Things you’ll know if you grew up in Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire: the forgotten home county. Though it may not have the fame of Surrey or the prowess of Oxfordshire, it will always be treasured by all who were lucky enough to grow up there.

But what sorts a true Hertfordshire child from the sea of Three Counties pretenders? Our shared experiences of Oceana, the Galleria and Baby Batch, of course.

These are all the things you’ve been through if you grew up in Herts – try not to get too nostalgic.

No-one had ever heard of your town

Cheshunt? Kings Langley? Brookmans Park? You’re definitely making these up.

Your school trips would always be desperately boring

Retrospectively it’s kind of interesting that Verulamium was one of the biggest Roman British towns or that there are loads of butterflies in Chiswell Green, but did we really need to take a half-hour coach on a hot day to see them?

School trips around Hertfordshire were dull to say the least, and half the time you’d spend them wishing you’d been allowed to just go to school and have lessons as per normal.

Then there were the times you got to see the messed-up stuffed animals at the Tring Natural History Museum, and it all seemed worth it.

But then there were the trips to Hazard Alley

Sure, it’s in Milton Keynes, but you weren’t a true Hertfordshire kid if you didn’t get taken on a trip to Hazard Alley. The place was fitted out with badly-made dummies and hellscape film sets, all meant to teach you the dangers of things like talking to strangers, touching live railway lines and tampering with electric fences.

Of course the illusion was broken when you realised your babysitter was the guy playing the drug dealer, and he spent the whole time letting you and your mates eat the blue M&Ms he was pretending to peddle.

Jarman Park was what dreams were made of

Long before the swanky Tesco and the giant climbing complex, Jarman Park was something truly extraordinary. You could grab a Pizza Hut before going to the cinema to see the latest Shrek, you could kill time playing Time Crisis II in the arcade or you could whack on your boots and iceskate around the woefully small rink.

And then there was Aquasplash: that dirty, verruca-ridden den of childish innocence. You’d spend your best birthday parties there, banging your head in the green bowl and getting flipped out of your rubber ring in the lazy river by nasty kids from Stevenage.

You don’t know if you’ve ever been truly happy since it closed down.

Baby Batchwood was a rite of passage

Batchwood itself has been a regular haunt ever since, but the heady days of Baby Batch are what you’ll always be trying to recreate. The rebellious kids would get pissed off WKDs and the dregs of their parents’ spirit cabinets, before heading to the manor itself to dance the night away to the likes of N Dubz, JoJo and 3 Of A Kind.

Face it, it hasn’t been the same since they took away the podiums.

Your emo phase took you to The Pioneer

Of course, as you got older you became grungier, and you started going to the dirty music venues where your friends’ band with a name like CaRnAgE or RIOT! had announced they were playing on a garish poster printed from their mum’s computer and stuck on your form room wall.

Of course, the best of these was The Pioneer in St Albans – a sprawling skate park-cum-music venue where hardcore scene kid boys would spend their time eating vending machine chocolate and trying to chat up girls with hair even more backcombed than theirs.

Enter Shikari started their career on this stage, so you knew it was cool.

You’d spend all your money in the Galleria

To say it’s never really seemed to have much more than a Maccy’s, a TK Maxx and an Accessorize, you were never quite sure how the Galleria was always able to leave you broke.

Either way, the money you didn’t spend here would be going on Jack Wills.

You were fiercely proud of your school

Private or state, posh or very much not, it didn’t matter: you bled the colour of your uniform. Habs boys fought tooth and nail with St Columba’s lads, Marriotts and Barnwell girls pulled each other hair and when St George’s met Berkhamsted on the rugby pitch, you knew shit was about to go down.

It didn’t matter that you hated your classes, your teachers and even most of your housemates with a passion – it was better than going to the other school.

Harry Potter became a point of county-wide pride

“You know Harry Potter?” you’ll say, leaning back in your chair: “Yeah, they filmed that near me.”

It’s not like the fact that the series was filmed at Leavesden Studios ever actually had any effect on your life, but it was just one in a list of Hertfordshire namedrops including Matt Damon drinking at the Chequers in Redbourn and the fact that Craig Charles apparently lives in West Common with a garden full of the decommissioned Robot Wars robots.

Everyone remembers where they were when Buncefield exploded

This was literally the biggest thing ever to happen in Hertfordshire. Everyone from Rickmansworth to Royston heard it, and that guy in the year below swore on his life that the explosion smashed all the windows in his house.

Now you think back to it, he might have been lying for attention.

Your Friday nights would be spent drinking in an opulent park

Every town in Hertfordshire had one: a great, sprawling park where you’d spend your Friday evenings in the cold, drinking Smirnoff Ice and trying to avoid both the PCSOs and the dodgy older kids who wanted to punch you in the face and nick your Motorola Razr.

If only you got invited to the house parties, eh?

Oceana Watford was the next step up

Of course, we all got to the age where we could finally legally go clubbing (or at least pay our older brother’s mate £10 to borrow their ID for the night). Oceana Watford was, of course, the destination of choice – and many a night was spent in that hazy hotbed of cheap shots, fingering and appearances by Arg from TOWIE.

Sure, it wasn’t incredible, but it was better than the fucking Forum.

You’d go out in London every so often and regret it

“Fabric is amazing!” you’d hear, or “All the cool people go to Pacha!”

45 minutes on the train and £20 entry later, you’re in a club where everyone is angrier, the drinks are six times as expensive and you don’t know a single person.

As you wait on the St Pancras platform for a train home at 5am, you wish you’d have just stayed home and gone to Chicagos.

But you’d still tell everyone you were from there

“Yeah, I’m from North London. Where? Oh, erm… Harpenden.”

You knew Hertfordshire didn’t really have that much to offer

Seriously, this Wikipedia page is on a list of “Hertfordshire landmarks.”

But even if it doesn’t have much to offer beyond roundabouts, dodgy waterparks and nightclubs for sugar-crazed children, you have to admit: your heart will always be in Herts.