The Green Man, on the High Street, still has a cash point built into the bar because the pub doesn't take credit cards. It has been serving drink under one name or another since 1830, when Jeremiah Hobson converted a room of his butcher's shop into a beerhouse under the new Beer House Act. By 1851 he'd rebuilt across the lane and taken on five lodgers; the pub gained full Inn status not long after.
Daily specials run to about £6, pudding included: belly pork, pies, faggots and peas, steak and kidney pie, a vegetarian suet pudding, thick sandwiches cut from crusty bread. Sunday roasts run twelve until two; everything else is twelve until two and six until eight, Monday to Saturday. Three real ales rotate through, kept by a real fire refurbished in 2023. One Tripadvisor reviewer titled their write-up "Time-warp village boozer with great quality everything" — plain decor, stark tables, a pub still mostly frequented by locals. Dogs get water dishes and gravy bones at the bar. It's co-owned by Patrick Harley, leader of South Staffordshire District Council, who has said it gives him somewhere to feel normal away from council business.
The survivor further along is the Old Bush — a reviewer called the Green Man the last of the original three pubs the village used to have, which makes the Old Bush the other one. Fresh cobs, Sunday roasts from midday until three, and a Saturday-night takeaway curry regulars single out for the lamb. Wychwood Hobgoblin Gold and Enville Ale sit alongside a rotating guest, with darts on weeknights, cribbage on Mondays, and live music in the lounge on Sunday afternoons. It holds a food hygiene rating of five.
Behind both pubs, the Smestow Brook runs alongside the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal so closely that in places only the towpath separates them. The Himley and Swindon Canal Trail follows this corridor for 4.6 miles, tracing the old South Staffordshire Railway line before joining the towpath and returning via Hinksford Lane — two to two and a half hours, woodland then water. The dismantled Wombourne Branch Line, closed in 1932, runs an almost parallel route for anyone who'd rather cycle.
St John's Church, on Church Road, is Victorian — built in 1854, small, stone and timber, no tower or spire. Its windows commemorate architect James Perry, shown alongside Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; first vicar James Raven; and Bishop Lonsdale of Lichfield. The churchyard holds two war graves and stopped taking burials in 2007.
What explains most of the rest is Swin Forge. It started as a fulling mill under Halesowen Abbey, became a corn mill, then was converted to a finery forge sometime in the 1620s — the beginning of roughly 350 years of continuous ironworking on the same stretch of canal, through the Foleys, the Homfrays, the Thorneycrofts and finally the Baldwins, whose company was nationalised into British Steel, which closed the works in 1976. The site was demolished in the early 1980s and became the Swin Forge Way and Baldwin Way housing estates. Only the old canteen survived, reopening in 1981 as the village community centre — all that remains today.
Swindon Cricket Club plays in the South Staffordshire County League from its pavilion by that same community centre, and the two together are what the district council credits with keeping the village's neighbourhood spirit going. From here it's a short run by bike or canal path to Baggeridge Country Park, a former colliery turned lakes and woodland, or to Himley Hall's Capability Brown parkland. Buses on Route 16 connect to Wolverhampton, Stourbridge and Wombourne, and Dudley is six miles east if both pubs are full.
On a quiet weeknight the loudest thing in Swindon is probably the cribbage at the Old Bush, or a gravy bone hitting a dog bowl at the Green Man.
