The place with four names

Two centuries ago Smallford was a quite different place from where we understand it to be today.  At the southern end of Colney Heath Lane was Smallford Farm, and nearby were a few cottages.  At this point the lane widened to become a large space – it is still possible to see evidence of the yard – and there is still a pair of cottages a short distance into Barley Mow Lane, then called Sion Lane.  The little stream which passed near Butterwick and through Smallford Farm, crossed the lane towards the river Colne.  Today it is gullied under Colney Heath Lane, but then you crossed the ford, which, depending on season, was probably limited in its flow – the small ford.

Dury and Andrews map shows Four Wants (now Smallford)
and the original Smallford hamlet – named here as Small Foot !

Over a period of time the number of people living here reduced, but there was increased activity further north in Hatfield Road, around the crossroads which includes today's Oaklands Lane and Station Road.  At this point in the mid-eighteenth century the Reading and Hatfield Turnpike Trust set up a toll house, and over time an inn was built and a blacksmith's shop opened to service the travelling trade.

But this crossroads hamlet had no proper name.  In 1766, when Messrs Dury and Andrews published their map, the turnpike was newly opened.  The mapmakers labelled the little collection of four or five cottages, the Four Wants.  Many have puzzled over this label; did it mean the four ways?  Or perhaps it described the hovel-like dwellings, with its occupants in severe need of almost everything which might be regarded as a minimum standard of life (want, as in need).

By the time the next map was published in 1826, the little community was named 3 Horseshoes.  We assume the inn had received its name by then, and the hamlet was known by the name of its public house.  Another generation, and 3 Horseshoes had become Horseshoes; in part probably because across the road was a beer house called the Four Horseshoes.

The name has moved.

Horseshoes it remained until after the Second World War, when the name Smallford, clearly redundant at the bottom of Colney Heath Lane, was then given to the increasingly important hamlet at the top of Station Road.

So, four different names in two and a half centuries.  That's some record for a small crossroads hamlet.