The name Goostrey reaches back to the Domesday Book of 1086, where the clerks spelled it Gostrel. Scholars trace the word to Old English roots that probably mean Godhere's tree, suggesting a meeting place under a single great trunk on the open Cheshire heath. Stone and bronze axe heads found within the parish push the human story further back still, into the centuries before the Iron Age, while Bronze Age barrows survive near Twemlow Hall and Terra Nova School at the parish edge. After the Norman Conquest much of Goostrey was held by William FitzNigel, Baron of Halton, and parts of it were soon gifted to the great Abbey of Saint Werburgh in Chester. The monks ran the parish of Goostrey-cum-Barnshaw as a scatter of small farms among woods and heath, supplying their abbey with wood, flour and fish until the Dissolution finally cut the link in the sixteenth century.

When the Mainwaring family of Over Peover bought up the land after the Dissolution, Goostrey settled into the rhythm of Cheshire dairy farming. Cheese, the county's famous specialty, shielded local farmers from poor grain harvests and built a comfortably well-to-do village. By the 1850s, when the present brick St Luke's was already half a century old, Goostrey could boast a school of more than a hundred children, two pubs, a mill, a blacksmith, two tailors and a shoemaker. The Crewe to Manchester railway slipped past the village in 1842, and in 1891 Goostrey finally got its own station. The platform attracted Sunday school outings, temperance groups and cyclists pedalling out from the smoky cities, and after the First World War the annual Goostrey horseraces drew crowds in motor cars. Farming dominated the parish until the late 1930s, when council houses and mains drainage arrived, and after a 1963 burst of estate-building the housing stock had quadrupled by 1970.

The parish boundary now contains something no other English village can claim: the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, the centerpiece of a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2019. The 76-metre dish was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world when it became operational in 1957, and from this corner of farmland it tracked Sputnik's booster, listened in on Soviet Moon photos, and detected the first gravitational lens. Living so close to a precision instrument has costs the rest of England does not pay. Housing developments around Goostrey have been refused on the grounds that they would interfere with the dish, and on still nights the residents share the sky with one of the most sensitive ears humanity has ever built. The world headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory, a global radio telescope project shared by twenty countries, also sits within the parish.

Despite the radio astronomy, Goostrey runs on village rhythms. The wooded valley of Red Lion Brook on the north side of the village is known locally as The Bongs, and it gave the children's novelist Alan Garner the title for his play Holly from the Bongs, which the village children performed for the BBC in the 1970s. Garner himself lives in the parish in a late-sixteenth-century house called Toad Hall and set The Weirdstone of Brisingamen at nearby Alderley Edge. Every June, on the last Saturday of the month, the village turns out for Goostrey Rose Day with fancy dress and a parade. The annual Goostrey Gooseberry Show, a Cheshire tradition with deep roots, still draws growers competing for inclusion on the plaque of past winners hanging in the Crown Inn. Goosfest, the village arts festival, fills the church, the hall and the Crown each summer with comedy, folk and classical music.

The village sprawls three miles along a single road, with two clusters of houses, two pubs (the Crown Inn and the Space Invader, recently and controversially renamed from the Red Lion), a primary school, a Methodist chapel, a Turkish barbers and a pharmacy. In 2006 Goostrey was one of the first villages in the United Kingdom to set up its own MySpace page, and the parish has logged twenty-four listed heritage assets and one scheduled monument, a bowl barrow near Jodrell Bank Farm. The contrast that defines the place is visible from almost any field: gentle Cheshire pasture in the foreground, and beyond it the white dish of the telescope catching the sky.