Here we go again

It is in the nature of these things that we pick the junk mail from the hall mat and throw away, not only the double glazing and pizza leaflets, but a vital item of information for us, our family and our neighbours.

This time some residents of Smallford may have missed attending a consultation meeting at the St Albans Rugby Club HQ  because they did not know about ...

... proposals by Brett Aggregates to open up the ground at the ends of their gardens for yet another gravel extraction site, on  land at the western end of the former aerodrome formerly belonging to de Havilland Aircraft Company and later Hawker Siddeley and British Aerospace.

Parts of the huge site have already been developed for business, residential, university and retail.  But a large swathe is reserved as open space.  Indeed, Ellenbrook Fields is a pleasant zone of recovering open land following the removal of the concrete air strip.

We must have sensed that below the surface there were useful minerals, which one day would be removed.  After all, the district does have a track record for supplying aggregates to the world, and to the east and south of St Albans we have experienced gravel extraction at Colney Street and Harperbury Lane, London Colney, Coursers Lane, Roehyde, Colney Heath, Oak Farm, Beech Farm and other sites.  So the news of proposed workings at the former Popefield Farm should not come as a surprise.

No-one would deny that aggregates are needed for the construction industry and for roads – and that there will be plenty of new homes coming to the districts between St Albans and Hatfield in the next ten years.  Some residents, of course, don't want the homes or the workings, and of the extra traffic that will come in their wake – the same fears which are attached to the proposed freight depot at Hedges Farm, Park Street. The narrow and already-busy single-carriageway Hatfield Road will indeed be busier and noisier than today.

Since the days of the St Albans Sand and Gravel Company after World War Two, when the call was for gravel to rebuild London, there have been proliferations of holes in the ground, and in recent years its successor company, Lafarge, has sought to close exhausted sites and return land to former or new open space uses – with the singular exception of the contaminated Butterwick (although that company may not have been responsible).  Where have we been in those sixty years?  We have continued with our lives and lived with the industry around us.  Today we look back and realise that, taken in the round, the result hasn't been too bad.

It is the prospect which is difficult to contemplate.  Thirty-two years is a long while to wait until the Popefield site is restored and the community park formed for our enjoyment.  Well, I will be well into  my second century by then, but it will be something for a younger generation to look forward to.

But all of this depends on whether planning consent is given!