Hemel Hempstead’s Town of Culture bid puts the New Town on a national stage

Hemel Hempstead was designated a New Town in 1947. For a generation that meant factories, neighbourhood shopping parades and Geoffrey Jellicoe’s water gardens. Culture, when it was discussed at all, sat in the Old Town Hall or arrived as a touring pantomime.

That is the story the council now wants to retire. In March it adopted an arts and culture strategy. In July it used a Town of Culture bid to argue that Hemel already has the ingredients: canal-side venues at Apsley, a restored Water Gardens, independent makers on the Old Town High Street, and a borough-wide programme that reached Tring as well as the new town.

Whether the bid wins is almost secondary. The useful work is the inventory. Dacorum has spent years talking about regeneration as retail and highways. Listing choirs, murals, heritage walks and youth music as infrastructure is a different kind of civic confidence.

It also has a political edge. If West Hertfordshire becomes a single council in 2028, Hemel will be competing with St Albans’ Roman and cathedral brand. A Town of Culture campaign is a way of saying the New Town has a culture of its own: mid-century, canal-industrial, multicultural: and that it is not a suburb of somewhere prettier.

The next test is not a trophy. It is whether the Old Town, the Forum and the neighbourhood parades still have somewhere to rehearse when the grant cycle moves on.