2024 has been a year of significant distractions – from the very sad death to cancer of my mother in the Spring, followed by the clearing of her house, full to the brim with every vestige of my parents’ busy and full eight decades; to the very happy birth of two bonny grandchildren in the last six months; to an autumn of successive film companies stripping Knebworth House to its floorboards and removing all its furniture and decorations, repainting its walls and then repainting them all again. These momentous events alongside all the regular activity of Knebworth Park, and farm, woodland & estate business has left little time for book production.
However the constant for me in 2024, through all this, has been a fascinating and deep delve into our archive to compile a scrapbook to celebrate 50 years of Knebworth Park concerts. Knebworth Park is a rare concert venue with continuity of management, an archive and an archivist, so we have literally thousands of photographs, piles of books of newspaper cuttings, boxes stuffed with event t-shirts, walls of event posters, drawers of old tickets, and every type of memento of half a century of our music history. It has been good fun to go through all this and to condense it down into a single album of colourful scrapbook layouts covering every one of our major concerts since 1974.
The distractions of the year, however, have made the book late. It was originally scheduled to appear in the summer. Then some of you very kindly pre-ordered it in September for a declared November release. Thank you for your patience. As this magazine is published it should be finished, but unavoidably copies will not appear from the printers for another few weeks. It’s almost here! I’m not changing the title to “51 Years of the Greatest Rock Venue in World!”
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH