We live in a publess desert. It's grim. Radlett is a prosperous suburban town that grew up around the London-to-Bedford railway when it arrived at the end of the 19th Century, so like a lot of settlements within reach of a big city, it's essentially an industrial-era invention, emerging from the fields within a few decades, mainly to serve London with commuting workers (we're on the Northern edge of Metroland, 15 miles from Central London, on the straight, straight line of Watling Street, between the concentric circles of the green belt and the M25).

There's a big council estate and a lot of stockbroker-belt homes - sprawling Tudorbethan mini-manors, cottage-style piles on big plots, classic Victorian villas, alms houses and workers' cottages (now extended and with a Range Rover out the front obvs) - amost all from the 50 years between 1875 and 1925 and almost all built, tract-by-tract, on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Charles_Phillimore" rel="noreferrer nofollow">one local landowner</a>'s farmland.

There are also plenty of contemporary <a href="https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/106171595" rel="noreferrer nofollow">monsters</a> built in <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bowbrick/40909794512">the Town Hall Style</a> with porticos and columns and quadruple garages and crammed into plots that barely leave room for a trampoline (oh, and <a href="http://hiddenarchitecture.net/jaffe-house-skybreak-house/" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Skybreak</a>, the amazing Norman Foster house in which Kubrick shot some scenes from A Clockwork Orange).

So, as a modern settlement Radlett is thoroughly charmless and doesn't have the traditional centre you'll see in ancient English settlements - there's no village green and no half-timbered pub next to it. The church is up the road a bit and so's the village hall. The only legit pub in the village (the sadly lamented Cat & Fiddle, a coaching house on the Roman Road from London to St Albans) closed down years ago, so all we have now - for a population in excess of 8,000 - is the bar at the old station hotel and this place - the one-time wine bar with the hilarious name.