Remembering This Year

 The first blog of 2023 looked back, not to 2022, but a full one hundred years to 1922.  That was a fascinating year that was.  I'll jump back to 1923 next time, but for now I will modestly roll back to the beginning of this year and will probably grasp how swiftly the months of this year have flown by – so quickly sometimes I have managed to record just two posts in an entire month, reaching the usual average of 36 this year.  But there has been an increase in series posts, so I will begin with these.

One of five titles in the series of little books about St Albans, and presented as a sequence of photographs, mainly taken between c1880 and the Second World War.

In the summer I felt it desirable to alert readers to a number of books about St Albans which are often neglected – I've called them The Little Books – slim volumes, small page sizes, a minimum of text, but the main feature is their prominence of photographs.  We are allowed the pleasure of focusing on one page at a time.  I covered five such books and assessed what proportion of the images shown were photographed in our east end.

With the publication of the city's Green District Plan there followed a short series of posts about some of the East End's green open spaces, including pocket spaces and forgotten places which, nevertheless, can inspire us or help us to collect our thoughts.

Opportunities to relax in the district's open spaces were explored after the publication of the District's Green District Plan.

A more recent series which I'll return to occasionally, are visits to individual roads or lanes; how and why they first appeared and what might have made them special.  This series began with Shirley road where, it appears, few of us have heard of.  And this road came about in the series because I wanted to highlight an unusual building along Shirley Road whose main function few had seen, and now it is too late.  It was the local equivalent of a British Restaurant which we. in St Albans, knew as a Civic Restaurant.  The restaurant building was finally removed from the scene c1975. So far you can read about the roads of the Breakspear estate, Coach Mews, Sutton Road, Royal Road and Princes Road; others will appear during the course of 2024.

Another short series reminded us of the old names by which fields were once known, and had been remembered for possibly hundreds of years.  One collection of fields was, and is still remembered as, The Nine Fields, between Brampton Road and Sandpit Lane.  And nine appears in the names of other east end fields too.

SAOEE Blog has not been without controversy in its reporting this year.  St Albans City Football Club had applied for an entertainment and music license – or rather a substantial extension to the existing control.  Which, naturally, drew the attention of the Clarence Park Residents' Association and Protect Clarence Park Campaign Group. 

The Blog also helped to celebrate the centenary of the appearance, on maps and signs, of the road classification system which help us to navigate ourselves around the road network, by letter, number and of course by colour.

Among the thousands of children who were evacuated to the city between 1939 and 1945
was a contingent from Ore School, Hastings, whose host school was the now-closed
Priory Park School.

Two contrasting blogs, both published in the summer and both engaged the attentions of the majority of the population in their times. The first in this year of 2023 when the Coronation of Charles III was celebrated, with its street parties, decorations and other special events. When we might have been tugged down with more difficult daily circumstances the Coronation was a short relief of positive buoyancy to bring a few days of light relief.  Contrast that with almost exactly eighty years earlier when it seemed like half of the nation's population appeared to have been on the move, or in some theatre of war.  And a part of this was the movement of children from the large cities to places of comparative safety in the towns and villages of "reception areas".  They faced new temporary lives without their parents; and the millions of adult hosts who accepted them into their homes faced new responsibilities and pressures in looking after their child and/or adult guests.

What a year!

To all my readers of the SAOEE Blog I wish you a very Happy New Year.