Stevenage, England

Stevenage ( ) is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, about north of London. Stevenage is east of junctions 7 and 8 of the A1(M), between Letchworth Garden City to the north and Welwyn Garden City to the south. In 1946, Stevenage was designated the United Kingdom's first New Town under the New Towns Act.

Toponymy

"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'' in 1060 and as ''Stigenace'' in the Domesday Book in 1086.

History

Pre-Conquest

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 during housebuilding in the Chells Manor area in 1986. Other artefacts included a dodecahedron toy, fragments of amphorae for imported wine, bone hairpins, and samian ware pottery associated with high status families. Archeological excavations have confirmed the existence of a small Roman farmstead, a malting kiln and a Celtic round house in the Chells area, and a cemetery containing 25 cremations. The most substantial evidence of activity from Roman times is Six Hills, six tumuli by the side of the old Great North Road that are presumably the burial places of members of a local family.

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

During the 9th and 10th centuries AD, the Saxon village in Stevenage faced frequent attacks from Viking raiders. Stevenage was on the border of the Danelaw. A Viking spearhead was discovered by archaeologists at nearby Ardeley.

Middle Ages

According to the Domesday Book, in 1086 the Lord of the Manor was the Abbot of Westminster Abbey. The settlement had moved down to the Great North Road. 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's Church dates from the 12th century, but it was probably a site of worship much earlier. The list of rectors (parish priests) is relatively complete from 1213. Around 1500 the church was much improved, with decorative woodwork and the addition of a clerestory.

North of the Old Town is Jack's Hill, associated with the legendary archer Jack O'Legs of Weston. According to local folklore, Jack stole flour from the bakers of Baldock to feed the poor during a famine, like Robin Hood.

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

The oldest surviving house in Stevenage is Tudor House in Letchmore Street, built before 1500. During the 16th century it was a butcher's shop owned by a man named Scott. From 1773 onwards it served as the town's workhouse, and later became a school from 1835 until 1885. It was the headquarters of the local town gas company from c.1885 until 1936, when it was converted into a private dwelling.

Chells Manor, a medieval hall house located three miles from the Old Town, was built in the 14th century for the Wake family on the foundations of a much older moated manor house mentioned in the Domesday Book. The site of the lost village of Chells was redeveloped during the extension of the New Town in the 1980s, and a hoard of Roman coins was discovered. In the present day, Chells is a suburb of New Stevenage.

Tudor, Stuart and Georgian eras

In 1558 Thomas Alleyne, then the Rector of Stevenage, founded a free grammar school for boys, Alleyne's Grammar School, which, despite becoming a boys' comprehensive school in 1967 (starting with the 1969 year), had an unbroken existence (unlike the grammar school in neighbouring Hitchin) until 1989, when it was merged with Stevenage Girls' School to become the Thomas Alleyne School. Francis Cammaerts was Headmaster of Alleyne's Grammar School from 1952 to 1961. The school, which has been since 1989 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) scrapped the move owing to budget cuts.

During the 17th century, the Elizabethan house at 37 High Street was the home of greengrocer and churchwarden Henry Trigg. Trigg was a philanthropist who donated another of his properties to serve as Stevenage's first workhouse. When Henry died in 1724 his coffin was placed in the rafters of the adjoining barn to prevent resurrection men from stealing his remains. In 1774, Trigg's house became the Old Castle coaching inn, and was used as a staging post by the Royal Mail. From 1999 until 2016 it served as a branch of NatWest, and as of 2022 it has been converted into a dentist's surgery.

Stevenage's prosperity came in part from the Great North Road, which was turnpiked in the early 18th century on the site of the present day Marquess of Granby pub. Many inns in the High Street served the stagecoaches, 21 of which passed through Stevenage each day in 1800. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the road now known as Six Hills Way was the haunt of highwaymen who would use the ancient burial mounds as a hiding place. James Whitney, the namesake of the Highwayman pub in Graveley, was hanged at Newgate in 1693 for robbing travellers in this area. Whitney, a Jacobite, was born in Stevenage c.1660 and was apprenticed to a butcher in Hitchin before opening an inn in Cheshunt. Due to the failure of his business, Whitney began robbing wealthy travellers and by 1690 he had a gang of over 50 men.

