Update: I have booked a table from noon as the pub expects to be busy that afternoon. The usual publican's reluctance to allow consumption of your own food applies but there is ample space nearby for picnics.
It's easy to think of St Evenage or Silkingrad as an endless spread of 1960's terraced housing thrown up to accommodate London overspill. Some would bemoan the concrete or refer to "The violent crime capital of Hertfordshire", an epithet proudly repeated by the local press.
I must confess that I rather like Stevenage, having worked there for 20 years and raised my family over a similar period. And it's darker reputation? I've never seen anything of that.
Stevenage as a village existed a long time before the 1946 the New Town Act; it was the first community selected to be a "new town". The Queen opened the centre in 1959 and a new railway station was built for Stevenage in 1973.
The A1(M) now runs to the west of Symonds Green.
But there is a more interesting earlier history that relates to the villages and hamlets that were to be engulfed by new developments. Bedwell, Broadwater, Shephall (apparently "Sheephall") and Symonds Green are all examples where the old village centres now sit oddly within the 20th Century sprawl.
Symonds Green is just such a place, starkly different from its immediate surroundings. It may surprise you. It supports a large, pre-Stevenage pub, a great space for picnics and, most surprisingly of all, easy access to some lovely countryside.
Please do come and relax in an interesting place. Bring a picnic if you like and then find some caches that you might otherwise roar past on the A1(M) heading to your own satanic mill in the Big Smoke.