Minus thirty

 St Albans has grown outwards in all directions, but none more so than in an easterly direction.  Comparing the town as it was in 1835, expansion was deemed essential in 1879, and then again in 1913. and further still in the 1930s.  It made little difference when the Borough and the Rural District were merged in 1974.  The ground area of St Albans has continued to grow.  Of course, not all of the land within new boundaries was built on, although it was population growth which prompted the legal process for what used to be called "taking in" more swathes of the countryside beyond the existing boundaries.

St Albans in 1835; boundary in red.  Mile House and Cunningham are both safely beyond the
town boundary, not being built over for a further hundred years.

While expansion occurred on many of the boundaries – and presumably will continue to do so – this blog is primarily interested in what happens in the eastern districts; after all, that is why our title is St Albans' Own East End.

There have always been a variety of reasons for land not being built over – service uses such as reservoirs, sewerage plants, factories, transport such as road alterations – but by far the greatest acreage has been converted to housing.  During the past month alone announcements made in the press have identified plans for three major residential developments totalling several thousand homes.  Most of these will come from what had until recently been active agricultural sites.  It seems to be an inevitability that the sale price of homes in and around our district will only stabilise once the balance between supply of housing stock exceeds its overall requirement.  It is easy to state the obvious: to construct an appropriate number more homes requires us to buy up and build on farmland and woodland, and that always appears to have been the case.

But what has that actually meant? Since 1900, when the City of St Albans began actively discussing a further movement of the eastern boundary outwards along Hatfield Road from Albion Road (which it had only reached in 1879) all the way to the modest Winches Farm, and finally determined by 1913.

Since 1900 our East End has lost over thirty farming units; mostly complete farms although included were a number of fields owned by landowners whose main centres were in other parts of the district.  And the total does depend on where we choose to draw the informal boundary of "our East End".

Beastneys Farm at the eastern end of Camp Road.  It became part of Hill End Hospital from
1899, yet some of its acres continued to be farmed on an organised scale even down to
the 1930s.

St Peter's Farm, which became Clarence Park and estates between Brampton and Hatfield roads all the way to Harlesden Road, was among the first in 1899. Dell Farm, an outlier unit of Heath Farm, had lost viable land in company with St Peter's Farm and others in c1860 when the Midland Railway was laid.  When Marshals Wick House and its estate was sold in 1927 a substantial swathe between Sandpit Lane and Marshals Drive was built on.  As was Ninefields, land belonging to the Spencer estate.

Cunningham Hill Farm, in the middle of the Camp district, is surrounded by the 
London Road estate (Mile House district).  Many of the farm homesteads survive.

The diminutive Newgates Farm survived until mid-century on the north side Sandpit Lane, but was added to the extensive developments at Marshalswick on the home units of the Marten family at Marshalswick Farm and Dellfield Sandridge Road; then there was the more recent Jersey Farm, and only the more distant Nashe (Nash) in this group has survived.  Oak Farm has survived but much of Beech Farm was, is and may continue to be used to provide the region with gravel.

The above mentioned Winches, though small, was subsumed by homes and shops in the growing location of Oaklands, whose mansion and its later College has continued to lose Oaklands Farm and Beaumonts Farm, the latter whose fields began to be nibbled from 1899 behind the north side of Hatfield Road, while Hill End Farm provided homes and a huge hospital.

Here is a farm, and its homestead, along Coopers Green Lane.  Oak Farm was the site of
Hertfordshire County Show in 1954 and is fortunate not to have been built over.

The designation of Hatfield as a postwar New Town encroached on the farms close to former Bishops Hatfield, over-spilling into the further-most land of the parish of St Peter.  So, to continue where we left off, Popefield Farm was just one of the farming units which gave way to an airfield, then an aircraft making factory, and a recent conversion to university, residential student and business zone, also absorbing Harpsfield Farm.  On the south side of Hatfield Road Wilkins Green Farm fortunately retains open ground, still resisting some development, partly as a result of the 1944 Greater London Plan (Sir Patrick Abercrombie) to retain the rural gap between St Albans and the future planned New Town.  However, the former Great Nast Hyde Farm closed and its fields grew homes, university accommodation and car parking.  Meanwhile Little Nast Hyde Farm has not been lost.

Little Cell Barnes Farm.  Now a part of the London Road estate near the eastern side of Drakes
Drive, it includes both community and business activity.

