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Stevenage carries two histories at once: a Saxon village recorded in the Domesday Book, and Britain's first New Town, built from scratch after the war to prove that ordinary families deserved a better place to live.
Long before Stevenage became a byword for postwar planning, it was a small Saxon settlement, recorded as "Stithenæce" in 1060 and later as "Stigenace" in the Domesday Book of 1086. For nearly nine centuries afterward, it stayed roughly that: a modest market village on the Great North Road, unremarkable in the way that most of England's small towns were unremarkable, quietly getting on with things.
Most towns grow by accident, one street at a time, over centuries. Stevenage grew twice: once slowly, like everywhere else, and once almost overnight, by design.
What's now called Stevenage Old Town is that original settlement, and it has kept its own identity fiercely. Wander its High Street today and you'll find timber-framed coaching inns, independent shops, and a village atmosphere that feels like a different place entirely from the planned town a mile away. Near St Nicholas Church, the novelist E.M. Forster lived as a boy from 1884 to 1894, in a house called Rooksnest that later inspired the setting of his novel "Howards End".
In 1946, everything changed. Stevenage was selected as the site of Britain's first New Town, part of a bold postwar programme to build modern, well-planned communities outside London for families escaping bomb-damaged, overcrowded housing. It was one of eight new towns designated around the capital, each intended to house around 60,000 people with proper gardens, green space, and modern amenities that many had never had access to before.
The plan was not universally welcomed. Local residents fought hard against the scheme in its early years, wary of what a government-imposed town might do to their community. But the New Town went ahead, and over the following decades Stevenage became a genuine experiment in how people could live well: segregated cycleways kept children safe from traffic, neighbourhoods were built around local centres, and industry was planned in alongside housing rather than left to sprawl.
One of the New Town's more surprising legacies is its commitment to public art. Sculptures and installations were woven into the town centre from the start, part of the belief that ordinary residents deserved beauty in their daily surroundings, not just efficient housing. The town centre itself, one of the first pedestrianised shopping precincts in Europe, was considered genuinely radical when it opened.
For a town built on the promise of green space, Fairlands Valley Park delivers on it handsomely. Its 120 acres include lakes for sailing and windsurfing, grass sledging slopes, play areas, and miles of walking paths, all free to enter and genuinely well used by the community it was built for.
Stevenage Museum, tucked beneath St Andrew and St George's Church, traces the town's full arc: from its Roman-era roots, through the quiet centuries as a Saxon and medieval village, to the ambitious New Town experiment that reshaped it entirely. It's a small museum, but it tells a genuinely unusual story well.
What makes Stevenage worth understanding, rather than just passing through, is exactly this doubling: the Old Town's centuries of continuity sitting a short walk from a New Town that dared to start again. Few places in England can show you both a Domesday-era street and a deliberately utopian 1950s town centre within the same afternoon. Go and see the join between the two for yourself, walk from one into the other, and you'll understand Stevenage in a way no history book quite manages.
The Social Martini is proud to connect the people and stories that make Stevenage special. 🍸