Cell Barnes Lane

Updated 15 March 2024

 Lanes give the impression of  being narrow rural roads, often bordered by hedging and maybe trees – or if not, fencing. In addition, they come with unexpected single or double bends, some providing a clue to earlier deviations.  An occasional cottage, barn or farm entrance might also turn up.

Camp Road and Camp Hill are near the top of this 1875 map.  Cell Barnes
Lane follows the green line past Cunningham Hill Farm towards the 
bottom right edge, to be continued on the extract below.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

Cell Barnes Lane continues toward Little Cell Barnes on the map surveyed
in 1875.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

At Camp Road's Camp Hill exists a T junction which is the beginning of Cell Barnes Lane.  It begins close to the former Cunningham Hill Farm, meandering gently downhill and finishing at the former Little Cell Barnes, although it continues at the charmingly named Nightingale Lane and once fed into the eastern side (or end) of London Colney; although today the four lane bypass gets in the way!

BY THE 1897 survey the first two properties, twin cottages lie to the side of the double bend,
very close to today's Drakes Drive.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

By 1937 the Springfield houses are completed, wrapping around Camp Road into Cell Barnes Lane.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

The complex of paths, lanes and other diversions north of Cunningham Hill Farm is a puzzle all by itself, which I will explore on another occasion, but until the post World War One period only two attached cottages appeared along the Lane in the 1880s.  Before that time it was  just the above mentioned farms.  The cottages were at a double bend in the Lane, and there are folk still around who recall the double bend as posing regular risks to cyclists, motorists and pedestrians from unseen lane users beyond.

The first major incursion of homes along the Lane occurred in the 1920s when a St Albans City Council post-war housing scheme (Homes for Heroes) was progressed in the mid decade  and named Springfield, after the field on which the homes were built.  Today a few of them have been demolished and replaced by the more modern houses on the Wingate Way estate. Spare ground before that development had been used as a cycle speedway track by various clubs in the district.

Programme produced by the St Albans EAC Hawkes Cycle Speedway club, with a photo
taken at the Cell Barnes Lane track (on the left page).
COURTESY BILL GADSBY

Little Cell Barnes cottages near what was the double bend, now between the two
roundabouts in Drakes Drive.

An early aerial photo of part of the London Road estate taken in the 1950s.
Cell Barnes Lane is shown diagonally from top right
to lower left.  Drakes Drive curves gently across the lower portion of the photograph.
COURTESY THE HERTS ADVERTISER

The next arrival in the 1930s was a major piece of infrastructure – the electricity grid was developing.  A new power station had been built at Hoddesdon and one of its circuits provided, via overhead lines, a supply to St Albans, with a substation in what was then open ground along Cell Barnes Lane.  Today it is opposite the Cunningham Schools. A field northwest of the sub-station and acquired by the council became the default location of circus visits once they could no longer make use of land at the Breakspear estate (the Gaol Field). The earliest maps show a copse of trees and a pond adjacent to Cell Barnes Lane.  This was lost on the expansion of the sub-station.

The site of the two schools, infant and junior, are both post-war and partly occupy an earlier sports field rented by O W Peak, the factory which made coats in Hatfield Road.  A pavilion occupied the site which mainly served tennis courts used by the firm's employees.

St Luke's Church's permanent home.

Electricity for St Albans arrives at the Cell Barnes Lane sub-station, originally coming from a new power station at Hoddesdon in east Herts.

Almost all of the former farm land between Cell Barnes Lane and Camp Road was acquired by the council and held in reserve for future housing – the London Road Estate.  Meanwhile it became one of the city's largest allotment grounds, the hedges on both sides of the Lane being rich in blackberries and sloes. Much of the land to the southeast of Cell Barnes Lane had, until the houses arrived, been row upon row of chicken coops belonging to Little Cell Barnes.

When housebuilding began in earnest from the 1950s it included the laying of Drakes Drive and a re-arrangement of Cell Barnes Lane at the double bend which provided the opportunity for introducing new junctions, eventually becoming little roundabouts.

Alongside the housebuilding grew the inevitable parade of shops, the Cornerstone Church, a branch library (the only one of the three on the east side of the city still remaining being at Marshalswick).  And we should not forget the permeant building of St Luke's Church, having moved from its temporary location in Camp Road and originally being a daughter church of St Paul's in Blandford Road.

This, and the one below, are the same extracts but current surveys.
BOTH COURTESY OPEN STREET MAP CONTRIBUTORS

So, during the period of just over one hundred years a quiet rural lane has become a busy residential road – with a pedestrian crossing and a bus route thrown in.