Further farms on the historical list include the pair of units Roe Green Farms north and south, Roehyde Farm, Redhouse Farm, Hollybush Farm and Smallford Farm.  Nearer to St Albans the demand for houses, work places and retail has intensified on Newhouse Park Farm, Great Cell Barnes Farm, Little Cell Barnes Farm, Beastneys Farm, Little Hill End Farm, Cunningham Hill Farm. The post-war London Road estate, partly for London re-housing, benefited by the closure of three of the farms, and a number of fill-in plots such as the former Sander's Nursery, endless corner sites and the Gaol Field, which in the early thirties produced the Breakspear estate.

It is a rare opportunity to witness the demolition of a former farm homestead, here at
Butterwick.  Following a life winning gravel from the ground it still cannot be given a
future lease of life having been used for waste filling once the gravel had gone.

If there is a farm you don't see above it may remain a producing unit, even if it is temporary grazing.  Or perhaps I have just accidentally  missed it out!  Nevertheless, the fact that we have managed to lose this number of farms must have something to do with the gradual increase in agricultural efficiency across the nation.  Fortunately, if many of the above former farm names (in bold) are familiar to you it will probably be because of the survival in thriving estate names, streets and public buildings.  Perhaps in former times as public house names.

The process of enlargement around St Albans continues.

Grid Plan

 

The Beaumonts estate road layout as originally proposed.

The Beaumonts Farm estate in its present form.
COURTESY STREET MAP CONTRIBUTORS

Preparation is underway to update the content of a number of website pages – www.stalbansowneastend.org.uk – one of which is Beaumonts. A number of readers have conjectured on the road layout designed for the estate in the late 1920s. The remainder of the Farm formerly in the care of the Kinder trustees and subsequently taken over by Oaklands estates, was acquired for onward development by Watford Land, and it was the latter which was responsible for the layout of the dormant and temporary fallow fields for new housing in 1929.

The Avenue as a gated private lane; the scene from the northern Sandpit Lane end.
COURTESY ST ALBANS MUSEUMS

Beaumont Avenue as a modern public highway.

Today the layout pattern would be very different with perhaps a single through road and a number of short stubs with no satisfactory  description to explain the pattern.  Perhaps such layouts are described as "informal".  But in the early twentieth century developers were determined to keep to the simpler and more efficient grid methodology, and so it was that Beaumonts Farm estate followed the same formal pattern.  So we should ask the question, was the grid just a grid, or was there a reason for the outcome distances between the north-south and west-east highways within the grid?

The original lane to the farm house, originally intended to be metalled and named Central
Drive.  Now a private section of road and named Farm Road.

In other words, was there a pre-existing series of land features or structures available to guide the planners?  Let's begin with Beaumont Avenue, the ancient trackway between Sandpit Lane and Hatfield Road with just one connecting road – the historic farm driveway to the former manor and farm homestead.  The first line on the development plan would therefore have been the west/east Central Drive (although the first part of this road remained unconnected and was later transferred as a private road  as Farm Road when attempts were made to complete the development after the Second World War. Central Drive extended eastwards and would have terminated close to Beaumonts Wood had the land not been purchased c1934 for educational use.  Nevertheless a trackway already followed this line and a water pipeline laid beside it which carried water to the farmhouse from the pumped water supply at Oaklands.

One of the north-south grid roads, Woodland Drive north, typical of the estate's layout.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREET VIEW

There was also a pre-existing track from near the junction of Beaumont Avenue with Hatfield Road, and Sandpit Lane.   This was historically a key pedestrian access to the iron house and gave convenient access to the farm homestead as an alternative to the Beaumont Avenue private roadway until the early twentieth century, an alternative public road was built and named Beechwood Avenue. Straighter than the trackway it became its direct replacement.

There are two reasons why a third line was pencilled onto the plan   and became Woodland Drive.  The north end had also pre-existed as a trackway from the farm drive (Central Drive) to enable farm vehicles, pedestrians, animals to the farmhouse garden and well, the barns surrounding the farm yard, and access to a house and storage building north-west of the farm.

Woodland Drive extends from top to bottom and Central Drive crosses from
left to right.  The former moat, coloured blue, was built over roadways and
gardens – with one exception, which the author is unable to explain!

There were also two even better reasons for extending the proposed Woodland Drive southwards of Central Drive, for this was the location of the former moat surrounding the first manor house, the water being fed from a spring nearer to (Elm Drive).  It would have been essential to avoid house construction on the moat itself and on the former surface stream.  Woodland Drive would therefore have been laid out as a single straight line from Elm Drive to Chestnut Drive.

