Peel history, canal country
Drayton Bassett
A small Staffordshire village where a surviving estate tower, a turreted canal crossing and wetland walks connect Peel history with the landscape around the River Tame.
- Best for
- Peel history and waterside walking
- Give it
- Half a day, or longer with the resort
- Don't miss
- The white-painted turret footbridge
Photo: Roger D Kidd · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small village with an unusually wide historical reach
The appeal lies less in a busy centre than in the links between St Peter's, the former Peel estate and the canal-edge landscape.
Come for a compact local-history stop, then choose between the resort, the canal route to Middleton Lakes, or the hall and water park beyond. Drayton Bassett works best as a connected visit rather than a single village-centre attraction.
Your picks, your pace
Make Drayton Bassett yours
Choose a mood or build your own list. Your saved stops are an ordering aid, with a direct map route when you are ready.
Local signatures
3 placesDrayton Manor Resort
A theme park and zoo occupying former Peel estate land, with the demolished mansion's surviving clock tower at the entrance.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 3 hours 30 minutes
- Locality
- former Peel estate in Drayton Bassett parish
- Access
- Ticketing and visitor access can change; check the official site before travel.
RSPB Middleton Lakes
A 160-hectare wetland reserve created from former gravel workings, connected to Drayton Bassett by canal-side walking routes.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- adjoining Drayton Bassett parish
- Access
- Outdoor conditions and route surfaces vary; check the land manager's page before travel.
Middleton Hall & Gardens
A Grade II* medieval hall set in 42 acres, sharing grounds access with the adjoining RSPB reserve.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Middleton, beside the nature reserve
- Access
- Visitor opening is not assumed; check the official site before travel.
Walks & outdoors
1 placeKingsbury Water Park
A 600-acre country park with 15 lakes and walking and cycling trails, reachable by continuing along the canal route past Middleton Lakes.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Kingsbury, south of Middleton Lakes
History & heritage
2 placesSt Peter's Church, Drayton Bassett
A Grade II* church with a 15th-century Perpendicular west tower, a nave rebuilt in 1793 and Sir Robert Peel's burial place in the churchyard.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 40 minutes
- Locality
- Drayton Bassett village
- Access
- Interior access is not confirmed; do not assume the church will be open.
Drayton Footbridge
A late-18th-century Grade II canal crossing, white-painted over red brick, with cylindrical turrets built around spiral staircases.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 20 minutes
- Locality
- Birmingham and Fazeley Canal at the parish's eastern edge
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On the map
Drayton Bassett at a glance
Tap a marker to jump to its guide card.
Three ways to explore Drayton Bassett
Signature outings
Peel at St Peter's
Read the church's 15th-century tower, rebuilt nave and churchyard together as the setting for Sir Robert Peel's burial.
The canal's Gothic footbridge
Cross the white-painted span and look for the cylindrical turrets built around its spiral staircases in the 1780s.
Fifteen lakes at Kingsbury
Use the country park's lakes and walking or cycling trails as the open-landscape finish to the canal-side route.
The village story
Drayton Bassett Village Guide
A locked Travel Fox story of Peel family history, canal landmarks, village life and the route towards the Tame Valley lakes.
A Mansion's Last Tower and the Canal Edge
The clock tower inside Drayton Manor theme park is the only piece left standing of the mansion that used to occupy the site — an Elizabethan-style pile designed by Sir Robert Smirke, big enough to host Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on a visit in 1843, and demolished by 1926. The rides and car parks now cover what used to be the Peel family's grounds. You can see the tower from the entrance before you've paid for a single ticket.
The village sits about three miles south of Tamworth, with the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal marking its eastern edge. A white-painted Gothic footbridge crosses the water on cylindrical turrets built for a spiral staircase, put up in the 1780s and still standing, Grade II listed. Walk the towpath south and you reach Middleton Lakes RSPB reserve, 160 hectares of old gravel workings, then Kingsbury Water Park beyond that.
Village Hospitality and Practical Limits
Drayton Bassett Village Club, on Drayton Lane, is the pub — a working men's club run largely by volunteers rather than a brewery. The menu covers fish and chips and burgers alongside vegetarian dishes, and reviewers mention Popara and Biko on the board. It's rated 4.6 from 78 reviews, ranked first of seven pubs and bars in the village. "Everyone is friendly, the drinks are reasonable and a good inside & outside space for the kids," wrote reviewer Kris Henscoe, while O'Toole UK praised "the dedication of the volunteers who keep the club running."
There's no confirmed butcher, baker or farm shop in the village centre — for that you'd want Tamworth, five to ten minutes' drive away, or Fazeley, a mile and a half off with a more frequent bus into Tamworth.
Peel, the Church and the Older Manor
St Peter's Church was founded in 1327, when Ralph Lord Bassett was licensed by Edward III to build it, reportedly to settle a debt. The west tower is 15th century, Perpendicular, with a crenellated parapet and a buttress solid enough to look defensive. A storm wrecked the nave in 1792, and the first Sir Robert Peel rebuilt it the following year. His son, twice Prime Minister and founder of the Metropolitan Police, is buried in the churchyard, having died in 1850 after a fall from his horse on Constitution Hill in London. The memorial tablet inside reads: "to whom the People have raised Monuments in many places. His Children erect this in the place where his body has been buried."
The manor belonged to the Basset family until 1483, then passed through the Earls of Leicester and Essex; Lettice Knollys, Countess of both in turn, lived here from 1593 and raised her grandson on the estate. By Domesday the village was Crown land, held directly by King William I and valued at £4 to the lord, the same figure recorded in 1066 as in 1086, with nine villagers, three smallholders and two mills.
Long-Distance Paths and a Rock-Star Footnote
The Heart of England Way runs straight through, on its way from Cannock Chase to the Cotswolds. The stretch towards Kingsbury follows the canal past the RSPB reserve, a couple of hours of easy, mostly flat walking. Tamworth is the nearest station, three miles off, and the A4091 connects to the A5 and the M42 without much fuss.
Musician Julian Cope lived in the village through the late eighties and into the nineties, which nobody at the Village Club seems especially bothered about one way or the other.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Staffordshire, linked directly to their property pages.
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Lee House Cottage + Annexe
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Leek
Silkwood House | Boutique 4 Bed nr. Peak District
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Stoke-on-Trent
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:Drayton Footbridge near Drayton Bassett, Staffordshire - geograph.org.uk - 7066787.jpg — photograph by Roger D Kidd; Drayton Footbridge near Drayton Bassett, Staffordshire by Roger D Kidd. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- St Peter's Church, Drayton Bassett — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Drayton Footbridge — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Drayton Manor Resort — draytonmanor.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- RSPB Middleton Lakes — rspb.org.uk national body or asset manager
- Middleton Hall & Gardens — middleton-hall.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Kingsbury Water Park — countryparks.warwickshire.gov.uk statutory register or public authority