The White Lion Inn is black and white and stands more or less alone at the centre of Harlaston's Main Street, which is about as much centre as the village has. CAMRA's local guide describes it as an attractive pub at the centre of a sleepy village, and for once that isn't overselling it.
New management took over in June 2026 and stretched the opening hours, so food now runs Monday to Saturday noon to 8pm and Sunday noon to 5pm, in a dining room that seats fifty.
There's a log burner in the bar, darts, WiFi, and Marston's Pedigree on the pump. Dogs are allowed in the bar, and the beer garden sits across the narrow road from the front door, so you take your pint over the road rather than the dog taking itself.
The name, locally, is said to come from a badge associated with a former owner of Tamworth Castle, though nobody seems to press the point.
There is no shop. The old post office building now runs as a bed and breakfast instead, which is what happens to post offices in villages this size.
The River Mease passes just below the village, narrow enough in places to step across, and loses its meander and gains depth once it's through. Walk west along it and you reach Elford in a mile and a half; cross it east and you're in Clifton Campville, which was Harlaston's mother parish until 1845.
Two miles north, Croxall Lakes — two former gravel pits, now a nature reserve — holds wintering goosander, wigeon and smew, and otters leave prints and spraints along the banks for anyone looking.
Tamworth, five miles south, has the nearest station, on the regular Crewe to London line. There's no A-road into Harlaston itself, just the lanes to Elford and Clifton Campville, covered by a community transport bus that does the rounds of both.
St Matthew's Church is Grade II* and largely Victorian, rebuilt in 1882–83 by the London architect Ewan Christian for £1,429 5s 5d and reopened that November by the Bishop of Lichfield. What survived the rebuild is the Norman tower, and its upper stage is timber-framed rather than stone.
Historic England records it plainly: "The upper part of the tower is half-timbered – this is said to be unusual for Staffordshire."
Behind the church, a dig in the early 1990s uncovered the remains of a 14th-century manor house on a moated site that had simply silted over and been forgotten.
The Domesday Book valued Harlaston at £6 in both 1066 and 1086 — more, as it's locally pointed out, than Birmingham's twenty shillings the same year. Twenty-three households, a mill worth four shillings, no woodland recorded.
The village has since been named Staffordshire's Best Kept Small Village five times, most recently placing third in 2023.
The village hall runs an indoor bowls club on Tuesday afternoons and dog training classes, puppies included, and every other year the residents open their gardens to whoever wants to look. There's a cricket club in the parish records too.
It's the kind of place where the biggest event on the calendar is people showing each other what they've grown.