Chestnut Drive itself was also laid on a pre-existing track to service the storage Nissen building which remained on the corner with Beechwood Avenue thoughout the 1950s, having been taken over by T&B Builders until their contracts were complete.

A second road to match Beechwood Avenue and also link Hatfield Road with Sandpit Lane, was Oakwood Drive.  The latter reached Central Drive, but war intervened and the onward section to Sandpit Lane was cancelled – which also meant Chestnut Drive was no longer to be a through road and was curtailed after Hazelwood Drive.

The location of Elm Drive was to avoid too many junctions between the estate and Hatfield Road.

A further road, proposed but not added to the grid, would have been parallel to Oakwood Drive and connected with an extension to Elm Drive on the south,  Central Drive in the middle and Chestnut Drive in the north.  The Elm and Chestnut extensions would also have had an arc of homes outside their sections of the grid.  This abortion was removed entirely from the programme,  resulting from the County Council's acquisition of land for Beaumont Schools, a future primary school and playing fields for what was The Boys' Grammar School (now Verulam).  The latter might instead have been for senior schools for the proposed Marshalswick housing development.  But that's another story!

So, in the case of Beaumonts estate, it may just have been laid out in a simple grid,  but each of the contributory elements appeared to have a specific reason for being exactly where they are.

The only other adjustment, necessary in the mid forties, resulted from the St Albans City Council buying the thus-far unbuilt plots from the former Watford Land and adjusting the Hazelwood Drive (north) layout to provide public open space under new Town and Country regulations.  There had been no provision for public open space, so open space was provided.  Public open space which would preclude informal ball games, that is!

The post-war road re-design of Hazelwood Drive north by St Albans City Council, which included
public open space.

A Tour Around 25

 You may have delved into every post this year as and when each was published, or dipped into the occasional topic as its relative interest to you was awakened.  2025 resulted in a total of forty posts, most at the rate of around three per month; so here is a review of what you may recall and/or topics you may have missed along the way.

The big series of 2025 has been coming across roads with names having an interesting story to tell.  The 12 posts altogether covered 57 named streets from across our east end, extending from the boundary of the Midland railway to Harpsfield, and from Sandridge to London Road.  Of course the total number of roads is well over 350, but twelve posts provided a useful summary.  You will discover one article each month throughout the year.  So we can start exploring.

Each of the selected streets had an imagined design, included a summary of the
source description, and its location and colour grouping

Occasionally we have explored the paths around Hatfield Road Cemetery and the lives of former residents.  The most intriguing was the story behind casual employee Francis Tan Kim Choo from Singapore, and the missing 25 minutes of his life.  Linked to the history of the Rats' Castle public house, we pause to remember the life of architect Percival Cherry Blow along one of the Hatfield Road Cemetery paths.

Anniversaries recalled include the months leading up to the end of World War 2, the messy times of the period, and the relief and celebration of the summer of 1945.  There had always been the promise of employment at the opening of former hosiery mill Ballito, arriving in Fleetville during 1925; revisiting the year 1925 to find out what made everyday life in a less populated east end, remembering modern St Albans isn't only now, but was also modern then!

When Ballito Mills moved in during 1925 two firms had previously moved out.
Hafield Road had not been metalled when this picture had been taken in 1907, but it turned 
from a printing house to a thriving building manufacturing knitting fashion
ladies nylon stockings.

We may not realise it but the district does seem to have what must be the smallest village green at Sleapshyde.  Clarence Park does not look quite like the drawings in one of the posts – some residents may be pleased about that – but there was a possibility, and may still become a reality – temporarily of course – during the summer  months.

A game of cricket certainly could not be played on the green at Sleapshyde.  Must be
the smallest village green of all.

A social necessity for all at some point or other wherever we live, is the need to use a public toilet on our walks.  In these times of restricted local council funding just how does our district cater for our outdoor urgent requirements?

One particular house?  You might consider a 1960s house on the corner of Hatfield Road and Beechwood Avenue, which is undergoing a significant change according to a planning application.  Or, also in Hatfield Road, is work delivering a replacement house, possibly a tight squeeze, just beyond Colney Heath Lane. More is being made of existing larger gardens.

Constructed on a former builder's yard, this house at the junction of Beechwood
Avenue and Hatfield is about to become two homes, if planners agree.

