New homes everywhere

We have become used to ticking off the new housing developments we come across in our local travels, not to mention those which are  proposed as private enterprises or will result from district plans, the largest for large estates in the vicinities of Redbourn and Tyttenhanger.

But lest we imagine this is a modern phenomenon alone, the demand for homes in huge swathes of Middlesex between the two wars, and resulting from families escaping the privations of poor housing in London, largely created the modern outer boroughs of the metropolis.  And it touched St Albans too in a small way, with the typical semi-detached estates, the largest of which was primed to grow from Marshalswick Farm.

As a result of such frenetic activity there developed a super-charged energy in the formation and  expansion of house building firms, most of which had previously been small family enterprises of fewer than a dozen employees.  Gone were the days when builders offered bids on a few plots on a field development sold off by a farmer.  Construction companies sought whole farms which their owners wish to dispose of; the farm name living on in the marketing,  display advertisements and show home welcome days – the flag poles and fully-furnished show homes had their genesis in the late 1920s.  Buses and taxis were even laid on to woo prospective purchasers, then a novel method of acquisition for ordinary families.

BRITISH NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE

In 1938 news came through that Marshalswick Farm had been purchased by the north west London building company of T F Nash.  Already a well-known company for its many well laid out estates to its name, TFN was not afraid of programming in excess of two thousand dwellings, including small numbers of detached properties in key entry locations to an estate, and was an early adopter of both cavity wall construction and built-in extras,  garage-width sideways and garage-included homes, all with generous gardens.  As for the designs, the front elevations are certainly distinctive.  In Harrow the company even developed blocks of flats with a modernist curved-end balconies.  Throughout the 1930s it was completing up to one thousand homes a year.

ST ALBANS MUSEUMS

St Albans was one of the company's rare forays beyond north-west London.  There was therefore a possibility that, had the war not intervened, Nash may have spread its building wings even further.  As it was, the firm joined other similar enterprises in bidding for  government infrastructure projects after domestic building ceased.  It was not until 1954 until building controls finally disappeared, but it seems that Nash had already decided to call it a day as a house builder in its own right.  Stocks of materials and equipment had been auctioned and sites sold.  Other builder-developers re-launched ready to take on the 1950s housing expansion; at Marshalswick it was McGlashan & Co.  Its office was at The Quadrant.


If you live, or have lived, in a T F Nash home you will usually know, and there are people out there who still search for the company's original brochures which set out the elevations and plans of a handful of designs in which it specialised, including their tapered rooflines, porches and shutters.  Most have now been altered, and few still sport the shutters, but recognising a Nash home is not always a challenge.

The Nash family may not have lived in St Albans, but it is a name which St Albans has taken to its heart; people just know where the Nash homes are.