Henry Lytton Cobbold

Not many places get their name up on a cinema billboard.  I can think of a few films with Paris in the title – “An American In Paris”, “Last Tango In Paris”… I can think of one or two that namecheck London – “An American Werewolf In London”, “London Has Fallen”… New York pops up in a title every so often – “New York, New York”, “Manhattan”… and of course Los Angeles can point to “L.A. Confidential” and “La La Land”… but I can’t think of many Hertfordshire villages named in movie titles.

Hertfordshire is increasingly becoming a hub for movie-making.  You may have read in the newspapers that new film studios are planned in both Elstree and Broxbourne.  But even when films shoot locally, like “Love/Loss” in Woolmer Green in 2010, or “The World’s End” in Welwyn Garden City in 2013, the name of the location doesn’t tend to make it into the film’s title.  Of the two movies I can think of that are set in Stevenage – “Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush” (1968) and “Boston Kickout” (1996) – one even showcases the name of somewhere else.

So this month, Knebworth, bask in a little global fame, because on Thursday 23^rd September “Oasis Knebworth 1996” is released ‘in cinemas worldwide’.  Search ‘Knebworth’ on social media at the moment and you’ll see the name of our village being discussed in a number of different languages. They’re talking about us from Tokyo to Santiago.  Not many other villages can say that.

So it’s a good month to talk films, and I shall be doing that in the Banqueting Hall of Knebworth House on Thursday 2^nd September, in support of Knebworth Twinning Association.  See you there!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH

I understand Mr Quinlan’s concern, expressed in his letter last month, that improved infrastructure can make a community a more attractive proposition for population growth.  Knebworth has faced that compromise since the Railway Station was added in the 1880s.  But the point I’ve been trying to make across the last two months – alongside revisiting some local history – is that Knebworth has borne significant population growth already without infrastructure.  Specifically road infrastructure.  Now, with Highways policy the way it is currently, this looks set to continue.

Instead, I’d like to see us catch up with some of the infrastructure that was originally planned for our Garden Village.  I’d like to see purpose-built routes and safe junctions to take traffic off Deards End Lane, off Gipsy Lane, and out of the centre of the village.  Not to encourage car use, or for the benefit of so-called ‘rat-runners’, but for necessary local road use and deliveries.  By creating planned and fit-for-purpose roads for local traffic we help to create the ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’ and protected Conservation Areas that our planning policies seek.

The new developments that the North Herts Local Plan is proposing for the west side of the village are contained to the west by the motorway, to the north by the Golf Club, and to the south by the Welwyn & Hatfield District line, so I don’t see including road infrastructure in them as encouraging further houses beyond.  What I do see, once the developments are in place, is no opportunity for us to change our mind, and decide that we do need the road infrastructure after all.

So give the question some thought.  It will come up in the coming months as these developments are masterplanned and consulted on.  It’s an important decision for us to make for future generations of our village.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH

So here is the village of Knebworth in the late 1950s – before Hornbeam Spring was built in 1957, but with the motorway shown, which did not open until 1962 (I am grateful to Adrian Entecott for fine tuning these dates).  The first thing I see on this map is how Lutyens’ Garden Village areas – Stockens Green, Deard’s End Lane, Oakfields Road, the area around St Martin’s Church – still stand out as the dominant residential areas of the village.  Infill is imminent, but not to Lutyens’ design and, as discussed last month, without any of Lutyens’ planned road infrastructure.

Stevenage New Town is being built at the time of this map, growing from an Old Town of about the same size as current Knebworth, to a modern settlement of over 80,000 people.  Stevenage was chosen over Knebworth because the Hertford railway loop joined the East Coast line just to its south.  If the railway connection had been just to the south of us, it would have been Knebworth New Town instead.  You have to go back to the Domesday Book of 1086 – when Stevenage was 28 households and Knebworth 33 households – to find Knebworth bigger than Stevenage.

Britain’s first New Town boasted all sorts of modern transport ideas.  Its showpiece was a town-wide network of cycle paths.  This is something our Highways planners now want Knebworth to try and catch up with.  Everyone welcomes cycle paths, but Stevenage did also have Chief Engineer Eric Claxton’s visionary “4-pronged ‘E’ of main roads”, which meant “you can get to every house without having to go through a lot of houses.”  In other words, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

Nowadays the fashion (and Local Transport Plan 4) is that cycling comes at the expense of the car.  New local roads are not to be built (because they encourage car use).  Existing neighbourhood roads are to be closed up, or made one way (to reduce the convenience of the car).  Roundabouts – which Claxton proved were safer and eased traffic – are discouraged; and some existing ones, like the one at Knebworth’s main crossroads, Highways are now considering replacing with traffic lights.

Claxton was proud that the Stevenage he built had no traffic lights, and almost completely reduced the need for right-hand turns across traffic, “You can route yourself so you go almost entirely left turn. This reduces the frustration. This reduces the delay.”  No one wanted us out of our cars and onto bicycles more than Eric Claxton, but he – like Lutyens – would also be mystified by the blocking up of the road system that is about to come to Knebworth.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH

So here is the village of Knebworth in the 1890s.  The first thing I notice about the north-south-east-west routes through the village is that they are exactly the same ones that we still use in the 2020s.  There is the central crossroads of the old Great North Road intersecting with Station Road & Watton Road (then also Station Road); there is Deard’s End Lane, for those going from the west to the north (or vice versa); there is Gipsy Lane & Gun Lane, for those going from the west to the south (or vice versa); and of course there is Swangleys Lane to go to Datchworth.

When, a few years later, Sir Edwin Lutyens designed Knebworth Garden Village, he saw that these medieval lanes would not be sufficient for Edwardian traffic, or for the new village he planned.  So he designed new broad tree-lined roads to ease the traffic flowing north-south-east-west.  He planned new routes to take traffic off Deard’s End Lane, off Gipsy Lane, off Gun Lane, off Swangley’s Lane.  He even planned a new tunnel under the railway just south of current cemetery, where there was an old cow tunnel.  Lutyens’ Knebworth Garden Village started to be built, and became the basis of our modern village.  But when it was halted by the War the infrastructure Lutyens planned was not built.  So today we make do with exactly the same crossroads, and exactly the same medieval lanes, to get about our modern village.

At the time of this map, Knebworth was a few dozen houses.  By 2031, it is due to be around 2,600 houses.  Whether or not we agree that Knebworth should have new homes, the evidence of many public consultations is that we do agree – with Lutyens – that its Victorian rural road infrastructure has long been insufficient.  New development does give us the opportunity to do something about this.  Lutyens’ masterplans have been revisited and new ideas for taking traffic off our medieval lanes, and away from our central crossroads, are part of new proposals.

But we face – literally – a road block.  A policy called LTP4, Hertfordshire’s Local Transport Plan, does not accept that new road infrastructure is the solution.  LTP4 has the good intent of reducing car use, and creating ‘low traffic neighbourhoods’.  But it seeks to do this not by giving vehicles any alternatives to our medieval lanes.  It seeks to do it by closing down roads, blocking up routes, and denying new road and junction infrastructure.  LTP4 wants to “reduce the ease and convenience of car use” (LTP4 p.30).  There are buses for you to take, or you should cycle or walk.  Rain or shine.  June or January.

So, car-route-wise, Knebworth faces a future that is even more basic than this Victorian map.  The one single vehicle route that we – our local rural neighbours, our buses, our delivery vans & lorries, our emergency services, anybody needing to use a car – will have to access our 2,600 homes, or the communities around them, will be via Knebworth’s central crossroads.  Lutyens would be mystified.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH

In 1995 a man called Pierre founded a website call AuctionWeb.  25 years later this site – now called eBay – is a more familiar household name around the world than 250-year-old Christie’s or, even older, Sotheby’s.  Knebworth House has found some fine storied treasures on eBay over the years.  I recall in 2003 using it to put together a display of objects associated with Edward Bulwer Lytton for his bicentenary celebrations.  I found comics based on his novels, music manuscripts of songs using his poetry, even a little ornamental silver chair with his name engraved on it, part of a set honouring writers.  The display is still in his study.

