Staffordshire community spirit
Shareshill
A small village where a volunteer-run shop, an historic church and two pubs sit within reach of wider Staffordshire outings.
- Best for
- Community character and compact history
- Give it
- Editorial estimate: half a day, or longer with a nearby stop
- Don't miss
- The shop residents saved
Photo: Roger D Kidd · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
Small scale, strong local character
Shareshill suits a short, unhurried visit built around its community shop, historic church and village pubs.
The appeal is a living community story rather than a dense sightseeing list. Add Hollybush while you are in the village, or link the visit with Moseley Old Hall or Cannock Chase for a longer day.
Your picks, your pace
Make Shareshill yours
Choose a mood or build your own list. Your saved stops are an ordering aid, with a direct map route when you are ready.
Local signatures
3 placesShareshill Community Shop and Post Office
Saved from closure through resident shares, grants and loans, Staffordshire's first community shop is run entirely by volunteers.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 20 minutes
- Locality
- Shareshill village
- Access
- The community shop includes a Post Office counter alongside its retail services.
Hollybush Garden Centre & Aquaria
A Shareshill garden centre and aquaria that makes a practical browsing stop near the motorway junction.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Warstone Road, Shareshill
- Access
- Check current opening before travel.
Cannock Chase National Landscape
A broader countryside stop several miles north of Shareshill, reached through Cannock from the A460 corridor.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours 30 minutes
- Locality
- Cannock Chase, Staffordshire
- Access
- Choose an official visitor point or route before setting out; this record covers the wider National Landscape.
Food & drink
2 placesThe Elms
A Davenports village pub serving pub meals, with games and a covered terrace known as the gin garden.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Church Road, Shareshill
- Access
- Check current food service and dog policy before travel.
The Wheatsheaf
A quiet traditional pub combining British pub meals and Punjabi food, with a children's play area at the front.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Laney Green, Shareshill
- Access
- Check current food service, access and facilities before travel.
History & heritage
2 places
Church of St Mary and St Luke
Georgian red-brick rebuilding meets an earlier west tower, with a saltire-cross frieze outside and Swynnerton alabaster effigies inside.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 35 minutes
- Locality
- Shareshill village
- Access
- The parish has discussed possible closure because of major roof-repair costs; confirm current interior access before travel.
Moseley Old Hall
A National Trust timber-framed house associated with Charles II's escape after the Battle of Worcester.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours
- Locality
- Featherstone
- Access
- Check the National Trust page for current admission and opening before travel.
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On the map
Shareshill at a glance
Tap a marker to jump to its guide card.
Three ways to explore Shareshill
Signature outings
Georgian brick, older stone
Look for the saltire-cross frieze below the crenellated parapet, then compare the Georgian rebuilding with the earlier west tower.
A pub with distinct rooms
The Elms combines pub meals with a lounge, games room and covered gin-garden terrace.
The house that sheltered a king
Use nearby Moseley Old Hall to follow the story of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester.
The village story
The Shareshill story
Community ownership, old earthworks, Georgian brick and seasonal traditions give this small Staffordshire village its particular character.
Community ownership and pub life
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.
Food, family and ancient ground
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.
Church and manor history
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.
Village rhythms and traditions
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.
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:Church of St Mary and St Luke in Shareshill, Staffordshire - geograph.org.uk - 8260082.jpg — photograph by Roger D Kidd; Church of St Mary and St Luke in Shareshill, Staffordshire by Roger D Kidd. 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.
- Shareshill Community Shop and Post Office — postoffice.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Church of St Mary and St Luke — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- The Elms — theelmspub.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Wheatsheaf — camra.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Hollybush Garden Centre & Aquaria — hollybush-garden.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Moseley Old Hall — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager
- Cannock Chase National Landscape — cannock-chase.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation