Four stone pinnacles mark the corners of the Old Church Tower, roofless and open to the sky, a few yards from the church that replaced it in 1852-53. It's the only piece of the medieval parish church left standing — the rest was pulled down when the new St John the Baptist went up next door, and the tower kept on purpose, to house the bells. A 1973 dig into its foundations found sandstone finished by a rubbing technique, read as a sign of Saxon work, under a Norman nave dated to the late 1100s.
Walk down into the village and it's the ordinary stuff that's still here: a doctor's surgery, a chemist, a dentist, a library, a post office and a convenience store, plus a wine bar, all within walking distance on the high street. Russell's Butchers, a Butcher's Shop of the Year finalist, sells lamb merguez, pork and apple burgers and lamb koftas alongside free-range, grass-fed cuts from animals kept off growth promoters and antibiotics.
There are four pubs in the village, one of them by the station. The Plough at Shenstone has been open since 1840, a long single bar with two lounges, real fires and a heated tent for beer garden overflow. Batham's Best Bitter and Batham's Mild are on year-round, Batham's XXX at Christmas; the menu runs from crab arancini to Caribbean beef curry to sticky toffee pudding. Manager Connor Roberts put it plainly: "I would not want to work in any other village than Shenstone."
The Fox and Hounds is Grade II listed and 18th century, fish and chips reviewers rate for value. The Bull's Head is older still — 17th century, beamed and panelled — with Sharp's Doom Bar and a free treat bar for dogs. Landlord Chris Callow likes that Shenstone is "close enough to big cities that you can go and do activities and enjoy them, but then it's far out enough that you can avoid all the bad things that come with living in a city." The Railway Inn sits by the station, breakfast from 9am Saturdays.
A route of about 8.7 miles of field paths and quiet lanes crosses to Stonnall via Mill Lane, muddy after rain; the longer Little Sutton and Shenstone Circular runs 10.8 miles. Shenstone Tennis Club, founded in 1972 by villagers who raised the money themselves, was named Staffordshire's Tennis Club of the Year in 2023, the year its two new artificial-grass courts went in.
Domesday records the manor at 100 shillings — five pounds — with 21 villagers, four smallholders, one slave and a mill, held in 1086 by Robert d'Oilly. Between 1978 and 1992 the village made motorcycles: Norton's factory here built the Interpol 2, the rotary-engined police bike ridden by UK forces, the armed forces and the RAC.
The old tower has a restoration fund now. Friends of Shenstone Tower secured a £395,907 Historic England grant after villagers started the campaign in 2019. The Norman font that once stood inside it — tub-shaped, possibly over a thousand years old — is now in the new church's south aisle, having outlasted the building it was made for.
In 2024, Shenstone made the Daily Telegraph's list of Britain's poshest villages. Locals weren't having it. "We're not posh," one resident told the Express & Star, "we're desirable."
