I was pleased to be able to make a statement in support of the Parish Council and Save Our Station Pub at the Public Inquiry. I was able to explain why The Station Inn is New Knebworth’s only pub, despite Knebworth now being the largest village in Hertfordshire. For those not familiar with the history, this is because prior to my great-great-grandfather, Robert Lytton, negotiating the opening of a Railway Station in 1884, there was no village here. What we now know as Knebworth was farmland at the west end of Datchworth Parish.
With the railway station came a new settlement called ‘Knebworth Station’. The Station Inn – one of only a handful of residences – was built and leased to the Fordham Company with a restrictive covenant on us, the landowner, that no other ‘alehouse or beerhouse’ should be built or permitted to be built or any ‘house or premises to be used for the sale of intoxicating liquors’ within ‘a radius of one mile’, for 99 years (i.e. until 1982). The community was so small that Fordhams didn’t want its lease devalued by us building competition.
Knebworth Station ~ the original name of what we now know as Knebworth Village
This covenant stayed in place despite the little hamlet of Knebworth Station becoming, in 1909, a much larger village. My great-grandfather, Victor Lytton, inspired by the Garden City movement and the recent creation of Letchworth Garden City, initiated a scheme with his brother-in-law, the architect Edwin Lutyens, to create a new settlement around ‘Knebworth Station’ called ‘Knebworth Garden Village’. The original plan for Knebworth Garden Village was larger even than today’s village. Although the full scheme was not completed, the population of Knebworth increased from a few hundred to about 2,500 by the Second World War, and very little that was built before the Second World War deviated from this Knebworth Garden Village scheme.
I explained to the Inquiry that my family now, as The Station Inn’s previous owners, in turn, hold a restrictive covenant over the pub. This is because the Fordham Company exchanged their lease for a freehold in 1931. Any property that we sold during the time of Knebworth Garden Village was covenanted to protect the Garden Village vision – preserving green spaces within the community, preserving the generous width between the built frontage on either side of our roads and avenues… and preventing, where possible, infill – which, of course, makes a Garden Village no longer a Garden Village.
These restrictive covenants pre-date the Planning Authority, but I very much hope that we are able to keep the garden of New Knebworth’s only pub. I hope that the area around the pub retains its width, life, lights and people – so that those using the Railway Station at all times of day and night can feel safe, and feel that they are arriving at the centre of our community, and not at the edge of a dormitory suburb.
The Station Inn is the original heart of New Knebworth. A community needs its vital organs – to live and to breathe and to prosper – and I believe that The Station Inn pub is one of my community’s vital organs.
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH