Stevenage (British New Town)

Overview
Stevenage /ˈstiːvənᵻdʒ/ is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England. It is situated to the east of junctions 7 and 8 of the A1(M), and is between Letchworth Garden City to the north, and Welwyn Garden City to the south.

Stevenage is roughly 32.9 miles (50 km) north of central London. Its population has increased significantly over the last century: the population was 1,430 in 1801, 4,049 in 1901, 79,715 in 2001 and 83,957 in 2011. The largest increase occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, after Stevenage was designated a new town under the New Towns Act of 1946. The current population is now estimated to be around 84,000.

Two films were set in and around Stevenage, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and Boston Kickout. Spy Game was partly filmed in Stevenage, but set in Washington, D.C.. The 1959 film Serious Charge was also filmed in Stevenage.

Etymology
"Stevenage" may derive from Old English stiþen āc / stiðen āc / stithen ac (various Old English dialects cited here) meaning '(place at) the stiff oak'.

The name was recorded as Stithenæce, c.1060 and Stigenace in 1086 in the Domesday Book.

Pre-1946
Stevenage lies near the line of the Roman road from Verulamium to Baldock. Some Romano-British remains were discovered during the building of the New Town, and a hoard of 2,000 silver Roman coins was discovered in 1986 during new house building in the Chells Manor area. The most substantial evidence of activity from Roman times is Six Hills, six tumuli by the side of the old Great North Road – presumably the burial places of a local family.

A little to the east of the Roman sites the first Saxon camp was made in a clearing in the woods where the church, manor house and the first village were later built. Settlements also sprang up in Chells, Broadwater and Shephall (though before the New Town Shephall was a separate parish and Broadwater was split between the parishes of Shephall and Knebworth).

In the Domesday Book the Lord of the Manor was the Abbot of Westminster Abbey. The settlement had moved down to the Great North Road and in 1281 it was granted a Royal Charter to hold a weekly market and annual fair (still held in the High Street).

The earliest part of St Nicholas' Church dates from the 12th century but it was probably a site of worship much earlier. The known list of priests or rectors is relatively complete from 1213.

The remains of a medieval moated homestead in Whomerley Wood is an 80-yard-square trench almost 5 feet wide in parts. It was probably the home of Ralph de Homle, and both Roman and later pottery has been found there.

Around 1500 the Church was much improved, with decorative woodwork and the addition of a clerestory.

In 1558 Thomas Alleyne, a rector of the town, founded a free grammar school for boys, Alleyne's Grammar School, which had an unbroken existence (unlike the grammar school in neighbouring Hitchin) until 1989. Francis Cammaerts was headmaster of the school from 1952 to 1961. The school, which was a mixed comprehensive school and is now an Academy as of 2013, still exists on its original site at the north end of the High Street. It was intended to move the school to Great Ashby, but the Coalition government (2010–15) proposed scrapping the move owing to budget cuts.

Stevenage's prosperity came in part from the North Road, which was turnpiked in the early 18th century. Many inns in the High Street served the stage coaches, 21 of which passed through Stevenage each day in 1800.

In 1857 the Great Northern Railway was constructed, and the era of the stage coach had ended. Stevenage grew only slowly throughout the 19th century and a second church (Holy Trinity) was constructed at the south end of the High Street. In 1861 Dickens commented, "The village street was like most other village streets: wide for its height, silent for its size, and drowsy in the dullest degree. The quietest little dwellings with the largest of window-shutters to shut up nothing as if it were the Mint or the Bank of England."

In 1928 Philip Vincent bought the HRD Motorcycle Co Ltd out of receivership, immediately moving it to Stevenage and renaming it the Vincent HRD Motorcycle Co Ltd. He produced the legendary motorcycles, including the Black Shadow and Black Lightning, in the town until 1955.

Government plans for rehousing Londoners


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Modern Stevenage


This slow growth continued until, after the Second World War, the Abercrombie Plan called for the establishment of a ring of new towns around London. It was designated the first New Town on 1 August 1946. The plan was not popular with local people, who protested at a meeting held in the town hall before Lewis Silkin, minister in the Labour Government of Clement Attlee. As Lewis Silkin arrived at the railway station for this meeting, some local people had changed the signs 'Stevenage' to 'Silkingrad'. Silkin was obstinate at the meeting, telling a crowd of 3,000 people outside the town hall (around half the town's residents): "It's no good your jeering, it's going to be done." Despite the hostile reaction to Silkin and a referendum that showed 52% (turnout 2,500) 'entirely against' the expansion, the plan went ahead. Ironically, although the Commission for the New Towns [however, CNT wasn't set up until 1963...] declared the Old Town would not be touched, the first significant building to be demolished was indeed the Old Town Hall, in which the opposition had been expressed.

In 1949 the radical townplanner Dr Monica Felton became Chairman of the Stevenage Development Corporation but she was sacked within two years. There were a number of reasons for her dismissal by the government but a lack of hands-on town planning leadership and her opposition to the Korean War (for which she was later awarded the Stalin Peace Prize) sullied her reputation.

In keeping with the sociological outlook of the day, the town was planned with six self-contained neighbourhoods. The first two of these to be occupied were the Stoney Hall and Monks Wood 'Estates', in 1951. The Twin Foxes pub, still on the Monks Wood estate, was Stevenage's first 'new' public house and was named after local notorious identical-twin poachers (Albert Ebenezer and Ebenezer Albert Fox). Next to be built and occupied by the London overspill was Bedwell in 1952, and then came Broadwater and Shephall (1953), Chells in the 1960s and later Pin Green and Symonds Green. Another new development to the north of the town is Great Ashby. As of 2014 it is still under construction. The Government gave almost £2 million for a purpose-built homeless shelter, which will serve a large part of Hertfordshire.

At least two other public houses have a direct relationship to local history. The name of the pub "Edward the Confessor" (closed 2006) could have had a connection to the time at which St Mary's Church in nearby Walkern was built, for King Edward ruled from 1042 until his death in 1066. Walkern's village church dates from this time. The second pub with a possible link to local history is the "Our Mutual Friend" in Broadwater. The name of the pub is the title of a novel by Charles Dickens. Dickens was an occasional guest of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in nearby Knebworth House and knew Stevenage very well.

High Street in the Old Town The pedestrianized town centre was the first purpose-built traffic-free shopping zone in Britain and was officially opened in 1959 by the Queen. By the clock tower and ornamental pool is Joyride, a mother and child sculpture by Franta Belsky. Although revolutionary for its time, the town centre is showing signs of age and in 2005 plans were revealed for a major regeneration to take place over the next decade. Details are still being debated by the council, landowners and other interested parties.

Multimillion-pound plans to redevelop Stevenage town centre were scrapped owing to the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the lack of interested private-sector partners On 24 May 2012 Stevenage Borough Council announced that a £250m scheme for the shopping area has been pulled by Stevenage Regeneration Limited (SRL) because of the continuing adverse economic conditions. The plans, which included realigning streets, moving the bus station and building a new department store, cinema, hotel, restaurants, and flats, had been given council planning approval in January 2012.

The Town Centre Regeneration Strategy (2002) called for better-quality shops (including a major department store), improved public transport with a combined bus and rail interchange, high-density town-centre living, substantially improved civic facilities, increased office space and an improved 'public realm'. YMCA Space Stevenage (a youth and community centre) was evicted and replaced by Paddy Power (a betting shop). Other well-known stores, such as Maplin Electronics, and Marks & Spencer have also disappeared from Stevenage town centre.

The town has a large central library in Southgate, at the southern end of the pedestrian precinct, with facilities including printing, fax and photocopying, children's events, study space, a carers' information point and a large public computer suite, as well as a small branch library at the northern end of the High Street in the Old Town. There is also a public library in nearby Knebworth, located in St Martin's Road.

Next to the Town Garden the Church of St Andrew and St George is an example of modern church design and has housed Stevenage Museum in its crypt since 1976. The church is a cathedral-like Grade 2 listed building. It is also the largest parish church to have been built in England since World War Two.

Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother laid the foundation stone in July 1956 and was also present at the consecration of the Bishop of St Alban's, the Right Reverend Michael Gresford-Jones, on Advent Sunday 27 November 1960. The frame is constructed from a continuous pour of concrete into moulds, creating interlacing arches and leaving no apparent joints. There are twelve Purbeck-marble columns around the high altar and the external walls are clad in panels faced with Normandy pebble. The campanile houses the loudspeakers for an electro-acoustic carillon. A popular sculpture, 'The Urban Elephant' by Andrew Burton, was commissioned in 1992.

North of Stevenage Old Town, near St Nicholas' Church, lies Rooks' Nest ("under the big wych-elm"), home of the novelist Edward Morgan Forster from 1884 to 1894. Forster used Rooksnest and the surrounding area as the setting for his novel Howards End. In the preface to one paperback edition of Howards End there is a lot to be found about landmarks of Stevenage and their relationship to the story of the novel, such as Stevenage High Street and the Six Hills. The land north of St Nicholas' Church, known as Forster Country, is the last remaining farmland within the boundary of Stevenage borough. Forster was unhappy with the development of new Stevenage, which would, in his words, "fall out of the blue sky like a meteorite upon the ancient and delicate scenery of Hertfordshire".

Also close to Stevenage is Knebworth House, a gothic stately home and venue of globally renowned rock concerts since 1974. The house was once home to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian English novelist and spiritualist, who, as reported by one of his visitors, so deeply believed in spiritual realities that he sometimes thought himself to be invisible while others were around.

Life since the Millennium
In 1999 a millennium countdown clock was mounted on the town centre clock tower, displaying the time remaining until the year 2000. The artwork on the clock was designed by Nicola Reed, a pupil of Fearnhill School, Letchworth.

Adjacent to yet separate from the residential parts of the town is the Industrial Area. For many years British Aerospace (now MBDA) was the largest employer in the town but now GlaxoSmithKline has a large pharmaceutical research laboratory complex (which is known as 'The Palace' to many of its inhabitants). A smaller but interesting enterprise is Astrium, which for some decades (as part of British Aerospace and its predecessors) has manufactured spacecraft, both as prime contractor and as equipment supplier.

There are many small- to medium-size firms as well. Stevenage BioScience Catalyst, a new science park aimed at attracting small and start-up life-sciences enterprises, opened in 2011 on a site next to GSK.

The town is still growing. It is set to expand west of the A1(M) motorway and may be further identified for development. The main area of more recent development is Great Ashby to the north-east of the town (but actually in North Hertfordshire District). A considerable amount of in-borough development has been undertaken at Chrysalis Park - on the old Dixon's Warehouse site adjacent to the Pin Green Industrial Estate. While being home to some celebrities, such as Kinga from Big Brother Fame.

Stevenage holds a number of annual events, including Stevenage Day and Rock in the Park. In past years Stevenage Carnival has also been held, with a number of attempts to revive it.

In 2016, Stevenage celebrated its seventieth anniversary as a New Town.

Also see

 * Milton Keynes (British New Town)