On 10 July 1807, the Great Fire of Stevenage destroyed 42 properties in Middle Row, including Hellard's almshouse of 1501. The fire is believed to have been started when a young girl employed as a chambermaid at one of the coaching inns emptied embers from the fireplace into the street. Sparks from the embers ignited the thatched roof of a nearby wheelwright's shop, and quickly engulfed the other timber framed buildings in the north end of the Old Town due to a strong North wind. The conflagration was only stopped from engulfing the entire street by demolishing a house to serve as a firebreak. After the fire was extinguished by Stevenage's volunteer firefighters using a hand-operated fire engine made in 1763, the houses and inns were rebuilt with brick facades and tiled roofs. Troopers from the Hertfordshire Yeomanry assisted the firefighters in the operation.

Victorian era to 20th century

In 1850 the Great Northern Railway was constructed and the era of the stagecoach 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."

At the turn of the century, the twin poachers Albert and Ebenezer Fox were active in the area. While in jail, they were studied by police commissioner Edward Henry to confirm his theory on the usefulness of fingerprinting in forensic science.

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.

Stevenage New Town

Slow growth in Stevenage continued until just after the Second World War, when the Abercrombie Plan called for the establishment of a ring of new towns around London. On 1 August 1946, Stevenage was designated the first New Town under the New Towns Act.

The plan was not popular and local people 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. The first significant building to be demolished to make way for a gyratory system was the Old Town Hall, in which the opposition had been expressed, in 1974.

The inaugural chairman of the Stevenage Development Corporation was the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, appointed by Lewis Silkin in 1946, with the radical town planner Dr Monica Felton as his deputy. In 1949 she became chairman 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 Lenin Peace Prize) sullied her reputation. Felton was replaced first by Allan Duff and later Thomas Bennett, who carried the project to completion. Gordon Stephenson was the planner, Peter Shepheard the architect, and Eric Claxton the engineer. Claxton took the attitude that the new town should separate bicycles from the automobile as much as possible. Mary Tabor was the Housing Director of Stevenage New Town from 1951 until 1972. Tabor was a member of the Society of Women Housing Managers, which was founded by women trained under Octavia Hill. Mary Tabor, with the support of more than 40 housing management staff by 1960, provided a notably personal and caring service to tenants of the town. Many early residents of the town would recall with gratitude how much she had done for them and the town as a whole.

In May 1953, Sir Roydon Dash took over the position of chairman from Bennett. In 1962, Sir Arthur Rucker was appointed Chairman of the Stevenage Development Corporation, retiring from the position in 1966. He was succeeded by Evelyn Denington, who joined the board in 1950. Denington remained the chairman until the dissolution of the Corporation in 1980. Having become a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974, Denington was elevated to the peerage in 1978, choosing to assume the title of Baroness Denington of Stevenage.

In keeping with the sociological outlook of the day, the town was planned with six self-contained neighbourhoods, each to house between ten and twelve thousand people. The first two estates to be occupied were the Stoney Hall and Monks Wood estates, in 1951. The Twin Foxes pub, on the Monks Wood estate, was Stevenage's first new public house and was named after local notorious identical-twin poachers ( Albert and Ebenezer Fox). It closed in 2017. At least two other public houses have a direct relationship to local history. The Edward the Confessor pub (closed 2006) could have had a connection to St Mary's Church in nearby Walkern as King Edward reigned from 1042 until his death in 1066 and Walkern's church dates from this period. The second pub with a 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.

Next to be built and occupied were the neighbourhoods of 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. it was still under construction. The Government gave almost £2 million for a purpose-built homeless shelter, which will serve a large part of Hertfordshire.

Industrial area

Stevenage Development Corporation zoned an area for industry between the East Coast railway line and the A1 road, which came to be known as Gunnels Wood Industrial Area. An additional area for industry has since been developed at Pin Green.

The primary industrial area is in a location that is separate—but adjacent to—the residential areas of town. British Aerospace (now MBDA