Rugeley

Market Days and Canalside Pints

Market Square fills every Thursday, 9am to 3pm, with a butcher, fresh bread and cakes, fruit and veg, hot food, and stalls selling clothes, gifts and handmade crafts. On the first Saturday of the month it switches to an Artisan Market instead. The right to hold it dates back to 1259, when Henry III granted the town a Thursday market and an annual fair — a charter exercised, in one form or another, for over 750 years.

For a pub with a view, walk out to the Ash Tree on Armitage Road, where the beer garden runs alongside the Trent & Mersey Canal and you can eat your burger while narrowboats go past. There's a play area and moorings for boaters who fancy stopping the night. The Stag's Leap on Wolseley Road covers burgers, steaks and hand-stretched pizzas, has a sunny beer garden, a pool table and a dartboard, and welcomes your dog alongside you at the table.

Chase-edge Inns and a Cinema Reborn

Out at Slitting Mill, a couple of miles from the centre, the Horns Inn does a spring menu that's run to tomato and mozzarella bruschetta, grilled seabass risotto, a peri-peri grilled chicken burger with lemon and herb mayo, and a Cherry Bakewell cheesecake to finish. It has lakeside views and a large outdoor area, and is aimed at people coming off a Cannock Chase walk who want somewhere to sit down. The Redmore Inn, just over the boundary on the edge of Gentleshaw Common, is Cask Marque accredited; one diner reported £12 for lunch and a pint.

The town centre pub with the best backstory is the Plaza, a Wetherspoon's now, but a cinema first — it opened as the Picture House on 12 November 1934, the opening-night film being Pardon My Pups, starring the child star Shirley Temple. It closed as a cinema in 1996. Inside, history panels cover Rugeley's old iron industry and its most famous former resident, a doctor named William Palmer.

The Poisoner and the Parish Church

Palmer poisoned his friend John Parsons Cook with strychnine at the Talbot, a pub across the road from his own house, in November 1855. Parliament passed a specific Act to move his trial to the Old Bailey. His mother, according to local historian Helen Barrell, stood at her window opposite St Augustine's Church and shouted at the sightseers below: "They hanged my saintly Billy!" The Talbot has since closed. St Augustine's, rebuilt in 1822–23, holds Cook's grave and what remains of the Palmer family tomb; Pevsner rated it remarkable for its date.

Between Cannock Chase and the Canal

The town sits on the north-eastern edge of Cannock Chase, with the River Trent bounding it the other way. The Trent & Mersey towpath heads north through Colwich and Little Haywood to Shugborough Hall, and a signposted 11.3-mile loop runs out through Brereton and Slitting Mill and back along the canal. Two stations, Rugeley Town and Rugeley Trent Valley, sit about a mile and a half apart, linked by bus, and the Chaserider 826 and 828 run to Stafford and Lichfield.

After the Cooling Towers

Where the two coal-fired power stations once stood is mostly open ground now — the second one's cooling towers came down in a five-second controlled explosion in 2021. Two of the four had been painted pink by the original architects, who wanted to heighten what they saw as the femininity of the hyperbolic form.