The village shop at Shareshill was bought by the people who use it. It faced closure in 2009, so residents bought shares at £1 each, applied for grants and took out loans to save it — the first community shop in Staffordshire, run entirely by volunteers and open every day including weekends. The motto on the sign, "for the community by the community," is not marketing copy here; it's a description of what happened. Its success helped start a second Staffordshire community shop, in Marchington.
There are two pubs. The Elms, on Church Road, is a Davenports house with a large bar to the left as you go in, a lounge hung with prints of birds and hunting scenes, and a plainer games room for darts, pool and karaoke. Weekday lunches run two meals for £19.95, and Thursday is steak night — two steaks and a bottle of wine for £37.50 — alongside roast lamb, homemade pies, fish and chips and lasagne. Dogs are welcome Monday to Friday, 12 to 5, on a covered terrace they call the gin garden, and it's rated 4.2 on Tripadvisor, 70th out of 456 places to eat in Wolverhampton.
The Wheatsheaf, at Laney Green, is a minute's drive from M6 Junction 11, about 0.4 miles off. It does pub meals and Punjabi food, has a play area for children, and CAMRA's Cannock Chase branch calls it quiet. Hollybush Garden Centre and Aquaria is half a mile further on.
Two stretches of earthwork border the village — one by the school, one by the shop — thought to be Roman encampments, with a line said to run north into Saredon, which has its own Roman mound and two Bronze Age ones. At Hilton Green, a former sewage works has become an outdoor education site with an orchard of more than sixty fruit varieties, willow beds for basket-weaving, a firepit and a yurt.
The church, St Mary and St Luke, is Georgian brick from 1742 on a fourteenth-century tower, a frieze of saltire crosses running below its crenellated parapet. Inside are alabaster effigies of Humphrey Swynnerton and his wife Cassandra. William Henry Havergal was vicar from 1860 until his death in 1870; his daughter, Frances Ridley Havergal, became a noted hymn writer. As of February 2026, the parish was discussing whether it can afford to keep the roof on.
Sir William de Shareshull held the manor before becoming Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1350, drafting the Statute of Labourers before retiring to a Franciscan house in Oxford, where he died within the year. The Domesday survey knew the place as Servesed: seven households, land for three ploughs, valued at ten shillings.
A blogger who walked here in 2011, comparing it with neighbouring Featherstone, wrote that Shareshill had "more of the feel of a typical country village." The village hall has a grass football pitch and an indoor short mat bowls club, and the WI still meets. Bus route 67 runs through to Cannock, and there's a train from Landywood, on the Chase Line, hourly into Birmingham.
Each summer there's a vintage fair and classic car show, revived by residents who missed it, and in August a scarecrow festival, when front gardens fill with straw figures nobody is paid to make.
