I can hardly believe that it’s 12 years since we first visited the small town of Alcester in Warwickshire for the first time. We have a grandfather clock which was made there according to its face, and as we had never heard of the place we decided to go and have a look at it.

We really liked the town, it had a lovely atmosphere so we weren’t surprised to discover that it had made it to the top of a survey of best places to live in in England. It’s full of chocolate box Tudor houses, which all seem to lean into each other as if they are holding each other up.

Sadly on our recent visit the pub had obviously had a very serious fire in its roof space as you can see below, but it was being fixed, not pulled down as so many much more recent buildings have been. The building to the right of it looks much more modern but it might just have been modernised over the years, I suspect that originally most of the buildings in the centre of Alcester would have had thatched roofs.

We had a look at St Nicholas Church. Some people had been hard at work creating this tapestry/needlepoint of some of the local buildings. I’m not sure what it had to do with religion but it’s very attractive anyway.

Alcester (pronounced Aulster) is quite close to Stratford-upon-Avon.

I have posted about it previously, here and here.