus Brandt sells antiques alongside bespoke furniture and names like Linley and Picasso; Bear mixes mid-century design with contemporary homewares. Kevis House and Newlands House run galleries, Bellmans and Surrey Auctions hold sales, and you can spend an afternoon looking at furniture you have no intention of buying and not run out of rooms.
For food, The Hungry Guest is the anchor: a deli, bakery and food shop with a dedicated Cheese Room stocking Sussex, Hampshire, Scottish and Pyrenean cheeses, charcuterie, pastries and produce from Mereworth Market Garden. A local profile named it the Great British Food Awards' top independent retailer for southern England and London in 2018. Its café, at a separate address in a gallery setting, pours coffee alongside wine, beer and sparkling wine. Hennings Wine Merchants has traded here since 1970, run now by Matthew Hennings, with Nick Poston managing the Petworth shop. Cherry's Deli & Bakery keeps its corner too. Allans of Petworth, a gentlemen's outfitter of more than fifty years, sells linen and tweed jackets and Panama hats and keeps an in-house seamstress.
There are two bookshops. Petworth Bookshop, run by Steve, carries books, cards, games, stationery and music; Readers' Books deals in second-hand and collectible stock. Between them, and Barbara Tipple's jewellery, the pharmacy, the cobbler, Spriggs the florist and the rest, the independent retail runs deeper than a town this size has any right to sustain.
Two pubs anchor the walkable centre. The Angel Inn, a food-led coaching inn of medieval origin with seven bedrooms, old beams and fireplaces, took West Sussex Pub of the Year at the 2022 National Pub & Bar Awards. Its spring menu runs to a smoked haddock and salmon fishcake with poached egg and fish-and-chive velouté, South Coast fish and chips with samphire, a Roscoff onion tart, Hampshire ribeye with bone-marrow butter, and a beef burger you can have with Brighton Blue or Keen's Cheddar. There is a Moving Mountains vegan burger for those who want one. Arundel Sussex IPA and Langham Hip Hop are the regular casks, and behind the building is a large walled garden shaded by magnolia and horse chestnut. Dogs are welcome.
The Stonemasons Inn, at the north end of town, is a family-run seventeenth-century pub, Grade II listed, with medieval oak beams, inglenook fireplaces and several small rooms opening into a restaurant extension. Diners have singled out roast beef, roast chicken, a halloumi burger, cauliflower cheese and chicken shish, along with a homemade tomato-and-balsamic ice cream. Harvey's Sussex Best, Fuller's London Pride and Timothy Taylor Landlord pour from five handpumps that lean local. Irish music plays the first Sunday lunchtime of the month, jazz the third. A third town pub, The Star, has been closed since a cellar fire on New Year's Day 2026, and its future is not yet settled.
Two more pubs carry a Petworth address but sit outside the town core, and both reward the short drive. The Welldiggers Arms at Low Heath, on the A283, is a refurbished country inn where picture windows open onto coppice and Downs; its head chef, Hugh FitzGerald, took bronze in the 2026 Pub Chef of the Year competition, and its Sunday roasts run to local chicken, grass-fed beef and high-welfare pork with pigs in blankets and cauliflower cheese, from suppliers including Walter Rose Butchers, Kingfisher of Brixham and Hobbs House Bakery. Badgers, south at Coultershaw Bridge, looks over the River Rother from a sunny terrace and two open fires; it does lobster and crab in summer, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and venison in winter, and its sample menu lists chicken-liver parfait, moules marinière and dressed crab with mango salsa. Jules Arlette has run it for about thirty years, and the brothers Matthew and Adrian Diaper lead the kitchen. It was the Railway Inn once, serving the station down the line and later stopping charabancs bound for Goodwood.
Beyond the pubs, E. Street Bar & Grill puts local meats, game and seafood into an ingredient-led kitchen with private dining rooms; Meghdoot's Mystique Masala cooks Indian food with a twenty-five-seat banquet room upstairs; and Park & Co pulls coffee with a stated eye on sustainability and community. When the weather turns, Leconfield Hall on Market Square shows new-release films, live music and performances. The Petworth Festival, founded more than forty years ago by Lord Egremont and a group that included the composer Robert Walker, fills roughly three summer weeks and an autumn literary week across venues around the town.
