Garden Cities – cranky or enlightened? Geoffrey Hollis from Welwyn Garden City Heritage Trust looks at the history of pubs and drinking in the first two garden cities.
The World’s End is an apocalyptic science-fiction comedy film released in the summer of 2013.
It tells the story of five middle-aged men on a nostalgic pub crawl which gets disrupted when they discover that the locals have been taken over by aliens.
Their aim had been to visit 12 pubs, finishing at one called The World’s End.
The film was shot on location in Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, and for internal scenes Elstree Studios.
The first pub on the infamous 'Golden Mile', christened ‘The First Post’, was in reality the Pear Tree in Hollybush Lane, WGC.
The final stop, ‘The World’s End’, was The Gardeners Arms, in Wilbury Hills Road, Letchworth - now The Wilbury.
The film's lead actor and co-writer, Simon Pegg, lives in Essendon and said that he chose the two Garden Cities as examples of pleasant modern towns.
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He must have been aware of the reputation of Letchworth as being a mostly dry town with few pubs but perhaps this was all part of the joke.
To make up numbers some buildings including Letchworth Station had to be dressed up as pubs.
Ebenezer Howard devoted a section of his book Garden Cities of To-morrow to Temperance Reform.
He was not keen on alcohol but did not favour banning it completely, instead suggesting that profits from its sale should be diverted to building “asylums for those affected by alcoholism”.
He proposed that the provision of services such as pubs should be decided by public ballot.
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The early settlers in Letchworth - which included Howard - were idealists seeking Utopia and far from conventional.
George Orwell somewhat sweepingly described the new town as attracting every form of “crank: fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature-Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist”. (Road to Wigan Pier, p 152).
When an enlightened ballot was set up to decide the provision of pubs, in which both men and women took part, a small majority voted against. Women carried the day, perhaps because they did not like to see men drunk.
Letchworth was a dry town until 1960 with just one inn, The Skittles, set up in 1907. This sold only soft drinks and so was the legendary 'pub without beer'; it was soon also without skittles as the locals shunned the game.
In 1925, the Skittles Inn building became the new home of Letchworth Settlement.
The directors of the company building Welwyn Garden were keen to avoid the 'cranky' image of Letchworth, while maintaining its noble objectives.
So, a “wet restaurant” was set up called The Cherry Tree.
It was a modest wooden structure, designed by Louis de Soissons in 1921, licensed in 1922.
A larger public house replaced it in 1932, which was demolished in 1991.
The façade was retained for the Waitrose supermarket now occupying the site.
There already were pubs in the area.
The Beehive in the small village of Hatfield Hyde dated from the early 17th century, although it was only given a licence in 1842.
Owned by Lord Salisbury, it became a favourite destination for early Garden Citizens to walk to across the fields on a nice summer evening.
Once the QEII Hospital opened it was popular with hospital staff. It closed in 2016, as it was losing money and now looks very sad and empty.
The non-conformist spirit was certainly strong in Welwyn Garden City.
The Welwyn Times for 21/9/23 reports that, following an enquiry from the WGC Church Council, the Parish Council after a lively discussion agreed to ask the WGC Company to prohibit "calling" bells or other continuous ringing.
There followed a number of letters in the paper; one favoured a ban to "prevent a small minority disturbing the tranquillity or recreation of the vast majority. Continuous bell ringing on a Sunday is anti-social and intolerable to enlightened communities".
Eventually all the churches in the area agreed not to ring their bells, which is still generally the position today.
The provision of pubs in the centre of the town remains a sensitive matter.
Wetherspoons bought one of the large houses on Parkway, near the Coronation Fountain, some years ago and sought a licence for a pub to be called The Cherry Tree.
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This was hotly contested by locals, ostensibly as being in the wrong location, but more probably as being the wrong sort of pub.
Planning permission was refused twice and in 2021 Wetherspoons threw in the bar towel and put the building up for sale.
As this newspaper reported on April 5, the building is now to be a nursery school – so no danger of underage drinking!
- Next time: Modernist houses in Sherrardspark.
Geoffrey Hollis - g.hollis@welwyngarden-heritage.org
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