Lichfield Cathedral was started in 1195 and largely completed by 1330. It is the only medieval cathedral in the British Isles with three spires - one at the crossing, two at the west end - and it has weathered an extraordinary amount of damage to keep them. The cathedral was twice besieged during the English Civil War. The central spire was completely destroyed; the building was effectively gutted. Restoration came under Bishop Hacket after 1660, partly funded by Charles II. The cathedral has been continuously restored ever since. Inside, the west window glass is some of the oldest in any cathedral; the Herkenrode glass in the Lady Chapel was bought in 1801 from a dissolved monastery in modern Belgium and is considered some of the finest 16th-century painted glass in Europe. Minster Pool, dammed in the 12th century to power a mill, still mirrors the spires on a still morning.

Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 above his father Michael's bookshop on Breadmarket Street, which is now the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum. He spent his first 27 years in Lichfield before moving to London with David Garrick - the actor who would change English theatre as profoundly as Johnson would change the language. A Dictionary of the English Language, published on 15 April 1755, was Johnson's nine-year solo answer to the great dictionaries the French and Italian academies had produced with dozens of compilers. He included 42,773 words. The Market Square holds his statue, gazing toward the building where he was born, with a companion statue of his great friend and biographer James Boswell on the other side. Johnson called Lichfield people the most polite in England. He returned often. When he died in 1784, he asked to be remembered here as much as in Westminster.

Just north of the cathedral on Beacon Street stands a tall brick house where the physician, poet, philosopher and natural historian Erasmus Darwin lived from 1758 to 1781. He treated patients across Staffordshire, refused to charge the poor, and wrote epic poems about evolution decades before his grandson Charles was born. From this house Darwin helped convene the Lunar Society - the group of industrialists, scientists and inventors that included Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood, who met on nights near the full moon so they could ride home safely afterwards. The society did as much to drive the British Industrial Revolution as any institution that ever existed. Darwin's house is now a museum that opened in 1999, the doors painted in the colours he chose, the garden replanted with the medicinal herbs he grew.

Elias Ashmole was born in Lichfield on 23 May 1617 and led a life that reads like a Restoration novel. He fought on the royalist side in the Civil War, studied alchemy and astrology, and after the Restoration was rewarded with a series of lucrative court positions. Throughout his life he collected: manuscripts, curiosities, antiquities, anything strange or rare. Many of his most prized items came from the traveller and botanist John Tradescant the Younger, who had inherited an extraordinary cabinet of curiosities from his father. Ashmole donated his entire collection - the Tradescant material plus his own additions - to the University of Oxford in 1677, creating the Ashmolean Museum, the world's first public museum. The collection that started in a Lambeth house and passed through Lichfield's most famous antiquary became, in time, one of the world's great university museums.

Lichfield is small enough to walk. Two railway stations sit on the Cross-City Line from Birmingham, and Lichfield Trent Valley also connects to the West Coast Main Line, putting London Euston as close as 69 minutes by train. The M6 Toll passes just south of the city; the A38 and A5 - the Roman Watling Street and Ryknild Street - still trace much of the route the legionaries marked out two thousand years ago at the fort of Letocetum, three and a half kilometres south of the modern city. Bird Street holds most of the recommended restaurants; the Indian, Thai and Italian options have multiplied since Johnson's day. The pubs are good - the Queens Head on Queen Street keeps six real ales and a cheese counter; the Earl of Lichfield serves Marston's Pedigree from nearby Burton-upon-Trent. The Coventry Canal runs along the east of town, 38 miles of firm towpath connecting Lichfield to Coventry through 13 locks. In July the Lichfield Festival fills 11 days with international music and arts. Greenhill Bower fills the Spring Bank Holiday with morris dancers and a carnival queen, a tradition that stretches back unbroken to the 12th-century Court of Arraye.