A road that never was

In the late 1960s the part of Hatfield Road between Hobbs Garage (now Kwik Fit) and Sutton Road was widened.  Not by very much because there is hardly room to breathe in some places.  These are the same frustrations which many of us feel now, negotiating our vehicles or cycles around parked cars, delivery trucks and pink buses, all of which have reason to use the highway here – the  frustrations were serious enough in the 1960s, and that was the second occasion; the first being in the 1920s.  After wartime restrictions on motoring, owning a car was growing in popularity – and very quickly.

Alban Way west, formerly a single track GNR branch railway.

The original bypass, designed to divert traffic around the east and south of St Albans, was itself busy, and did not appear to have much effect on Hatfield Road.  The proposed solution?

The branch railway line between Hatfield and St Albans had closed fully by 1968, and someone saw the overgrown railway track as a possible way of taking traffic away from Hatfield Road for the second time.  The news came in July 1970.  "St Albans could get a new two-mile main road from the Hatfield side of the city to the centre at a rock-bottom price by using a derelict railway line.  The land for the road ... has been offered to the city council by British Railways."

Although one person did mention a dual carriageway, in effect it would be a standard 24-foot freeway with no properties along its length, from Hill End Lane to London Road, with a connection to the city centre's controversial main distributor road (a road scheme ditched later that year following a General Election).  "A spokesman for the City Council said, This would be a very useful scheme.  We would not need to pull down any buildings and much of the preparatory work would have been done for us by the people who built the railway., so it would be a very cheap scheme to improvement."

Fleetville is still waiting for its congestion buster, but I suspect using the Alban Way would no longer be acceptable as too many people have taken their own emotional ownership of the route in their walks and rides along part or all of the green way.

Another group:

Mavis has sent us this great photograph, taken in the 1950s, of a group of employees outside their place of work, Nicholson's, at the Beaumont Works in Sutton Road.  One of the first factories to arrive in Fleetville, it had already been turning out high quality coats for peace time rain and wartime mud for over 50 years when this picture was taken.

Forty 1950s employees of Nicholson's.

Now, it would be nice to find some names – forty of them if possible.  If

you know anyone in the lineup do please email me on saoee@me.com  They can be added to the caption of the photo on the stalbansowneastend.co.uk website.