SG6 and the Garden City estate · Letchworth
Data recovery for Letchworth. The world's first Garden City, founded 1903.
Letchworth Garden City was founded in 1903 by First Garden City Limited, on Ebenezer Howard's plan, and the first new houses were occupied in July 1904 — the first Garden City in the world, and not a New Town. The 2021 census counted 33,990 people in the built-up area. North Hertfordshire District Council covers the town, with Hertfordshire County Council above it. What makes trading here different is the landlord: the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation is a charity, it calls itself the largest landlord in the Garden City, and it lists 5,500 acres, 181 industrial units, 125 shops and 185,567 sq ft of offices on its estate — the Spirella Building among them, in office use since an £11 million restoration in the late 1990s. That makes a town of small tenants: engineering shops, printers, framers, accountants, architects. A small tenant's whole business tends to sit on one disk. When it stops, send it to our Oxford lab under tracking and insurance; the diagnosis that follows costs you nothing.
Run the problem past an engineer
0800 6890668
What the Garden City sends us.
No page for your town? Try the fault-finder →| The problem | Why we see it locally | First move |
|---|---|---|
| A workshop PC under a bench in an industrial unit | Order book, machine programs and twenty years of drawings, none of it off site | No more restarts; pull the disk and post it by itself |
| An accountant's office machine that will not finish booting | Client ledgers and the Sage and Xero files behind them, all on one disk | Recovery from us, rebuild by IT |
| A print shop's artwork drive that has stopped mounting | Layered originals for customers' branding that nobody else still holds | Unplug it at once — it may travel inside its own case |
| A two-disk NAS in a small architectural practice | A mirrored box says nothing until the second disk follows the first | Shut it down before it rebuilds; whole or as bare disks, either is fine |
| A framer's drive of before-and-after commission photographs | Every job shot twice and kept on one drive in a drawer | Copy nothing else onto it; send the enclosure untouched |
From an SG6 postbox to our bench.
Around Letchworth.
Everywhere on the list →Four things Letchworth asks.
Is there a counter in Letchworth?
No. Letchworth has no counter of ours, no van and no collection service. Media travels to us by post, insured and tracked on both legs, and we pay for the journey home. Anyone who would sooner not post it can drop the drive at our intake lab at Littlemore, on the Oxford Science Park, which takes weekday drop-offs between 9am and 5:30pm. The free diagnosis happens the day the parcel is opened, whichever way it reaches us.
Which places around Letchworth do you take work from?
All of SG6 — the Garden City estate itself, the industrial units and shops let across it, the offices near the station and the streets running out towards Letchworth Gate. Hitchin is the next town south-west, Baldock the next one east, Stevenage below them both. Every job arrives as a single tracked parcel, so an SG6 address is charged exactly as any other address is.
Our order book and machine programs are on one workshop PC. Can you read the disk?
Usually, and that machine is the commonest parcel out of a Letchworth industrial unit: one tower under a bench, years of drawings and programs on it, nothing held off site. Do not keep restarting it — every attempt gives a failing disk another chance to lose more. Switch it off at the wall, take the disk out and post that. We image it read-only before anything else and read the files back off that image, so nothing is ever written to your original.
We scan Garden City records for a volunteer group and the drive has stopped mounting. Worth sending?
Yes. Scans of deeds, plans and photographs are usually the only digital copy of paper too fragile to handle again, and a drive that has stopped mounting has far more often lost its file table than its files. Do not run a repair or check-disk tool across it; that writes to the exact area we need to read. Unplug it, pack it in its own case and send it. There is nothing to pay for the diagnosis, the figure comes in writing before any work, and we cover the parcel back to you.
Other jobs from the casebook.
Unplug it in Letchworth and let us look.
Power it down, tell us what went wrong, and let the free diagnosis land before you decide anything.