Last month his namesake, my son Edward, made an interesting discovery on eBay.  He spotted a silver tureen with a double ‘L’ and a coronet that he thought looked familiar.  It took us a while to identify where we had seen it before.  It was in the detail of a photograph of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s son Robert, when he was Viceroy of India, on the costumes of his attendants.  The coronet in the design is a Baron’s coronet, not an Earl’s coronet, which Robert (only recently ‘Lord Lytton’, on the death of his father) became by virtue of that high profile job.  Robert was a baron for only 8 years.  This explains why the ‘LL’ Baron insignia is not particularly familiar to us today.  It also matches the 1870s date of the tureen to that specific moment in Lytton family history.  It now becomes a Knebworth House story – not as a tureen – but as a rare and unexpected find on eBay!  Thanks Pierre!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH

No, the scaffolding currently around the north-west corner of Knebworth House is not because we are about to the build the extension in this drawing.  No, the scaffolding is up for much more familiar and predicable reasons.  It is necessary because the north-western turret, which looks splendid and upright in the drawing (to the right of the flag), is today breaking away from the rest of the building.  Large cracks have developed all around it, and if it was let be, it would soon be pointing, like the leaning tower of Pisa, towards Hitchin.

The reasons are two-fold.  One, its Victorian foundations are not as substantial as the Tudor foundations deeper within the house.  The Victorians were more interested in spending money on decoration than foundation.  Two, the extreme weather patterns of recent years – alternating between extremely hot & dry and extremely wet – has contracted and separated the earth below.  Already we have dug around the tower and set large blocks of concrete below, to stabilise the building.  Now we begin the process of pinning, and re-stuccoing, above ground.  We also have to repair windows cavities that are now larger than the windows and lintels that were made for them.

I could show you photos of this damage – alarming photos of cracking walls and broken lintels – but there is too much other gloom in the world today.  So instead, let’s celebrate the imagination of the Victorians.  The fantasy and wackiness of Knebworth House is such a big part of what we cherish about it today.  As we scramble and scrape to preserve it, let’s salute the imagination and vision behind it, and treasure what remains.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH

“Dear Brother, I find myself this evening with an English friend in an inn in the heart of the country far from the screeching howl of London.  Yours H.”  This post card of The Lytton Arms was sent in 1907 to Freiburg in Germany.  It shows the pub before its stables were removed to create the entrance to the car park.  Stables were more useful to a village inn than a car park in those days.

I have just returned from this same forecourt with a basket full of delicious walnut bread and a box of mince pies, purchased from the pub’s neighbour Derek Hughes, who’s been setting up his bread stall, The Earth’s Crust, here every Sunday morning.  It is such a pleasure to buy bread from a local in front of the local.

I hope we all get to spend much more time inside our two Knebworth locals in 2021 – and all continue to support our local businesses, almost all of which have struggled in the lockdowns and restrictions of 2020.  With an image of this happy duo sitting “over a glass of English stout” in The Lytton Arms 114 years ago, I share the messages they send from 1907, “many salutations” and *your health!” for 2021.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH

“Rebus Angustis Fortis” is the motto on the Cobbold coat-of-arms.  “Courage Through Adversity”.  It comes to mind at the end of this unsettling year.  I have seen so many instances of it in 2020.  How extraordinary our NHS and Care workers have been.  How brilliantly so many have persevered through lockdowns and restrictions, family drama and tragedies.  Our health, livelihoods, businesses, friends, relations and neighbours have all been put at risk.   And with what fortitude and imagination so many have fought back,

A sad and happy year ends with sad and happy news.  Very sad, is the passing of Bryan Poole who I had the privilege of getting to know as a Governor of Knebworth Primary School.  I served with Bryan on the Premises Committee of the School Governors from the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2013.  He was a lovely man and a brilliant supporter of the school.  His good company and good humour made it a pleasure to take on the not-so-thrilling tasks of health & safety audits and boiler repairs and security fencing and playground resurfacing… the list goes on… and on…  I am sure Bryan is now pointing out to St Peter that the gates need their hinges checked and probably could do with a lick of paint.  I am in awe of the amount of time Bryan volunteered for the school.  I managed only four years.  Bryan started in 1989.  That’s over thirty years of giving up his personal time in the interests of our local school.  He will be much missed and I send sympathies and best thoughts to his wife Lynda, a similarly dedicated volunteer and previous editor of this magazine

Happier news is that last month Martha was unanimously voted President of Historic Houses, a national association representing over 1600 independently-owned historic houses and gardens.  She will hold the position for four years, and is the first female president in the association’s fifty year history.  It is a great tribute to all her hard work and dynamic management of Knebworth House, and her commitment to heritage issues, locally, regionally, and across the country.

She and I and all our family wish all our neighbours in Knebworth a very Happy Christmas,

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH