What shall we do about Hatfield Road?

We can only imagine what Hatfield Road was like in the seventeenth century, but by the mid-eighteenth sufficient angst had built up to warrant improvements by making it a toll road.  Unfortunately, tolls there were but how much improvement was made to the highway cannot be ascertained as detailed accounts from 1868 to 1881 no longer exist.

Then came the early local authority period.  Still a narrow road with passing places.  Some of that narrowness exists today near the Crown.  The road was subsequently widened to become the double-lane size it still is today; although still unmade until the teen years of the twentieth century.

As the number of motor vehicles increased, and in recognition of it being a shopping street with direct access to the city centre, the thirties brought some welcome relief when the bypass road from Roe Green to the Watford road encouraged traffic with no business in St Albans to miss it out altogether.

At Smallford some further widening took place, and the bend at the rec was shaved to provide a better sightline.  Otherwise, the road today is the same as it was in the 1960s.  It is not that there was no ambition on the part of the County Council.  Two proposals from that time may linger in some people's memories.  The first, and most radical, was to bulldoze the "straggle of shops" out of existence, replacing them with clusters of shops and residences further from the road.

The second was to make the street into a local road, and divert through traffic on its own mini bypass as a dual carriageway on the route of the former branch railway between Camp Road and Smallford.  The report did not state whether there would be access junctions at, say Sutton Road, Ashley Road and Hill End; nor did it acknowledge that a four lane highway is rather wider than the railway, even though there was sufficient width for two tracks.

Neither of these schemes, as we know, went anywhere, and since then a further fifty years have passed with its inexorable increase in traffic and parking demand.  But at least Morrison's has provided some additional parking.  What is surprising is that, as new buildings have sprung up on the south side through Fleetville, no allowance was made in the planning applications for future widening.  And at the worst section of all, no additional lane was provided for buses outside Morrison's.  What were the authorities (not) thinking of?

Smallford, towards Hatfield.  The tollhouse on the left (where the paddock
is today), with the Four Horseshoes beyond.  On the right, the cottages are
no more.  But the road IS wider.