Home / Locations / Hertfordshire / Stevenage / Old Town
Yes, Yikes Car Wash now covers Stevenage Old Town, the coaching town the New Town was built next to. We clean cars where they are parked: in the permit streets off the High Street, on the drives along Walkern Road and Letchmore Road, by King George V Playing Field and up towards Jack's Hill. Book online, pick a two hour window, and a vetted local washer from the Yikes Network arrives with water, power and kit. Your space outside the house stays yours.
Book your washKey facts
Parking reality
The Old Town is the one part of Stevenage that was never planned around the car. The High Street was the Great North Road, a turnpike with 21 stagecoaches a day passing through in 1800 and a run of inns to serve them, and the streets behind it were built for a market town, not a new town. So parking is tight, and since 1 December 2020 the council has run a permit parking area across a cluster of residential roads close to the High Street, operating Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 3pm. Most of those streets are permit only; a few have limited waiting bays with an exemption for permit holders, and the hours can differ street by street.
The High Street itself is next. A draft order for the stretch between Gates Way and Trinity Road would allow two hours of waiting with no return within three, permit holders excepted, with up to two permits a household and visitor vouchers in sets of twenty. The council's own wording is worth repeating: a permit does not guarantee a space, it only lets you stay longer.
You do not need a visitor voucher for us. Your washer sorts their own parking, works at your car where it stands, and the only vehicle that needs to be legally parked is yours. If your car has a space you fought for, it keeps it: nothing moves.
What the Old Town does to a car
The Old Town is the green end of a green town. The Woodland Trust ranks Stevenage among the best places in Britain for access to large woodland, and the Old Town has the mature trees to prove it, which means sap on the bonnet in summer, leaf fall in autumn and bird droppings all year. The B197, the old Great North Road, still carries traffic the length of the High Street, so a car parked near it collects a steady film of brake dust and diesel soot.
Winter adds road salt. Hertfordshire County Council's winter service started on 1 October 2025 and covers about 1,500 miles of priority roads, the High Street among them, and salt left on paint for weeks is the surest way to a dull finish by spring. A wash every few weeks takes it all off before it marks. Your washer rinses before anything touches the paint and photographs the car before and after.
How it works
Local life
A coaching town with a market charter from 1281, a Tudor house, a great fire and a pub with a hangman as a regular. These are the places that shape a week here.
A weekly market and annual fair have been held here under a Royal Charter of 1281. Tudor House in Letchmore Street, built before 1500, is the oldest house in Stevenage; it has been a butcher's, the workhouse, a school and the gas company's offices.
Source: Wikipedia: Stevenage
On 10 July 1807 a fire that began with embers from a coaching inn destroyed 42 properties in Middle Row. The timber houses at the north end were rebuilt with brick fronts and tiled roofs, which is the High Street you see now.
Source: Wikipedia: Stevenage
A 16th century Jacobean farmhouse once owned by Oliver Cromwell's spymaster John Thurloe, a hotel since 1925, and the hangman Albert Pierrepoint's usual stop on the way to an execution in London.
Source: Wikipedia: Stevenage
When the greengrocer Henry Trigg died in 1724 his coffin was put in the rafters of the barn behind 37 High Street to keep it from the resurrection men. The house became the Old Castle coaching inn, then a NatWest, and is now a dentist's.
Source: Wikipedia: Stevenage
Ditchmore Common until the 1930s, now football and cricket pitches, bowls and a pavilion, and the home of Stevenage Day on the second Sunday in June every year since 1959. The 2026 event on 14 June had more than 200 stalls.
A working brewery and taphouse, the Broken Seal, on Basils Road since 2019, with every beer named after a figure from Stevenage's past, from the footballer Frank Dymoke to Pierrepoint himself.
Source: Wikipedia: Stevenage
Old Town ward had 8,575 people in 3,710 households at the 2021 Census. It is the most mixed part of Stevenage in how people live: a third of homes are flats, a fifth are privately rented, and 77 percent of households have a car, against 80 percent across the borough. Only 31 percent have two or more, the lowest of the northern wards, because here a second car has nowhere to go.
More on this: how a wash works on a permit street and why bird droppings and sap damage paint.
See it in action
Yikes Car Wash live on GB News: washing cars through the hosepipe ban. The video loads from YouTube only when you press play.
See the latest washes. Before and afters, new areas and the team on the road, on our Instagram.
@yikescarwash on InstagramPopular in Stevenage Old Town
Outside wash and an inside vacuum, done at the kerb.
The fuller clean, inside and out, for the family car.
The quick outside wash for a car that lives on the street.
Two years of protection against sap, droppings and road salt.
What's on locally
Updated 25 October 2026
Stevenage Old Town questions
We check local details against council, TfL and other official sources before we publish them. Parking rules change, so always check the sign at your bay.
Pop in your SG1 postcode, pick a window, and leave the rest to us.
Book your wash