Many years from now, someone is going to be rummaging through the Knebworth House Archive and find this forgotten old sketch. “Ah yes – this was a vain fantasy at the beginning of the 21st Century responding to years and years of village consultations that consistently identified traffic congestion and a backlog of road infrastructure as the No.1 concern of Knebworth residents.”
“You see,” the AI Knebworth House Archivist will say, “when Knebworth Garden Village was planned at the beginning of the 20th Century, lots of connecting routes were envisaged but, as the village grew, not a single one of the planned new roads was put in. The old medieval lanes – Deards End Lane, Gipsy Lane and Swangleys Lane – that had existed to serve three old farms, were expected to serve the 2600 homes that came to comprise Knebworth Village.”
“When the extra 600 of these homes were built, in the late 2020s, and a final opportunity presented itself to replace these old medieval lanes, it still never happened. The fashion at the Highways Department at that time was that nobody should use cars – they should bicycle their groceries up the hill and walk their children to school through the wind and the rain before finding their own way to work – which in those days you could often only get to by car.”
“Of course there are plenty of reasons why this very old fantasy sketch – which imagined replacement routes to the old lanes – could never have worked. Third party landowners, widening an old tunnel under the railway… all much too expensive. Back then, all the money generated by new developments was needed to pay for arguing about them. Shame, though, that nobody at least tried to solve the problem… Can I walk you back to your jetpack?”
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH