Temporary buildings

During the next few years there are likely to be more temporary classrooms arriving on school fields and playgrounds, as the child population increases.  Previous attempts to ensure there were just enough places for the cohorts of local children were never going to work permanently.  Of course, 'Portacabin' classrooms are nothing new: Camp School's 'bungalow' arrived in 1936, and Fleetville School required similar facilities the following year.

Wartime nurseries, such as the one at Fleetville were made of sturdier materials, but were, nonetheless, a temporary solution to accommodation problems.  Fleetville Nursery, erected in 1942, continues to serve its community functions over 70 years later.  In 1946 huge numbers of HORSA huts were put up at secondary schools to serve the increased school leaving age to 15; and many were still in place to welcome pupils nearly thirty years later when the leaving age was raised further to sixteen.

Churches, of course, have often acquired temporary buildings; both Hatfield Road Methodist Church and St Paul's put up their tin buildings; and the formative St Mary's began with a second-hand timber structure.

The first Bunch of Cherries building.

Scouts are no strangers to wooden or concrete temporary buildings either, although it is rare for these to be replaced with permanent headquarters buildings; the 8th and the 9th are the only groups I can recall having done so.  When, in 1949, a new pub was granted a licence, another type of licence – for a building – could not be given, and so, until 1963, two pre-war wooden huts were pressed into service at the Bunch of Cherries.  And when their time had come, both huts were demounted by willing scouting volunteers and pressed into further service for the 2nd and the 16th scout groups.

Salwey headquarters of the 2nd (Camp) St Albans Scouts.

Several units of the Home Guard had wooden army huts, one standing at the corner of Central Drive and Hazelwood Drive.  These too must have enjoyed second lives somewhere or other.  Similar huts housed prisoners of war at Oaklands, Gorhambury, London Colney and other locations, and were then used to ease the housing shortage.  Then there were the 'ten-year' prefabs which were brought in to do the same job, but with local and national authority approval (the huts were really squatter accommodation).  That ten-year lifespan has stretched until, well, today, as a visit to Mitchell Close will reveal!

Smallford Station today from the former station yard.

Quiet railway branches often relied on timber or metal structures as stations, which might have arrived – by rail of course – in flat-pack form.  Usually given regular coats of company-colour paint they lasted pretty well.  We all know of one local station building, at Smallford, which has remained in surprisingly good condition in the 62 years since it last saw a passenger, thanks partly to it being on private land and covered on one side by undergrowth.  If you are in the city centre during the next two weeks, call in at the central library to view the little exhibition which Smallford Residents' Association have created there.  The Association intends to renovate the former Smallford Station, either in-situ or at another location.

Though not in St Albans, Barclay's Bank opened its Welwyn Garden City branch in a tiny – and I really mean tiny – timber building near the Campus in the 1920s, and International Stores, Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer were among the retailers who deployed Nissen huts in the years after WW2.

We seem to have relied on our temporary structures in so many circumstances.