The reason many people come is on the other side of that wall. The National Trust's Turner trail credits Petworth House with twenty Turner oils — the largest group outside Tate — four of them still hanging where Turner intended, in the Carved Room, among what the Trust calls Grinling Gibbons's finest surviving carving in a private house. Turner was a frequent guest of the third Earl of Egremont, and Constable came too. The house gathered Titian, Van Dyck and Old Masters over centuries, and in 1956–57 the sixth Lord Leconfield arranged the first acceptance of art in lieu of death duties, the manoeuvre that kept the collection together and handed it to the nation.
The park is the work of Capability Brown, who reshaped roughly seven hundred acres between 1751 and 1763 into broad valleys, water and wooded edges, with a resident fallow-deer herd. You can walk it several ways. The Ancient Trees Walk covers four miles past veteran trees and deer; the Through Turner's Eyes route runs three miles between the viewpoints he painted; the Capability Brown Parkland circuit is a moderate three to four miles, an hour and a half to two and a half; and the Pleasure Gardens loop is a mile and suits small children. Dogs go on short leads in the Pleasure Garden, and off lead in the deer park only under close control, but not into the house.
South-east of the centre, Shimmings Valley — steep-sided and wooded, and known locally as Little Switzerland — gives a tighter, more enclosed walk than the open park. For something longer, the Petworth Way runs twenty-five miles from Haslemere to Arundel as a two-day route with the town as the overnight halt, the first day just under twelve miles. And south at Coultershaw, where water-powered milling ran from before Domesday until 1973, a restored beam pump of 1782 — which once lifted twenty thousand gallons a day a mile and a half uphill to the town — still turns for visitors on open days.
The town is old in the way the record proves. Domesday lists it as Peteorde, forty-four households, one mill and one church, valued at eighteen pounds; the name is Old English for Pytta's enclosure. Petworth kept a house of correction from the eighteenth century — the reformer John Howard inspected the bridewell in 1784, and a James Wyatt prison of thirty-two separate cells opened in 1788, growing into a gaol that held up to a hundred and twenty-seven men before it closed in 1878 and was pulled down three years later. Nothing of it survives as a museum, whatever you may have read. The museum the town does keep is quieter: Petworth Cottage Museum at 346 High Street, a Leconfield estate worker's home furnished as it stood around 1910, where Mary Cummings, who came from Ireland in 1877, lived and worked as a seamstress for Petworth House. The scullery, work room, attic and outdoor privy are all still there.
One date sits apart from the rest. On 29 September 1942, a lone German bomber aiming for troops in the grounds of Petworth House struck the boys' school with no warning given. Twenty-eight children were killed, along with the headmaster, Charles Stevenson, the assistant teacher Charlotte Marshall, and a laundry worker, Eva Streeter.
St Mary the Virgin, at the foot of Lombard Street, is a Grade I church of a thirteenth-century chancel and a largely fourteenth-century body, remodelled by Sir Charles Barry in 1827 and restored again in 1902–04. Pevsner called it an "exasperating puzzle," which is fair warning: the alterations pile up, from Barry's red-brick upper tower to the stuccoed spire he added and that had to be taken down after 1947. Inside are a rare German-glass rose window, glass by Kempe and Comper, Sir John Dawtrey's Caen-stone tomb of 1542 with his wife Jane, and the private Petworth House pew.
Getting here is part of the character. The nearest railway station is at Pulborough, about 5¼ miles off and run by Southern, with a bus onward into town; Stagecoach route 1 threads Petworth along the corridor from Worthing through Storrington and Pulborough to Midhurst, nine kilometres west.
Steve has been selling books on this street for more than twenty years, in the middle of dealers who trade in very old and very valuable things. "Although I have been bookselling in Petworth for 24 years, I still feel excited when I turn the key in the lock each morning," he says. It is a small thing to hold onto, and a good one.