The Rats' Castle is still trading, but under a new name (the Old Tollhouse) but parts of the corner's story had become a little muddled over time.  So the account is being sorted to become more accurate.

Same building, but new name in Fleetville. The former Rats' Castle also has an 
unusual back story.  Read the real version in this post.

It's not often we focus on trees, but this year we discovered the felling of an oak tree in a residential garden.  We wait to discover how old it was, and need to have the experience of a tree ring counter to help us!

Have you observed how the property front boundaries of Sandpit Lane vary along its length?  These are the Sandpit Lane Wastes which have at times posed a few problems for residents when their new homes were built behind the current kerb lines.

There seems to be no end to the number of books written about St Albans.  The current total appeared to be about 65, not all in print, however. A few of the more recent titles are announced.

One of the most recent books published about St Albans.
COURTESY SAHAAS

A flurry of new residential developments are at the planning stage and one is shortly to appear at Oaklands with the delightful name of Oaklands Blossom.  We explore how this has come about.

Four posts focus on the former Beaumonts Farm.  How early residents were able to walk legitimately between Camp Road and Marshals Wick before modern streets had been constructed.  Then how a medieval field provided a brick resource for local housing and today for employment.  The request for a search for pictures of two temporary structures which have not been seen since 1938 and the early 1960s respectively, both in Woodland Drive. And finally, how we can still make our way from Colney Heath Lane and St Peter's Church in exactly the same way as worshippers in the early 19th century had walked the same route.

A corrugated iron house similar to this once stood where 83 Woodland Drive is today.
Does anyone know of a photograph of the real corrugated iron house from this
site?  Lived in by three different farm households between c1901 and 1938.

Enjoy re-reading, and we hope you look forward to another blog collection in 2026.

The listing of all  2025 blogs is shown on the right.  One click takes you straight there.

Worthy of Snapping?

 In the heart of Beaumonts Farm there were two landscape features, neither permanent and neither present today, and you might question whether either would have been worth the cost and trouble of taking a photograph of, especially back in the world of film photography.

The focus for this week's post is shown above.  The orange circle is the location of the former
Iron House (or Tin House) until 1938.  The green circle defines the "Green" or waste ground
where the farmhouse, demolished in 1938 had stood for a century.
It was also a post war playing field, shops and, eventually, Irene Stebbings 
House.  The small blue circle is where the electricity substation was installed.

The Iron House

The first was only present before the estate houses – notably Woodland Drive – had been built.  It was a temporary little house constructed of corrugated iron and was known as The Iron House.  They were popular during the same period as tin churches and corrugated iron storage sheds, including Nissen buildings (those with curved roofs still to be visible today.  The farm had one of those too.

A hand-written drawing and label for the temporary Iron House building with an
overlay on a more recent surveyed map.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE ARCHIVES & LOCAL STUDIES

We know exactly where the Iron House was because although temporary buildings were never surveyed onto maps they were nevertheless added by hand to certain versions once maps were  published.  By overlaying onto a later map and setting those features from both maps, we have established that the Iron House and its little garden was spread across the plots of numbers 77, 79, 81 and 83 Woodland Drive.  The houses of 81 and 83 themselves were built on the site of the Iron House.

It first appeared on the scene by 1901 and by the date of its demolition c1938 three households had made it their home. Edward Ashwell, a farm labourer, his wife Eleanor, and their 7 year old daughter (in 1901).

Louis Bundy, a cowman, and his wife Merrina, together with four children, moved in next.  Charles and Edith Atkins had moved in by 1915 and were resident for the longest period of time.  They had five children, and we know they had attended Fleetville School.

All we can say is that this image is SIMILAR to to the Iron House which stood
where 81 and 83 Woodland Drive is today.

We know of no surviving photograph of the house, nor of any of the families who were resident.  Perhaps no-one did take a photo, but as to the question was it worth taking one, three families might have thought so although none of them was likely to have possessed a camera. The opportunity might have been afforded to others, however.

So, what is the photograph above; is that not the Iron House?  Well, it is certainly part of AN iron house and was selected to illustrate the kind of structure which stood for roughly forty years one hundred yards north of the farmhouse.

A signboard and playground

For the second structure we jump forward to the 1940s. 

The farmhouse, demolished in 1938 is now the location of Irene Stebbings House, and
during the post-war period had been an enjoyable open space on which children
could play.

