The Dog Inn serves a camembert starter for two before you've even got your coat off, and that's before the specials board, the "pasta of the week," or the lamb shanks and steak and ale pie that keep it busy on a weeknight. Adam and Abbey run it with five letting rooms upstairs, a beer garden noted by CAMRA, and a quiz night that fills the place weekly.
Two more pubs cover the rest of the village. The Bell Inn, on Main Street in a building that's stood since at least 1834, does a carvery on Sundays that reviewers rate highly, plus a dartboard, a real fire and a beer garden big enough for a bouncy castle on a good weekend. The Whittington Arms sits toward the Lichfield edge of the village, more restaurant than pub, with a wide list of real ales and wines.
Shopping is modest and functional: a newsagent with a Post Office counter at 46 Main Street, and a Co-op that stays open late. There's no butcher or deli in the village itself — for that you'd go into Lichfield, three or four miles away.
St Giles' Church is the one building here that repays a slow look. The tower base is 13th-century, built from red sandstone quarried at Hopwas Wood; the nave was rebuilt in 1760 after a fire nearly destroyed the place. The pulpit is over 300 years old: given to Lichfield Cathedral in 1671, it stayed 118 years, passed through the church at Elford, and reached Whittington in 1922. Thomas Spencer, who co-founded Marks & Spencer, is buried in the churchyard, among 47 Commonwealth war graves.
The Coventry Canal runs along the edge of the village, and the favourite local walk follows the towpath before cutting back over farmland skirting Whittington Heath Golf Club. Keep going the other way and you reach Fradley Junction, where the Coventry meets the Trent & Mersey.
For families there's Bit End Field on Vicarage Lane — a tennis court that doubles as a pickleball court, a football pitch, an adventure playground — plus Jubilee Park, with a BMX track and an orchard of more than a hundred young fruit trees. Noddington Park is smaller, with swings and a basketball hoop for older children and teens.
Whittington Heath itself used to be a racecourse. Lichfield Races ran there from 1702 until 1895, when the War Office ruled it "undesirable to hold a race meeting at the gate of the barracks" it had just built. Turner painted the view in 1830; the 1773 grandstand became the golf club's clubhouse in 1957. The barracks now house the Staffordshire Regiment Museum, with medals from eight of its thirteen Victoria Cross recipients.
Lichfield Trent Valley station is the nearest mainline stop, the village sits just off the A51/A38 corridor toward Tamworth, and the 765 bus gets you into Lichfield in about fourteen minutes.
St Giles Hospice, now a major Midlands palliative care charity, started here in 1983 under the local vicar, Rev. Paul Brothwell. The historian Paul Addison, a specialist in WWII British political history, lived here too.
Jubilee Park's orchard didn't plant itself. It went in with volunteers from the Whittington & Fisherwick Environment Group, village people turning up to put trees in the ground one at a time.
