Marsh

 If you have ever walked along Sandpit Lane – all of it from Sandridge Road to Coopers Green Lane – you will have made at least one observation, that the lane is remarkably straight, in the same way we vision a Roman road to have been straight.  Today, we are pausing close to the roundabout which gives access to the Jersey Farm residential district.  Before the houses came you walked a narrow lane towards the farm and onwards to Sandridge.  But for the moment we will stop at the roundabout.

The couple of hundred metres of House Lane did not exist exactly here before the houses arrived.  Most of the original line of House Lane can still be seen, but it meets Sandpit Lane obliquely behind the three cottages known as Ardens Marsh.

A section of the 1840 tithe map showing the location of Ardens Marsh.
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The cottages are revealed on both the 1879 and 1896 surveys (this is 1896).
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

Sandpit Lane follows the bottom edge of the photo.  An upgraded House Lane skirts the modern
housing to a new junction with Sandpit Lane; the former section of House Lane now remains to the north of the cottages.  Some of the houses are built within Ardens Marsh; those on the extreme left in 
the former Ardens Marsh Field.
COURTESY GOOGLE EARTH.

The 1840 tithe map identifies this junction clearly.  We need to look for field number 246.  The map here is very close to the parish boundary, and since it is essentially a parish map nothing of the land north of the broken line – that of Sandridge St Leonard – is shown.  As usual the tithe maps are not oriented northwards but have been moved a quarter turn for a best fit.  Sandpit Lane crosses the lower part of the map before turning towards Smallford.  Today its name is changed to Oaklands Lane after the Coopers Green Lane junction.

Field 246 is different from others on the map in that it is unfenced on the two sides where Sandpit and House lanes pass.  House Lane, incidentally, was at one time known as Hatfield Lane, but possibly not at this end.  The field was named Ardens Marsh, and the rectangular field to its west Ardens Marsh Field.  In the second half of the 19th century these two fields were combined.

View towards Sandpit Lane; the edge of Ardens Marsh.

Ardens Marsh cottages.

The name Ardens is obscure, and has been alternatively known as Hardings – the comparison is logical.  But the Marsh in the name is not as obscure as all that.  This locality lies low in the chalky landscape, a fact made clear as anyone climbing northwards along Coopers Lane will testify.  North along the line of Sandpit Lane, when the water table was significantly higher, have historically appeared a number of springs.  Only Ellenbrook and Boggy Mead Spring remain as surface streams today.  Ardens Marsh was still grass in the 1840s, and even today the roadside ditches are often water filled.

House lane as it was in the early 1900s looking southwards from Sandridge.  This section was known as Hatfield Road or Hatfield Lane.

Between the roundabout and the stub of House Lane which no longer provides access to Sandpit Lane, are the three attached cottages which are collectively called Ardens Marsh.  They didn't exist in 1840 but do appear on the 1879 survey.  Other nearby farm employee cottages were built during the same period: Freelands in Coopers Green Lane, Newgates in Sandpit Lane, Hall Heath also in Sandpit Lane and Beaumonts in Beaumont Avenue.  The need to accommodate key workers and improve on earlier and highly unsuitable arrangements of temporary accommodation within the conglomeration of inadequate farm buildings.  Ardens Marsh cottages were erected and owned by Thomas F Gape, who also owned the nearby Oak Farm.  His land extended to the western end of Ardens Marsh Field, abutting the small and narrow Newgates Farm.

Ardens Way is this locality's connection with the past.

Ardens Marsh carries its name forward to the future as well, for a residential road branching off Barnfield Road has been named Ardens Way.

Crown Fields

 Before launching into this week's group of fields you might like to return to last week's post, Nine. I had intended to add an early Fleetville advertisement for Carter's (Sear & Carter later).  After much searching I have finally located it and it takes its place in the middle of the previous post.  Frank Carter located his shop and the adjacent land in Hatfield Road next to St Paul's Church as Ninefields Nursery.  The site of this property is now St Paul's Place.

IT might take some time to identify your location from the tithe map.
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The tithe map with roads named and fields identified.  The text below lists the owners by their
printed colours.
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This week there is a far larger group of fields (above) to understand if we are to make sense of the district which launched the development after the 1879 expansion of the city's boundaries, from the previous 1835 Lattimore Road boundary as far as the Midland Railway and Crown junction.

Again I have begun with the 1840 tithe map which, as always, is bereft of helpful text labels; just roads, field boundaries and their numbered references, and properties in grey or pink.  So, the first version at the top is how we start, and once the roads have been identified by their curves, straights and junctions, the names of the fields and their owners can be added.  In this locality there are many owners, identified by colour.  We should wonder whether owners sold up enthusiastically, willingly, or following detailed deliberations and only persuaded after offers of a higher price.

The blue fields were those of William Cotton of St Peter's Farm; the purple fields were owned by Thomas Kinder, but away from his Beaumonts Farm; in red were the fields belonging to Edward Boys.  One field, in grey was owned by Widow Brown, who also had a connection with St Peter's Farm, that field being between today's Marlborough and Lattimore roads.  Of the two major land owners Earl Verulam's presence on the map are in orange, while two fields owned by Earl Spencer (and rented by Thomas Kinder) are shown in green.

The map surveyed in 1872 just a handful of years after the building of the Midland Railway.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

Map surveyed in 1897.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

Map surveyed in 1922.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

The Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1872, forty years after the tithe map, demonstrates the sheer expanse of railway development once it arrives, and on this map are two; the Midland between north and south and the diagonal route of the Hatfield & St Albans branch line.  By this date street development had grown apace so Boys' fields were quickly lost under houses, as are two of Kinder's.  Locals knew this expansion area as New Town.

