Engaging With Our Locality

Whenever families, individuals, classes at school and visitors to the district, are able to share in some of the history of their home district, the experience is always positive.  More than that, what we discover is quite joyous.

Heritage Open Days have proved the point once more, although other casual meetings throughout the year have a similar effect.  September and October is also the period of time in the school curriculum when children explore their home patch, both the school itself and the shops and homes, where we and our friends live and what we can buy at the shops.  It is therefore a delight to meet the children as they find out how the school day was conducted, how children behaved and the playground games they may have played fifty or a hundred years ago.

Fleetville School playground in the 1930s.

Throughout the year members of Fleetville Diaries carry out deeper explorations in the form of projects.  St Albans had been the home of Frederick Sander and his renowned orchid nurseries in Camp Road, and this formed the basis of a major project last year.  Its culmination was to share our findings in a glorious celebration with members of the Sander and Moon families today (Henry Moon turned Sander's orchids into exquisite watercolours).

This year the organisation has taken Beaumont Avenue as its next subject in the series Right Up Our Street; and to focus on the former hosiery mill, Ballito, which grew on the site now occupied by Morrison's, where thousands of local men and women came to work, both in peacetime and war.  Although largely based on recollections it has been important to understand how the factory came to Fleetville in the first place.

Heritage Open Day on Saturday 14th September was an appropriate occasion to bring people together, to view three exhibitions and chat with the project leaders, to do so in a building (Fleetville Community Centre) first erected in 1942 as a nursery for the young children of women encouraged to work at the Ballito works that had been turned over to making shell casings for the war effort.

Factory managers' houses in Woodstock Road south

It comes as a surprise to many that competitive circumstances dictated the original Fleet Ville did not realise its full potential and which may otherwise have become a good deal larger.  The fact that it did not enabled one of this city's major benefactors, Charles Woollam, to acquire the field left over for the recreation and enjoyment of the people of Fleetville in the form of the Rec, or as many people refer to it these days, Fleetville Park.

Summer view of The Alley.

We then take a short guided walk around early roads; are amazed that Fleetville had a unique cinema – where no-one was fortunate in watching a film there; stood on the spot where several WW2 spies were charged, discover the homes built for the factory employees in one road and those built for its managers in another; and the function of The Alley which most Fleetville folk claim never to have walked along.  There are parts of Fleetville, too, which are more ancient than the Cathedral, and a stream to cross without getting our feet wet!

People love to ask questions and are often amazed by the answers; almost always a conversation ensues.  We are all part of a community and feel a personal responsibility to learn more about it.  And it matters not whether you are a 9-year-old who has already made sense of where he lives, or an adult who has lived here for three times as long and come to realise it's no longer sufficient to take local history for granted.

One way or another we all yearn to become more involved.