Borehamwood

Faces, roasts and rural pints

On Shenley Road there is a bench with plaques of familiar faces set into it — Alfred Hitchcock, Simon Cowell, a few others — and a pavement walk of fame running the length of the street. It is Borehamwood reminding you what it is: a town of 36,000 people that spent most of the twentieth century making films, and got called British Hollywood for it.

Start with the pubs. The Wellington on Theobald Street is the food-led one, with beer gardens front and rear and a bar reviewers describe as crammed with local ales. The Sunday roast is what people come back for — several call it the best pub roast they've had, which is a big claim to keep making.

Mops and Brooms sits out on the north edge of town on the road to Shenley, in what one description calls splendid rural solitude, with views across Hertfordshire and locally brewed real ales. It is the most countrified pub in the town, and you have to leave the town to reach it.

A local pub and the heritage trail

The Alfred Arms is the recently renovated local — spacious beer garden, good-priced beer, and by most accounts a decent atmosphere.

For walking, the Film and TV Heritage Trail is the obvious one: twenty-five-plus interpretive panels from the station up Shenley Road to Elstree Studios, about an hour, taking in plaques the British Film Institute awarded the town in 1996 for the centenary of British film.

Reservoir, rare breeds and play

Aldenham Country Park is a couple of miles out — 175 acres around a 60-acre reservoir that French prisoners of war dug by hand in 1795. There is a rare-breeds farm with Longhorn cattle, Bagot goats and Tamworth pigs, and a free Winnie-the-Pooh trail with the characters' houses and a Poohsticks bridge over the stream.

Meadow Park has the playgrounds, tennis courts and a spray fountain for children, and is home to Boreham Wood FC, a non-league club with a habit of embarrassing bigger teams in the FA Cup.

The studios that built the town

The studios are the reason the town exists at all. The first opened in 1914 — a single windowless 70-foot stage, the first dark stage in England, lit by a gas-powered generator. Borehamwood had good London trains but sat far enough out to escape the city's pea-soup fogs.

Star Wars was made at Elstree Studios in 1977, along with the Indiana Jones films; at one point in the 1980s, six of the ten highest-grossing films ever had been shot there. The largest stage is now named the George Lucas Soundstage 2. Down the road, the BBC Elstree Centre built Albert Square as a permanent backlot in 1984 and made EastEnders there from February 1985 until the production moved next door to Elstree Film Studios in 2024.

Rail links and cultural echoes

Trains from Elstree and Borehamwood run direct to St Pancras in about twenty minutes, which makes the town a workable base for London without London prices. The Warner Bros. Harry Potter studio tour at Leavesden is a short drive; St Albans and its Roman remains about twenty minutes the other way.

Ray Davies of the Kinks lived here through the 1960s. The Buggles wrote a song called "Elstree," a nostalgic tribute to the studios, its video showing Trevor Horn as a janitor remembering his bit-part days. It is that kind of place — a town that made other people famous and mostly kept quiet about itself.