 Housebuilding had stopped in 1940 and in several parts of the estate site all had been quiet for nearly five years.  A large block of land between Woodland Drive north and Hazelwood Drive north, and adjacent to Central Drive, had, in the original 1929 plan, been reserved for a church.  St Albans City Council acquired this block  c1945, intending it for community use (unspecified).  Within twelve months J Benskin, Brewery, Ltd erected a signboard announcing the company had acquired land here for a future public house.  In the meantime several occupants of the new homes nearby took the opportunity to dump builders' waste onto the site. By the 1960s the city council had used half of the site for five small shops and there was also a pair of homes at the Hazelwood Drive end.

In the 1960s the rough open space had been flattened and local youngsters created
their own ad-hoc team.  By this time the shops had been built (behind the group).
COURTESY CHRIS NEIGHBOUR

This left about half of the block with two mature trees, though in poor condition having been extensively climbed, swung on and mauled about by us children; and hillocky grass mounds hardly suitable for a game of football!  In 1953 we had all gathered on this land where a bonfire had been prepared, and fireworks set off, to celebrate the late Queen Elizabeth's Coronation.  The city council later flattened the ground, brought a goalpost (just the one, I think) and fenced the newly sown grass from the street.  Children could now make more of their outdoor space.

Procession and street party in an unmade Central Drive.  Beechwood Avenue is in the
background, with the waste ground "Green" to the right.  Coronation year, 1953.
COURTESY THE CLEMENTS COLLECTION

Present day view of the scene and viewpoint shown in the previous image.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREETVIEW

At some point the Benskin signboard disappeared, probably in the late 1950s, and eventually Irene Stebbings house was built and a permanent cap installed on what had previously been the farm well.

Irene Stebbings House.  The space behind it part of the "Green" and site of the former

Farmhouse.

We have a photo or two from the post-war period, though not one which shows the empty and entire block between Hazelwood and Woodland Drives – and during the 1950s this would have included all of Central Drive homes and all of the corner plots including Beechwood Avenue (1), Woodland Drive and Hazelwood Drive, as they had not yet been built on.  So this was still quite an empty and open vista.  Does anyone's family collection include that Benskin's signboard?  Yes, I do wish I had taken photographs of these sites, but our perspectives were very different when we were children in the fifties.  The opportunities were there for our parents and our grandparents, however, but remember, they were using film.

So, pictures of the Iron House (Tin House) and pictures of the early "Green" – we will call it the waste ground – where the farmhouse had been.  Over to our readers, their families and friends.

1950s Child Centred

 What did the Herts Advertiser focus on at Christmas during the 1950s?  Of course far more than we can explore here, but below are half a dozen quirky items which involved children of the time; after all, what would Christmas time be without them?

Blizzard?

To start with there will have been just as much whoopy joy for the appearance of snow, far more frequent anyway in the fifties than today.  Two reasons, it brought children out of doors onto the streets, in the parks and/or back gardens to handle and mould the white stuff and throw it around quite a lot.  Some children were also lucky if their school was closed for the day, or even longer.  Caps, hats, gloves, scarves, warm coats, and boots and gloves – except for the hardy types who returned home with red hands to re-warm in front of the fire or the kitchen boiler hot pipe.  February 1958.

The School Play

Secondary (or in the early years, Senior Schools) school buildings began to be built with assembly halls with basic stages, tab curtains, beginner lighting rigs and nearby classrooms sometimes linked to a backstage area.  St Albans Grammar School for Boys (now Verulam) opened in 1938 and their first few "annual" drama performances were Shakespeare presentations.  By the end of the 1950s the period may have remained the same but the playwright had change as the school discovered Thomas Dekker.

The Shoemaker's Holiday, a light comedy of 16th century life with a moral interpretation.  The Herts Advertiser's review wasn't overwhelmingly positive; in fact, s/he found the positives quite limited.  But the end of term play, like fundraising "fayres", parties and film shows, were the traditional staple for the week before Christmas, and the timetable went light touch.  Our bringing up, wherever and whenever it was remained memorable, and most of us can recall those special events.  December 1959.

The works children's party

Many of our parents working at the larger firms in our east end during the 1950s, brought home from the directors one evening a "personal invitation" to attend the firm's children's party.  Occasionally, this may include a x2 in the form of your best friend whose parent did not work at the factory.  Ballito's Hatfield Road stocking factory (now replaced by Morrison's) was one of the larger events, employing so many hundred adults.  But the children's party   was the usual stuff of games involving plenty of running around, competitions which may have involved dressing up, film shows, Father Christmas (must have seen him at least twenty times during that Christmas period – and we shouldn't forget the magic show and lots of basic food.  As with parties hosted by the mums of our best friends they were always unpretentious affairs and certainly did not include paid-for visits to the local skating rink or "an experience" of the Disney kind. January 1954.

