Eight pubs, according to WhatPub, for a population of around 8,500 — the blogger retiredmartin.com toured all of them in 2024 and called the Littleton Arms "the last of my eight Penkridge pubs" on the way round. The Arms sits in St Michael's Square, built in 1793 by Sir Edward Littleton from local brick and Teddesley oak, now a boutique hotel with ten ensuite rooms above a menu that runs to the Littleton Burger with oak-smoked bacon and triple-cooked chips, fish and chips in a lemon thyme batter, roast pork loin with duck fat roasties. Davenports on the pumps, water bowls by the door.
Up on Market Street, the Horse & Jockey does the cask ale side of things — ten hand-pulled real ales, a Good Beer Guide entry, and what regulars reckon is the best cellar in the village. Food is homemade sausage rolls, pork pies, samosas, scotch eggs and fresh cobs rather than anything plated, with a doggy station by the door for water and treats.
The Boat Inn has a beer garden over the Staffs & Worcs Canal, Bottomless Brunch on the board alongside a proper Sunday roast. The White Hart, older still, dates to 1565, built by Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and reputed to have put up both Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.
For shopping there's Tinklers, a family butcher three generations deep, and the open-air market on the Market Place, running since 1978 — up to a hundred stalls on Wednesdays and Saturdays, fruit and veg, hardware, crafts, a poultry auction on Wednesday mornings, a Fine Food and Craft Market on the third Saturday. Large free car park off the M6, Junctions 12 or 13.
St Michael and All Angels stands over the market place, Grade I, red sandstone, a chancel begun around 1225. King Edgar made it a Royal Peculiar in 958, answerable to nobody but the Crown, and the deanery was held by the Archbishops of Dublin from 1215 — an arrangement unique to Penkridge. Inside, four generations of Littletons lie under alabaster tombs. The Domesday surveyors valued the manor at £7 in 1086, up from £3 5s twenty years earlier, when it was recorded as partly waste.
The Staffordshire Way runs through the centre and picks up the canal towpath, flat enough for most legs, north past Acton Trussell to Stafford or south past the Gailey reservoirs towards Wolverhampton. The station sits on the West Coast Main Line, opened in 1837 on the Penkridge Viaduct, with trains to both, and Cannock Chase is a short pull south-east.
By 1818 it was a daily coach stop on the London–Manchester and Birmingham–Liverpool routes, the road so narrow that, per the Victoria County History, "coachmen were said to have found the manipulation of a four-in-hand more difficult in Penkridge than at any other place between London and Liverpool."
The market itself is the oldest thing still doing its original job: Henry III chartered it in 1244, over objections from Stafford, and it's still there every Wednesday and Saturday. The Victorian Night and Christmas Market takes over the same ground each last Friday of November, grown since 2010 into more than seventy stalls and a funfair — a fair amount of noise for a village that spent most of a millennium answering to nobody but the king.
