Where's here?

We all need to know these things occasionally.  So let's start by asking the question, "What do they call this place?"

Painted by John Buckingham shortly before the Midland
Railway arrived, from a vantage point near Grimston Road.

We'll assume the year is 1868, so this will be a historical question.  We've been walking (quite a common pursuit in 1868) towards St Albans, but we're not there yet.  We have dropped down towards a small stream valley, possibly a winter bourne, and we pass on our right an open space with, behind it, a farm homestead and a cottage next door.  On our left we note a lane coming uphill to meet the road, and stretched out across the lane and between two posts, is a metal chain, next to which is a tiny house.  Here lodges the guardian of the turnpike road, the route we have been walking.

After waiting for a young man on a loaded cart to pay his due, and the toll keeper to lower the chain, the cart driver bumps over the chain and turns toward the town where there is some feverish activity as dozens of gangers are piling subsoil onto the road in readiness for a bridge which will carry the road over the railway being constructed.  They are calling it the Midland Railway.

The toll keeper's house was where the posting box is today.

There is no further traffic for the toll keeper and so we engage in general conversation.  From my vantage point I can see back in the direction from which I had travelled, with hedges on both sides of the lane.  I now have a better view down the track from which the cart had arrived, and I can just see the bright new brickwork of another bridge recently completed, for a different railway.  Turning to look up the hill I spot the fresh brickwork of a new institutional building receiving prisoners from much older accommodation.  To its right there is a line of activity as the Midland Railway works continue, with a third bridge and the building next to it which will shortly open as the station.

Between there and the toll house are fields of barley rippling in the gentle breeze.  Cattle graze in another field.  Finally, a long field on the right of the turnpike road is bright with colour and noisy with people enjoying themselves at a temporary fair set up for the town's people – and for me when I get there!

"So, where are we?"  I ask the toll keeper.  "What do they call this place?"

"Don't rightly know, officially.  Don't think it has a proper name," he responded.  "But I know what some of us call it.  The Chain Bar, because that's the most important thing here.  If you've got animals or a cart, you have to stop and pay.  Some call it the Fete Field, because that's what sometimes happens in the meadow opposite.  Course, it's not an official name, just what folks call it.  If someone asks me where I work I tell 'em I collect tolls at the Chain Bar opposite the Fete Field.  They know where I mean."

By 1915 we got to know the place by the name of the
public house and hotel at the roundabout: The Crown.
Yes, there was a roundabout here in 1915!
COURTESY ST ALBANS MUSEUMS

Today, if you haven't guessed, we have a part of St Albans which still hasn't an official name.  You might think an official name is even more necessary today, given the large number of homes hereabouts; the same point (Chilli Raj, or rather the posting box outside it) might be located at The Crown.  Because it is a complex road junction, and that needs a name, just as the toll keeper's house did, and the place where people went to enjoy themselves.  Yes, and we still go there to enjoy ourselves, but today, instead of going to the Fete Field, we'll tell them we're off to Clarence Park.