More school plays

By the 1950s all secondary schools were getting on the school play bandwagon, with special performances for the local elderly groups, and the top classes of nearby primary schools, in the expectation that parents would want their children to move up to that school later in the year.  Beaumont Boys' School's turn came round with Sweeney Todd.  A splendid performance which I can attest to, because I was in the audience!  Some of the pleasure must have been lost for my parents who wandered along to that evening's show, as I had spent most of the intervening period describing almost every little detail.  But isn't that just what is supposed to happen, between the cringing and the muted applause, and the head teacher's wondrous thanks for everyone turning out to support the pupils (as they were invariably called).  December 1955.

Presentations

Not sure whether this was specifically Christmas, but the Mayor turned up at Fleetville School one day to present a prize to Diane Farmer, and then scooted along the road to Garden Fields to make a further prize to Alan How.  Both best at something, naturally.  Like other memories of schooldays, on our frequent adult holiday sojourns to Jersey we acquainted ourselves with Alan; he owned and ran the Beach Barbecue venue at Gorey, and we got to know "Big Al" quite well over the years.  I wonder whether Diane and Alan hung onto their certificates and were able to use them as prompts with their own families,  October 1952.

Cribbing

Finally, how good were we all at making things at Christmas?  It seems that in the second half-term classrooms were veritable factories, turning out decorations, cards, cribs, advent calendars, play programmes, seasonal pictures and so on.  The boys of St Columba's College turned out their own personal crib scenes to be entered into a competition – rules deliberately vague – and of course judges to follow the rule: everyone's a winner, yet there is somehow only one prize!  How does that work then?  December 1956.

And the Herts Advertiser's own

Probably an agency pic but all the same, everyone would have joined in the spirit of Christmas with a photo such as this. December 1959.

All photos above courtesy the Herts Advertiser.

Street Plates 12

 And so we come to the final post in this series of monthly articles about the backgrounds of a number of east end street names and why they were so called – or were probably named.  For the most part I can be certain, but occasionally – as you will read in this post – there has been a certain amount of guess-work, and if readers have an alternative view do let me know.

Many decades passed in the twentieth century with estates and other development areas only partly complete.  Temporary usage was made of dormant land – temporary buildings, allotment gardens, stock-piling ground and, in the years before mains drainage, the dumping of the contents of cess pits  A business partnership trading in Fleetville for over fifty years, Frank Sear and Thomas Carter, ran a nursery and florist, from premises adjacent to St Paul's Church, now called St Paul's Place.  

Sear & Carter's florist shop; behind were several glasshouses.  Today the whole is the
location of St Paul's Place.

Houses today line the Salisbury Avenue junction with Garden Close.

Sear and Carter carried out extensive trials on temporarily acquired land in and around Fleetville, one of these sites being between Woodstock Road north and Beaumont Avenue & Salisbury Avenue. There, shrubs and other garden plants were grown on.  The company also undertook contract work on behalf of residents, businesses and the city council.  The site opened onto the road adjacent to where Gleave Close is today.  At the other end, access was gained from Salisbury Avenue.  The business transferred from Hatfield Road in 1960 to their country trial ground and nursery at Smallford, a site long since occupied by Notcutt's Garden Centre. The small trial sites had closed and were sold for development, including the Woodstock Road trial ground, where the Beaumont Avenue access road became Garden Close; a rather appropriate name considering the location's previous usage.

Take a walk along the short closes which make up much of today's Jersey Farm and you may come across Cromwell Close.  This is yet another road which had been named by its developer after a London link.  Many of the others took their references from squares in the Capital, but, apart from Cromwell Road there appears to be only one more, Cromwell Crescent – but not a Square.  Perhaps it is not a London connection we should be looking for, but a reference to the 1640's Civil War.  Oliver Cromwell was a Parliamentarian; St Albans was mainly Parliamentarian in approach, and the town was a major collecting centre for Parliamentary forces during this period.  Thomas Cromwell also had connections with nearby Beaumonts.

