Canal paths, village layers
Whittington
Whittington pairs an easy-going canal edge with a church full of travelled treasures, regimental history and useful family recreation grounds.
- Best for
- Canal walks, local history and family stops
- Give it
- Editorial estimate: allow around half a day, depending on your stops
- Don't miss
- St Giles' 300-year-old travelled pulpit
Photo: Dave Kelly · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small village with several strong reasons to pause
Come for the canal and St Giles', then choose between regimental history, active family time and an unhurried meal.
Whittington works best as a compact mix-and-match visit. The Coventry Canal supplies the outdoor thread, St Giles' carries the deepest village detail, and the Staffordshire Regiment Museum adds a substantial indoor-and-outdoor history stop. Bit End Field and Jubilee Park give families room to change the pace.
Where to go
Places in Whittington
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesCoventry Canal Towpath
Follow the village's waterside thread on the Coventry Canal, using the towpath as the backbone of a local circuit that can return over farmland beside Whittington Heath Golf Club.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Along the edge of Whittington
Bit End Field
Use this village green space for informal play, a dog walk or local sport.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Vicarage Lane, Whittington
Jubilee Park
Mix the BMX track and trim trail with walking or running space, then look for the community orchard of more than 100 young fruit trees planted with local volunteers.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Whittington
Food & drink
1 placeThe Whittington Arms
Use this restaurant-led gastropub for a sit-down finish, with seasonal pub food and a broad choice of real ales and wines.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Edge of Whittington towards Lichfield
History & heritage
2 places
St Giles' Church
Look beyond the 13th-century tower base for the dark-oak pulpit that travelled via Lichfield Cathedral and Elford, fragments of medieval glass and a churchyard containing 47 Commonwealth war graves.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Whittington
Staffordshire Regiment Museum
Explore a collection of over 16,500 objects and archive items, including medals from eight of the regiment's thirteen Victoria Cross recipients, plus an outdoor First World War trench replica and a recreated 1940s air-raid shelter.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Whittington Barracks, outside the village centre
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Three ways to explore Whittington
Signature outings
Follow a pulpit's unlikely journey
Inside St Giles', a 300-year-old pulpit links Whittington with Lichfield Cathedral, Elford and more than a century of movement.
Walk through regimental history
The museum moves from Victoria Cross medals to a recreated First World War trench and a 1940s air-raid shelter.
Let the canal set the pace
Use the Coventry Canal as the outward line of a village walk before looping back across farmland beside the former racecourse landscape.
The village story
Whittington, one layer at a time
Follow Whittington from its village pubs and St Giles' Church to the Coventry Canal, family green spaces and regimental history.
Three pubs, three different moods
The Dog Inn is a village pub with live sports and pub games; a full refurbishment is planned, including a revamped garden, new dining space and games-and-sports zone.
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, serves a Sunday carvery and has 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.
Village essentials and a church full of journeys
Shopping is modest and functional, with a Co-op store in the village. There is no butcher or deli in the village itself; Lichfield is three or four miles away.
St Giles' Church is the one building here that repays a slow look. A church has stood on the site since the 13th century, but Historic England dates the surviving tower to the 14th century; the nave was rebuilt in 1761 after a fire destroyed most of the earlier church. 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.
Towpath miles and room to play
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.
Bit End Field offers room for informal play and dog walks. Swan Park, beside the canal at the end of Swan Road, has a tennis court that doubles for basketball and pickleball, a football field and an adventure playground. Jubilee Park adds a BMX track and an orchard of more than 100 young fruit trees.
From racecourse heath to regimental history
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.
Lives rooted in Whittington
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.
Stay around Staffordshire
Make a longer stay of it
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For homeowners
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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:St Giles' Church, Whittington.jpg — photograph by Dave Kelly; Dave Kelly. 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.
- St Giles' Church — ourvillagechurch.org.uk other published source
- Coventry Canal Towpath — canalrivertrust.org.uk national body or asset manager
- Staffordshire Regiment Museum — staffordshireregimentmuseum.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Whittington Arms — thewhittingtonarmslichfield.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Bit End Field — whittingtonandfisherwickparishcouncil.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Jubilee Park — whittingtonandfisherwickparishcouncil.gov.uk statutory register or public authority