retiredmartin

February 2026. Letchworth Garden City.

The weekly visit to see Dad in his Cambridge care home found him in rude health,

no doubt in part due to the food at Hatley Court, which is (genuinely) better than anything I eat these days.

I’d hoped to use the weekends in Waterbeach to get a few ticking and gig trips into London, but the rail network has decided that commuters are more important than tourists and picked weekends to “upgrade” the network.

So all trains stopped at Letchworth, and if you think I’m taking a rail replacement bus you’ve never been on one.

You might well think LGC (as the kidz call it) is a hard sell on a drizzly Sunday in February,

but I hadn’t been since 2020 when I brought James here for driving lessons, and that seemed sufficient gap to justify a forensic re-evaluation. Or something.

Platform, which I noted erroneously as “Terminus”, was previously “Colonade” and before that an original exciting Hogshead in the time when Mrs RM and I started married life in what still felt like a Quaker town, the original non-alcoholic pub crawl.

I had no plan, or timescale, and after admiring the Billy Fury (?) themed mobility scooter and the lone Hobgoblin pump and a sports bar feel I gave it a miss. That Hobgoblin was probably an NBSS 5.

Letchworth began life 120 years ago without any pubs in the centre, just a few like the Two Chimneys spread out across in the surrounding villages. You’ll see from the grey Ps on the CAMRA map that as the town has gained pubs the suburbs have lost their chain diners.

What can it mean ? Has the nation grown bored of Hungry Horses ?

We shall see what secret treasures the Garden City has to offer up.

I wasn’t confident.