The Bank House has outlived four other pubs in Hixon, almost inevitable given how it started. It began life as a farm about 400 years ago, brewing its own beer on the side, before giving up farming for good and becoming the village pub full time. Grade II listed, it's a 17th-century timber frame extended in brick a hundred years later, refurbished in 2017 with the original beams, log burners and low-ceilinged nooks kept. There's a courtyard with a wood-fired pizza oven, pizzas from about £9.
The rest of the menu runs from a smoked salmon Scotch egg with tartare sauce to a chorizo hash with fried egg, both £5.95, a weekly pie — usually minced beef — at £12.50, and a chicken Caesar salad at £11.50, with a cranberry and almond Bakewell tart or a chocolate truffle torte. Reckon on £25 a head; full vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free menus run alongside the regular one.
Bring a dog and it gets a mat, a bowl of water and a jar of treats at the table. One reviewer, there for her wife's birthday, wrote that "what a lovely touch to have a mat, treats and a bowl of water at the side of the table for the dog."
Hixon had five pubs at one point. The Green Man went last, sold to a developer in 2019 and demolished in 2020 for a Co-op and housing, despite a petition and parish council objections.
St Peter's Church went up between 1845 and 1848, designed by George Gilbert Scott on land given by Lord Talbot, once the site of a windmill. It has a north tower with a broach spire, and in the churchyard lies Wilmot Martin, a farmer and charity fundraiser who performed as "The Staffordshire Harry Lauder."
Domesday recorded the village as Hustedone: five households, two plough teams, a meadow, valued at ten shillings and ninepence.
A footpath runs out to Amerton, close enough to fold in a visit to the farm park and its Playbarn. Closer to home, Hixon Millennium Green has a play area and room for a proper game, there's a cricket ground on Church Lane, and the Wellington Fields Allotments Association runs a set of plots. A humpbacked, separately listed 18th-century bridge on the parish edge carries a footpath over the Trent and Mersey Canal.
Nationally, Hixon is known for 6 January 1968, when a low-loader carrying a 120-ton transformer was caught on the new level crossing at New Road by the Manchester–Euston express doing around 75mph. The crossing was thirty feet long, not long enough for the load to clear in time, and eleven people died. The inquiry that followed was the first judicial rail inquiry since the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, and it changed how abnormal loads are handled at crossings. The crossing was replaced by a bridge in 2002.
The A518 and A51 run through, Stafford is under eight miles off, and a Chaserider bus makes five stops in the village between Stafford and Uttoxeter. The nearest station is Rugeley Trent Valley — Hixon's own halt closed to passengers in 1947.
Every year the Charity for Hixon Elderly Folk puts on a music festival on the Millennium Green, and what it raises pays for the village's older residents to have a Christmas do.
