Market, church and canal
Penkridge
A Staffordshire market village shaped by royal church history, canal-side walking and characterful inns.
- Best for
- Market browsing, church history and towpath walks
- Give it
- A relaxed half day, or longer with the farm attraction
- Don't miss
- The Grade I church above the market place
Photo: Philip Halling · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A market village with several stories to follow
Penkridge combines a long-running market tradition with a remarkable church, an easy canal-side route and a strong choice of pubs.
Start around the market place and St Michael's Square for the village's medieval and coaching history, then follow the Staffordshire Way onto the canal towpath. Food-led visits can range from a historic coaching inn to a dedicated real-ale pub and a canalside garden, while Play @ Lower Drayton Farm gives families a substantial nearby stop.
Where to go
Places in Penkridge
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesPenkridge Market
A family-run open-air market with general stalls, a Wednesday poultry and garden-sundries auction, and a specialist food and craft market on the third Saturday.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Market Place
- Access
- The regular market is held on Wednesdays and Saturdays; check the official site for event details.
Staffordshire Way at Penkridge
A flexible section of the Staffordshire Way running through the village and onto the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal towpath, with a fairly flat profile and only gentle gradients.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- village centre and canal towpath
Play @ Lower Drayton Farm
A family farm attraction combining play zones, animals and tractor or trailer rides.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 3 hours
- Locality
- Lower Drayton
Food & drink
3 places
The Littleton Arms
A coaching inn built in 1793/1794 by Sir Edward Littleton using local brick and Teddesley oak, now combining a pub, restaurant and ten-room boutique hotel.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- St Michael's Square
The Horse and Jockey
A traditional pub centred on ten hand-pulled real ales, with homemade sausage rolls, pork pies, samosas, scotch eggs and fresh cobs rather than plated meals.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Market Street
The Boat Inn
A modernised pub and restaurant with a spacious garden overlooking the canal, serving hearty British meals, bottomless brunch and Sunday roasts.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal
History & heritage
1 placeSt Michael and All Angels
A Grade I red-sandstone church with a chancel begun around 1225 and alabaster memorials to four generations of the Littleton family.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Market Place
- Access
- Interior opening is unconfirmed; verify before travel if entry is essential.
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Three ways to explore Penkridge
Signature outings
Royal church history
Explore a Grade I red-sandstone church whose chancel dates from around 1225 and whose Littleton memorials span four generations.
The coaching-inn story
Visit a coaching inn built in 1793/1794 from local brick and Teddesley oak, now serving as a pub, restaurant and boutique hotel.
A canalside stop
Take a table in a spacious beer garden overlooking the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal.
The village story
Penkridge Village Guide
Markets, medieval church history, towpath walking and a notably deep bench of village pubs.
Coaching Inns and Real Ale
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.
Canalside Pubs and Market Days
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.
Church, Towpath and Rail
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.
Coaches, Charters and Christmas
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.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Staffordshire, linked directly to their property pages.
Cheddleton
Greenways House - Parking, Pool Table and Garden!
- Sleeps 10
- 4 bedrooms
Cheddleton
Lee House Cottage + Annexe
- Sleeps 19
- 8 bedrooms
Leek
Silkwood House | Boutique 4 Bed nr. Peak District
- Sleeps 8
- 4 bedrooms
Stoke-on-Trent
Heather's House
- Sleeps 6
- 2 bedrooms
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:Littleton Arms, Penkridge.jpg — photograph by Philip Halling; Philip Halling. 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 Michael and All Angels — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Penkridge Market — penkridgemarket.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Staffordshire Way at Penkridge — ramblers.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- The Littleton Arms — thelittletonarms.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Horse and Jockey — blackcountryales.co.uk other published source
- The Boat Inn — boatinnpenkridge.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Play @ Lower Drayton Farm — playatthefarm.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation