Markyate · food
Markyate is a linear A5 village: a short list of local places, and Hemel, Harpenden or Luton when you want a scene.
The Sun Inn and village takeaways do the honest work. Pretending otherwise is how guidebooks annoy people who live here.
Our listings will send you to Hemel or Harpenden where Markyate has no equivalent: and we will say so.
Cake that tastes of butter, ice cream that is not only a freezer brand, rooms that work after school.
Markyate is small enough that an honest “best dessert spots” list should admit gaps. These are the nearest Dacorum options we would actually send you to.
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01
189 High Street, Berkhamsted · Berkhamsted
GAIL’s is a chain, and Berkhamsted treated it as a civic event anyway. The bakery is useful: proper bread, coffee, highchairs, a pavement that works in March. Independent cafes further along the street still make the better flat white for some regulars: which is as it should be.
02
23 High Street, Hemel Hempstead · Hemel Hempstead
No visit to the Old Town is complete without deciding whether you are a Tea Tree person. Vintage room, proper afternoon tea, High Street window. It is unashamedly pretty, which Hemel’s New Town centre is not, and that is the whole appeal.
More from the directory: Markyate Fish Bar & Kebab HouseMarkyate Grill at Fusion FoodsMarkyate Cricket & Football Club
Planning
Supplementary Planning Documents for the HGC area are now adopted. They will guide neighbourhoods, infrastructure and the long argument about how Hemel grows north.
25 June 2026