This month we are involved in the three things that make us unpopular with our neighbours. We are culling deer in our deer park, we are cutting down trees in New Wood as part of our Forestry Management Plan and we own land that is proposed for Greenbelt rollback and, if approved, development. All three of these things make me uncomfortable – I am a vegetarian, even dead trees I like to preserve by making sculptures out of them, and I prefer country to town. However I understand that in all three of these cases continued vitality is the result.
I see that our neighbours like it that we maintain a deer herd, I see that our neighbours enjoy walking the public footpaths through and past the woods that we are responsible for maintaining, and I see that our neighbours benefit from and enjoy living in the houses that have been built on our land since we purchased it off the Hotoft family (some time ago) and Knebworth was all green fields. Ah, I hear you say, deer stock renews, woods renew, but open spaces once gone are lost forever. But I see that over the years the majority have benefited by the evolution of New Knebworth. I do believe development works best when there is a plan, and consequently I have spent a lot of time over the last 35 years involved in initiatives to investigate how change, if inevitable, might work for the better. Ask me for positive examples of the loss of green fields and I point to what was built of Knebworth Garden Village in the early 1900s (e.g. Stockens Green) and the creation of Old Knebworth Village Green in the 1980s.
Change is unsettling, and makes us feel uncomfortable, but I suggest that Knebworth has an advantage over other communities. As yet, no third party developers are involved in the larger areas of land proposed for change in Knebworth by North Herts District Council’s Plan, and the two families that are responsible for that land live in this area, work in this area, and have for a long time called our community home. They are your neighbours, and as George Eliot wisely says in her novel ‘Middlemarch’, “I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbours think they are”.
Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com