Above and top: junctions of Lincoln's Close and Cromwell Close and their connecting
roads.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREET VIEW

Nearby another road is named Lincoln's Close.  Lincoln was also a frontier town during the Civil War and also became a Parliamentary collection point at this turbulent time, and so could be considered to have an appropriate connection with St Albans.  However, an intriguing twist is the styling of the name, for it is called Lincoln's Close (inviting the comical riposte, "Is it? are you sure?)  So this is the first of today's uncertain explanations.  It is therefore left for readers to help clarify the road name's origin.

In the late 19th century an apparently rather unattractive and damp  track linked the foot of Camp Hill and the boundary track of Beaumonts Farm, now known as Sutton Road. It traversed two fields traditionally managed for dairying.  A builder who had developed a number of homes in St Albans was Ernest Stevens, acquired what was known as the Twelve Acre Estate, essentially these two fields, in the early 1930s.  Several building companies were beginning to assemble packets of land for selling plots and arranging for purchasers to build their own homes, or acquiring houses which the developing companies had constructed in a limited number of designs.  Ernest Stevens was aware that this would leave out aspiring residents who were unable to afford this method of obtaining their own home.  Stevens therefore, laid out his houses, retaining the ownership and making them available for rent at the lowest practical level.  The main through road took its name from the Camp Hill end, then named The Camp Fields, and so became Campfield Road.  A cul-de-sac he named Valerie Close and a road linking Camp Road he named Roland Street.

Above and top: Valerie Close at its junction with Campfield Road, and Roland Street
at its junction with Camp Road.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREETVIEW

Thus far all was straight-forward, and we assume that the names Valerie and Roland, having been selected by Stevens himself, were two family members.  So here is my second assumption of the day, because I cannot be sure.  If a blog reader can assist we will, I am sure, be delighted.

In most cases a street name consists of a root and a suffix, the latter being the name, Road, Drive, Crescent, Green, Square and so on. So, in this case we have a road named Dymoke Green, but searching for a suffix is quite unnecessary.  Charles Green, or to give him his full name, Charles Dymoke Green, had been the owner of Oaklands Mansion, but on marriage into the Marten family became a constituent and final generation member living in Marshalswick House.  We'll leave aside his early occupation as a distiller; for us in Hertfordshire it was his role in establishing the methodology for a new youth organisation, the brainwave of Baden Powell, and brought to life in 1908.  The Scouts, as the organisation came to be known, came alive first in Hertfordshire, one of the first adopting counties, thanks to Green's ideas, working with his own sons and with Powell.  Indeed some of the earliest outdoor activities were trialled within the grounds – his own "back garden", as it were – of Marshals Wick House.

An early outdoor activity in the grounds of Marshals Wick House.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE SCOUTS

When St Albans City Council developed a residential estate adjacent to Marshalswick Lane in the 1950s, it decided to recognise the spirit, experience and creativity of Charles Dymoke Green and his family.  Rather than labelling it Dymoke Green Close or Dymoke Green Drive, the name was left to stand on its own as Dymoke Green.

The name Thomas Edison, the international inventor of electrical, well, electrical anything, is not expected to be closely associated with St Albans.  After all, he spent all of his life in his birth country, the United States.  But his reputation and inventiveness could be claimed universally,

At the turn of the twentieth century the young local authorities possessed equally proud young ambitions, especially in health and welfare, and so there was a steady growth in the development of  civic buildings including hospitals. Many authorities sought to work with specialist architects of the day and to become or employ the inventors of ideas to run successfully these new institutions.

A surviving ward block of the former Hill End Hospital.

As a result, land was acquired at Hill End and farms were purchased.  Aspiring architects sought to bring ambitious electric lighting to Hill End  They ensured that the new complex installation would be built into the hospital buildings as they came out of the ground.  Not only would this be the most efficient methodology, it would be cheaper and less time-consuming.  Hill End was proud of its new installation and was even more proud to announce it was fully supported by Thomas Edison whose name and reputation was already internationally known.

Highfield today therefore has two roads who side-by-side have earned recognition in this corner of our district.  Thomas Edison is one; the other being Alexander Graham Bell (Bell View).  Not coincidentally, both men and their roads are within a stone's throw of a post World War Two company, Marconi Instruments, who would, as well, have honoured them.

