Sometimes you just want to go for a nice walk, nothing too taxing, well-connected, municipal-focused, mixed heritage, watery promenades, sculptural interludes, optimistically postwar, retail opportunities, refreshment-adjacent, a bit of a stroll, won't take long. So here's an upbeat loop round the new town of Hemel Hempstead, nowhere near enough to make a day of it but a nice walk all the same. [map][14 photos]
n.b. Imagine a three-petalled flower, or perhaps a wind turbine. That's the shape of the Hemel Green Walk - three approximately equal loops spreading out from the central roundabout.
n.b. The full Hemel Green Walk is 7½ miles long but I'm only doing the northern loop hence just 2½ miles.
n.b. The other loops head out of town to the station and towards Apsley Marina, but the canal towpath looked a bit muddy so I stuck to the all-weather section.
n.b. The Hemel Green Walk is supposed to be available as a lovely-looking fold-out map, but I went to the library as directed and they didn't have a copy, indeed hadn't heard of it. To their credit they looked in several drawers and cupboards but had no luck so I had to make do with a pdf.
Let's start at the Magic Roundabout, Hemel Hempstead's iconic central gyratory. It's six mini roundabouts in one, a big loop that can be orbited clockwise or anti-clockwise with the River Gade flowing straight through the middle. It was constructed in 1973 and many drivers love it, although it's fair to say my Mum wasn't a fan. Alongside used to be the HQ of Kodak, the camera people, who moved into a concretetower in 1957 and moved out in 2006 after film processing faded away. I thought they'd replaced the offices with new flats but apparently they just reclad the exterior and added some extra blocks. An anthropomorphic sculpture in the central plaza has been stacked imaginatively from three reels of film... but we're not going that way, we're heading into town.
Hemel Hempstead was designated a new town in 1947, four weeks after Crawley and six weeks before Harlow.
The sinuous office block that once crossed the main road was replaced in 2005 by a chunky shopping district called Riverside. The anchor tenant was a huge Debenhams which with hindsight was a terrible choice, the largest building now a vacuous shell, since doubled down by the emptying of Top Shop/Top Man opposite. Enough lingers elsewhere that Hemel remains a proper retail draw, mainly thanks to Marlowes, the new town's original postwar precinct. It wasn't always pedestrianised but it feels right that it is, a long swoosh of shops with occasional sculptural infill. On the bend by M&S is A Point of Reflection, a mossy dollop resembling a classical urn, and further up is Waterplay, three acrobatic kids on a plinth representing the sporting vigour of Dacorum.
Dacorum is the name of the local authority hereabouts since 1974.
My favourite civic artwork in Hemel is the Tile Mosaic Map on the end of the Hillfield Road car park (said to be Britain's first multi-storey). It shows the town in relation to neighbouring settlements, each with a caricature of what its famous for, so for example Hatfield has Queen Elizabeth I being startled by a jet airliner, Ayot St Lawrence has a very beardy George Bernard Shaw and Whipsnade has a lion parading on an elephant. It's a shame Watford doesn't get a look-in but that's because the canvas is landscape rather than portrait. Nearby is Development of Man, a four-part evolutionary layer cake in Portland stone with 'Man the Town Dweller' as its pinnacle, and which probably looked more imposing before the charity shop underneath moved out.
The mosaic map was created by Rowland Emett, king of postwar kinetic whimsy.
The Green Walk suggests a diversion at this point to go see where a railway no longer is. This was the Harpenden to Hemel Hempstead branch line, a connection to the Midland Main Line which opened in 1877 and never quite reached the West Coast Main line due to railway rivalry. It closed the same year Hemel was designated a new town, a decision which seems ridiculous today, after which the viaduct across the Gade was demolished to make way for fresh development. Thankfully the seven miles from the old station to Harpenden has been retained as a long-distance path called The Nickey Line, which is certainly an ambulatory quest for another day, but not really worth making a special effort to see on a town centre trail.
This is why Hemel Hempstead's current station is a bloody-annoying mile out of town across a muddy moor.
I hadn't walked this far north before so wasn't fully prepared for the fact that Hemel Hempstead has an old town, a long street with buildings 400 years older than the surrounding residential districts. Of course it does, all the early new towns coalesced around an existing urban heart rather than being conjured up across fields. But this is a properly characterful quarter mile, a narrow climb between jutting buildings, irregular shops and pastel-painted cottages, now with one-way traffic to avoid congestion. More than one Tudor coaching inn still plies a trade, the Olde Kings Arms now offering unlimited pasta on Mondays rather than stabling for 36 horses. Hemel was once renowned for its grain market, the Corn Exchange long since absorbed into the (Old) Town Hall but still with an echoingly evocative pillared undercroft. It's fair to say I was pleasantly surprised.
Henry VIII may actually have stayed at the Olde Kings Arms before it was called that.
Historically Hemel's pride and joy is St Mary's, a notable Norman church on a proven Saxon site. It has flint and Hertfordshire puddingstone in its walls, a slew of stained glass inside and is unmissable on the skyline due to its 200 foot octagonal spire. According to a plaque the spire is 'one of the tallest in Europe', a claim I find hard to match to actual data, although I am willing to believe it was maximal in the 14th century and that it's still the tallest lead-clad timber spire in England. For a good view of the full vertical extent head to neighbouring Charter Gardens, soon to be a riot once the bulbs burst forth, where the gatehouse tower of a Cromwellian knight's manor house still stands.
Henry VIII probably didn't stay at the manor on the night he signed the town's market charter, whatever myth says.
It's now time to head back south again, this time following the river rather than the main streets. When the new town centre was being created the planners realised the Gade would make an excellent recreational spine so left a linear park down one side for recreational purposes. It's a tad more natural at the northern end, this where the splash park, bowls club and general kickabout space can be found. But as the river flows closer to the shops it's been cajoled into a straighter ornamental form, creating a very pleasant and unexpectedly lengthy promenade space called the Water Gardens. This includes gentle weirs, majestic willows and the occasional duck-infested island, with the Gade crossed at regular intervals by a very 1950s-style of low arched footbridge.
The Water Gardens replaced several watercress beds, West Herts once being prime cress-growing territory.
Hemel Hempstead's chief architect was Geoffrey Jellicoe, his original vision being "not a city in a garden, but a city in a park." His signature design is perhaps best seen in these riverside spaces, especially the Flower Garden with its shrubbery arches and geometric walkways, although it's currently too early in the year for the full burst of colour so oddly unphotogenic. The Water Gardens end with a bulbous lake, its shape intended by Jellicoe to resemble the head of a serpent although I doubt most residents have ever spotted the symbolism. Here we find the last of the walk's civic sculptures, a pair of bronze dancers jiving on the surface of the water (title Rock'n'Roll, artist Hubert Yencesse, year 1962). Ahead lies the Riverside shopping centre again, then the six-fold roundabout and that means we're done.
I certainly saw a new side to the new town on this walk, and perhaps you'd enjoy a trip to Hemel Hempstead too.
