Town in Staffordshire, England
Stafford
Stafford's Ancient High House is England's biggest timber-framed town house, and it once hosted a king. The town also gave the world an angling bible.
Key information
- County
- Staffordshire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- The Ancient High House, Stafford Castle, Izaak Walton, shoemaking, electrical engineering
- What locals are called
- Staffordians
- Famous people
- Æthelflæd, Izaak Walton, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (MP)
- Football clubs
- Stafford Rangers
About Stafford
A warrior queen's fortress, 913
Stafford's story starts with a woman. In 913 Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and daughter of Alfred the Great, built a fortified town here as part of her campaign against the Danes. The site was a good one: a ford over the River Sow, dry ground and a spot on the routes through the Midlands. The name means roughly 'landing place by the ford'. The town was a serious place from the start. Archaeologists have found that Stafford made its own distinctive pottery in the Anglo-Saxon period. 'Stafford ware' was wheel-thrown and turned out in quantity, which was rare in England at the time.
The house that outlasted a civil war
Walk down Greengate Street and you'll find the Ancient High House, built in 1595. It is the largest timber-framed town house in England, a four-storey stack of black-and-white beams that looks a little improbable even now. In 1642 Charles I stayed here on the eve of the Civil War, and he reportedly used the visit to rally support. The town's fortunes in that war were mixed. The castle on the hill above Stafford was held for the king, then slighted by Parliament, and it never recovered as a fortress. What stands on the hill today is a romantic ruin with a twist. A Norman castle was founded here in the 1070s, and in the early 19th century the Jerningham family began building a Gothic Revival replacement on the old site. It was never completed.
The angler who wrote the bible of fishing
Izaak Walton was born in Stafford in 1593. In 1653 he published The Compleat Angler, a book about fishing that is also a book about contentment, conversation and the English countryside. It has been reprinted in hundreds of editions and is among the most reissued books in the English language. Walton later bought a cottage at Shallowford, just outside Stafford, and it is now a small museum to his life. Stafford also had a famous politician on its books. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The School for Scandal, sat as the town's MP from 1780 until 1806.
Boots, transformers and the Staffordshire Knot
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Stafford was a shoemaking town. Factories turned out boots and shoes in huge numbers, and the trade shaped the streets and the working lives of generations. Then came electrical engineering. Big works here built transformers and heavy electrical equipment, and the town became a hub for making things that powered the nation. Stafford's civic emblem is the Stafford Knot, a looping three-strand design that appears on signs, uniforms and the county badge. It's one of the oldest heraldic symbols in England, and it makes a handy way to spot Staffordshire's reach on anything from police cars to football shirts.
Rangers, rails and local flavour
Stafford Rangers are the town's football club, and they have a bigger trophy cabinet than most non-league sides. They won the FA Trophy in 1972 and again in 1979, both times at Wembley. Stafford sits on the West Coast Main Line, and its station has long been a stop on the route from London to the north-west. That makes it a quick hop to Birmingham and Manchester. On the plate, you're in oatcake country. The Staffordshire oatcake, a soft griddled pancake often wrapped around bacon and cheese, is the county's great breakfast, and it turns up in Stafford too. The county showground just outside town hosts the Staffordshire County Show each year, a reminder that the farmland of the Sow valley is never far away.