One Hundred On

 We are now one hundred years on from the year 1925, and an additional six years forward from the end of World War One. At that time the government had determined that, in addition to the need for substantial numbers of additional new and higher quality houses, the cornerstone of this promise was to provide sufficient homes for returning veterans – the policy known as "Homes for Heroes".  The City Council launched its first programme at Townsend, although many would have been disappointed by the lack of pace, no doubt cause by a lack of understanding by the complexity of logistics, legals and the need to follow government procedure.  

A group of the first completed and occupied Springfield homes as photographed for
the Herts Advertiser.
COURTESY THE HERTS ADVERTISER,

A street view of part of the Springfield development one hundred years on.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREET VIEW.

The second programme focused on Camp Road and Springfield Road, though, once again there were funding issues between the council and the government, resulting in late delivery of the Springfield programme which only broke ground during 1925.  The Hatfield Road/Beaumonts programme, slated for a section of the dormant farm, remained just an idea. While a few of the original Springfield homes were later demolished,  the remainder in their lifetimes have been upgraded to ensure improved heating, glazing and insulation.  Springfield is now reaching its centenary.

Our east end was dynamically growing and a mere twenty-five years old. As such its residents had to contend discovering routes through and around the developing districts of Camp and Fleetville; after all, no-one had thought of planning the layout of streets, homes and factories which gradually became added to what was already present  in a random and haphazard spread.  At times travellers needed to take risks, especially in negotiating  the barrier which was the Hatfield & St Albans Railway line.  

The former Hatfield & St Albans branch railway divided the eastern district in two, and even
today the sub-optimal road network between Camp and Fleetville reflects the early
difficulties of connecting the two districts.

On a summer evening in 1925 four men were apprehended and later appeared in court for trespassing on the railway as they had attempted to take a short cut from Campfields to the allotment field east of the Hatfield Road Cemetery (today the site of Fleetville Junior School).  To be clear, these were four Fleetville men and were walking from Camp to Fleetville, so it is likely this was their second act of trespass on the branch line, the first being their walk from their home patch in Fleetville to their destination somewhere in Camp – was it a social evening at the Camp public house, now long gone?  It had never been easy walking between these two communities: the Cinder Track (Ashley Road), Sutton Road or Camp Road.  A further road between Roland Street and Sandfield Road was much talked about but never materialised.

Homes at the Sandpit Lane end of Gurney Court Road ninety years after they were
laid out on part of the former Marshalswick House grounds.

Readers of the Herts Advertiser in 1925 took note of advertisements in the early Autumn of a new development at Marshals Wick.  Stimpson Lock & Vince had opened a sales branch in the centre of St Albans for the express purpose of marketing the homes then being built for sale  along new streets north of Sandpit Lane, in the expansive grounds of the newly demolished Marshalswick House, formerly the home of the Marten family.  The rather grand formal parkland was being converted into streets of upwards of five hundred detached and semi-detached homes for sale.  While Charmouth and Gurney Court roads proceeded  as intended, the original plan was modified further east.  In particular The Wick wooded area was not cut down as originally intended for yet more dwellings, other roads were fore-shortened and Hazel Grove was removed from the plan altogether.  In addition, the east-west spine road, Harptree Way, was left as today's stripling with no houses fronting either side.

No photograph has been found of the 1913 picture house at Fleetville.  It was a typical "tin
church" style and was already second hand when brought to Hatfield Road.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE ARCHIVES & LOCAL STUDIES

1925's residents of Fleetville would have recalled the prospect of a cinema appearing remarkably quickly in 1913; they were even able to stand on the corner of Hatfield Road and Tess Road (later renamed Woodstock Road South) and see the structure for themselves. Admittedly it was modest in size, as were many similar moving picture halls at the time.  But the locals never had the opportunity to venture inside; a legal case brought to court forced the builder to take the structure down, having contravened the Cinematograph Act, and to pay court costs against the builder.

A proper cinema at last!  The Grand Palace post-war became The Gaumont, then became
Chequers when they stopped showing films and converted to bingo.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE ARCHIVES & LOCAL STUDIES

However, a decade later Fleetville residents finally got their cinema – well, it was built as near to Fleetville as was possible!  Named The Grand Palace Cinema and fronting Stanhope Road this sizeable entertainment building with its own orchestra, live shows, and a mix of silent and sound films, brought the most modern of entertainments within reach of east end residents.  Such was the size of its audiences  one of the district's early marked pedestrian crossings was installed across Stanhope Road right outside the stylish portico doors.         

Four notable events of the time in 1925.  How distant they now feel; beyond personal memory and only known handed down by our grandparents – and through the pages of the archived local newspapers.