A busy week

Occasionally there is a small collection of topics which reflect what has been going on in our East End.  This is such a week, so here we go!

To begin with, an account stretching back to 1929, which I probably should have noted from filed press reports from the time: a young woman of 18 had travelled from Kent to take up employment at Ballito Hosiery Mill, in the year it had greatly expanded, just four years after opening in Fleetville.  She had been fortunate in finding lodgings with relatives at Smallford, and had got to know a young man, possibly another Ballito employee.  An inquest was held after the woman was deemed to have taken her own life after contact with a train near her relatives' home.  There are many gaps in the account, which was passed on by a member of the Smallford & Albans Way Heritage Group.  It seems that a train does not have to be travelling fast to have a devastating effect on the life of a person whose mental condition may already have been frail.  We might for a moment reflect on what trauma she might have experienced if she had felt there was no-one she could talk with.

Ponded section of the Ellen Brook at Ellenbrook Fields

Excited families on Friday last made their way to the one of the last sections of the 400-mile route from Holyhead of Children In Need's Rickshaw Challenge.  The route through "our patch", having left Sandridge, took in Marshalswick Lane, Beechwood Avenue and Ashley Road/Drakes Drive, then London Colney on its way to the BBC Studios at Boreham Wood.  One small (but exhausting) segment in achieving the sum of around £47 million for the charity.  The young people who participated made us all feel good.

Boggy Mead Spring is the other north-south stream

Ever since the closure and sale of the former de Havilland site between Smallford and Harpsfield, the development plan, now very much evident in the university and business district, also allocated a substantial zone for the Ellenbrook Fields Country Park.  Yet nothing more had been heard on the matter, until another issue  intervened – the proposal to quarry the site for gravel.  Both Oak and Beech farms had already been trawled; so had Smallford and a substantial swathe between London Colney and Roe Hyde.  Residents are now bracing themselves and are not looking forward to further years of disruption, dust and deployment of lorry fleets.  A demonstration against quarrying was held on the Fields last weekend, one major element of which would be the effect on  groundwater supplies.  Bearing in mind that one of only two  remaining streams flowing southwards into the river Colne, the Ellen Brook flows through part of the Fields and contamination from this stream would surely also affect the Colne.

Highfield Park Trust held the latest of its annual History Evenings on Friday evening; always a friendly occasion where new friends and acquaintances are regularly made.  This year the focus was on the role of the two former mental hospitals, Hill End and Cell Barnes, in the the period 1939 to 1961, when the major teaching hospital, St Bartholomews (Barts) was in residence.  The Trust is acquiring an increasing documentary archive on the life of Hill End and Cell Barnes, and this includes a number of transcribed conversations with members of former staff and families of residents whose work or treatment brought them in contact with the Hill End/Cell Barnes campus,

Staff drama group at Barts in Herts during the 1950s

 now a new residential development and park.


Finally, the residential development which also serves as a new access road to Beaumont School, was, readers will recall, named Kingsbury Gardens.  This name appeared rather odd, given that Kingsbury is associated with St Michael's rather than Oaklands.  We now notice from the street place recently installed, that the road is called Austen Way, which presumably applies to all three of the linked streets.  Which only leaves the inevitable question about the relevance of the name Austen.  Churchill Homes has been asked but thus far there has been no response.