Pub Odyssey 40

Tuesday 11 October:  THE WOODHALL ARMS PAPILLON, STAPLEFORD (Malcolm Allen, Chris Haden, Mike Horsman,Elvis Pile, David Room, Rupert Stanley, Andrew Swift)

COMMENT:  This was a nice meal in a pub which managed more successfully than many to combine restaurant and pub, and did this by keeping them physically separate.  The pub side really felt like a pub.  The beer was good too.  It is, however, a difficult place to say anything about historically because nothing much is recorded.  Stapleford is little more than a hamlet and all I can find out about the Woodhall Arms is the fact, hardly surprising, that it had a recorded nineteenth century existence.  However, by complete coincidence I had lunch the next day with a lady who was brought up in Stapleford before and during the Second World War.  She said, again unsurprisingly, that Stapleford was even smaller then but she added what was to me a genuinely surprising fact.  This was that in those days the Beane River which flows past Stapleford was a famous salmon river with access much sought after.  Now, of course, the Beane is barely more than a ditch, the reason being the pumping of water to supply the needs of (she thought) Stevenage and Harlow.  Its another story which emphasises how agricultural a county Hertfordshire was even up to the Second World War, and how much the new towns changed all that.

The Woodhall Arms is obviously named after the Woodhall estate,owned by the Abel Smith family for many generations, and still at the same size, 7,000 acres, it has been for many years.  The Woodhall estate like everywhere else of substance in England reflects some facets of  England's astonishing history.  The big house, now Heath Mount School, was built by Indian nabobs (that is English merchants who made it big in the early years of British rule in India), the park landscaping is a classic 18th century effort, the walled garden was built by prisoners of war in the Napoleonic Wars, and the great Victorian architect and gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton, builder of the Crystal Palace, got his start working in the kitchen gardens of the Woodhall Estate.