By the time the 1897 map was surveyed two further developments had appeared on the eastern side of the Midland Railway, touching and over-reaching the new 1879 boundary.  The field known as Nine Acres (not to be confused with Ninefields from last week) first became a nursery before being purchased by Frederick Sander for the Cavendish estate in 1880.  The opportunity arose as soon as the Midland Railway opened, to develop homes for users of the railway (commuters?).  Therefore, Stanhope, Granville and adjacent Hatfield roads were opened up in the 1880s and 1890s.  Earl Spencer, as with all major landowners, made a profit on his resources, and a field did not need to grow crops if a better income could be made From other outputs.  Land owners are not necessarily farmers.

Meanwhile, three more fields owned by Earl Verulam to the south of the map were also up for grabs.  Twelve Acres quickly became the prison at the same time as the Midland Railway arrived, the remaining land on this field becoming known as the Gaol Field and subsequently developed as the Breakspear estate.

Camp Road today, facing uphill to Camp Hill; the route of the former branch railway passing
overhead (but not on this newer bridge).  Originally the lane followed a line further to the right,
but to provide sufficient height it was diverted eastwards as shown on the 1872 map (above).

Camp Lane, on the lower edge of the map, was diverted by the builders of the branch railway route.  Its two adjacent fields, Dell Field and Up And Down Field were pastured until the 20th century and succumbed to housing development from the 1930s as the Dellfield estate.

It is not difficult to use the tithe field boundaries to compare them with the three Ordnance Survey maps for 1872, 1897 and 1922;  many of those boundary lines are still evident in current roads, tracks and footpaths, the edges of gardens and other properties; a fascinating tracing of the locality's progress through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nine

 When growing up in the 1950s, I came across grown-ups who were well settled into their Fleetville lives (as a child I would have used the word 'old') referred to a non-specific part of the district as Nine Fields, or the Nine Fields.  It has taken decades to home in on the background to this name.

Sear & Carter, who had a garden shop and nursery in Hatfield Road, on the site of today's St Paul's Place, had named it Ninefields Nursery.  So likely it was close by to this group of open space fields.

A class of boys from Hatfield Road Senior Elementary School at work with their teachers on
the land north of Brampton Road in 1917.  Early work to prepare wartime allotments for their
families.  The south side of Brampton Road is in the background.
COURTESY HERTS ADVERTISER

The beginning of the article which accompanies the
photograph above it.
COURTESY HERTS ADVERTISER

Frank Sear (before becoming Sear & Carter) advertised its Hatfield Road shop and adjacent land
as Ninefields Nursery.  The nine fields, however, were north of Brampton Road.

The Herts Advertiser in 1917 ran an article about senior school pupils who had taken on extensive plots of ground "at the Ninefields" for wartime allotments.  The boys (the item was specific here; no girls were mentioned) would take home produce which they grew to their families. In one of the earliest photographs published in the paper the image was spread over the whole width of the page but there was little height to it.  The photographer was probably standing close to where Jennings Road is today, facing south so as to capture large numbers of boys at work, with the south side of Brampton Road beyond.

An uncle, who had grown up in one of those Brampton Road terrace houses, recalled his childhood adventures playing "on the Ninefields at the Woodstock Road end".

With a copy of the 1840 tithe map in front me I annotated that section between Beaumonts and the then city boundary and between Hatfield Road and Sandpit Lane.  Unfortunately I didn't manage to join the split map very effectively. 

The field names might, I thought, provide a clue to the name Nine Fields.  Descriptive as they were, the field names led me no nearer to an answer (except for one field named Nine Acres!)  Perhaps I should look at field names in more detail.  One group focused on locations and general descriptions of shape, such as Further Field or Great Long Field.  A pair of the largest fields in the Sandfield Road/Verulam School area was named Great Moodys and Long Moodys, which suggests an old English reference to fields which are difficult to work, unless someone has a more specific suggestion.

The orange labelled fields belonged to William Cotton of St Peter's Farm. The
unlabelled fields on the left are part of the map below.  Kinder's fields of
Beaumonts Farm and the Grammar School Field, on which Fleet Ville was
built, is not part of this survey.
TITHE MAP COURTESY HALS

A third group defined the fields in terms of their size in acres; there is Four Acres, Seven Acres and so on.  I noted that the group 1 and group 2 fields in 1840 were both owned by William Cotton of St Peter's Farm, whose farmhouse still exists as the Conservative Club, near The Crown.  Group 3 fields all belonged to Earl Spencer.  There were twenty fields in total.  Mr Cotton's apportionment was eleven fields, including the smallest, the almost circular Dell Field, a former chalk pit.  However, Spencer's total was 9 fields – so, to spell it out, Nine Fields.

The green labelled fields belonged to Earl Spencer; the orange labelled
fields belonged to William Cotton of St Peter's Farm and are additional
to his fields on the top map.  The two unlabelled fields lower right appear
on the top map and are labelled on that version.
TITHE MAP COURTESY HALS

The Nine Fields were a contiguous group, all north of Brampton Road, six of them with a boundary to Sandpit Lane and the remainder completely road-locked but edged by the lengthy footpath between Hatfield Road/Beaumont Avenue and St Peter's Church, much of which was adopted by Brampton Road and York Road.

So, although the Nine Fields must have been a specific group which did not include fields in the vicinity of Woodstock Road, it seems that the name became more generalised to refer to all of the fields between Brampton Road, Woodstock Road, Sandpit Lane and Clarence Road; quite possibly a slightly larger area before early 20th century developments.

References to Nine Fields in published works are virtually absent – but then, very little about the eastern districts of St Albans has been published anyway.  If, however, readers of this blog are in possession of more definitive information, please to share it with us.