Streets we named

 There are developers who are content to build homes and go as far as laying our their estate and perhaps consulting a list of house types and road names.

Then there are those who do the job properly, who feel embedded in their home areas, who grew their businesses within their home patch, later expanding and feel a pride in delivering home style names and roads to connect where they began with wherever they have reached in their business experience.  The developer Thomas H Nash, Nash Homes, was one such firm.

So, let's explore a few of Marshalswick Farm Estate's roads and pick a few connections.  It may help us to discover that the Nash family were of Chiltern origin, and it also helps to understand that the region abounded in brickworks and is nationally known for its timber industry, especially for furniture manufacture; the major town in this respect being High Wycombe.

Let's start with High Wycombe, original home of the T F Nash family.

A green corner of Wycombe Way "round the back of The Quadrant."

Straight away therefore, we have connections with the town of High Wycombe, having given its name to an unprepossessing thoroughfare behind The Quadrant, often known for its long-stay parking and tall brick walls. 

A short step along The Ridgeway long distance path...

... now formalised into a National Trail.

A rather shorter The Ridgeway extending from Marshalswick Lane to... well, further along
Marshalswick Lane.

But on a completely different scale is The Ridgeway, created to circumscribe the residential development, leaving Marshalswick Lane at one point only to rejoin it just over over half a mile later.  Part of the actual route had been laid out for Nash in the form of a lengthy track curving through the former Marshalswick Farm.  Historically, geologically and topologically, The Ridgeway is a an ancient long-distance track way of some 5,000 years of almost constant trading use between the West Country and The Wash, and containing a number of ground monuments cut into the chalk surfaces at occasional locations.  Much of its distance is now part of a National Trail.

Traditional flint houses in Great Kingshill.

View along Kingshill Avenue.

Of the small settlements north of High Wycombe the earliest to have been given a Chiltern name, was named after Great Kingshill – and its partner settlement of nearby Little Kingshill.  At Marshalswick two roads get a bite out of this naming as, in addition to Kingshill Avenue was a C-shaped road known as Kingshill Crescent.  However, the latter was altered to Queens Crescent in 1952 (ascension of Queen Elizabeth II) to reduce confusion for the postman! 

Rather more than a village today: Hazelmere.

A corner of Hazelmere Road

Hazelmere Road bisects the eastern half of the estate between Sherwood Avenue and The Ridgeway south. It would be hopeful to think of Hazelmere still being recorded as a village although it has long since outgrown that status with much post war housebuilding (not I think by Nash! and not in the Nash style).  For us in St Albans and nearby Hatfield it is appropriate that the parents of aviator and aircraft designer Geoffrey de Havilland, Rev Charles and Alice de Havilland, had a church minister living nearby where Geoffrey spent his childhood.

A corner of Hughenden Valley.

A calm Hughenden Road.

Hughenden Road also a forms a link between Sherwood Avenue (together with Wycombe Way) and The Ridgeway, forming an attractive soft edge to the high density zone (HDZ).  The link is with the dispersed Buckinghamshire locality of Hughenden Valley, where is located Hughenden Manor, formerly home to the Disraelis (Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister).

I wonder whether Chiltern-related roads also feature in other Nash developments in the company's history.  Expect a footnote another time; meanwhile we're not done yet with roads in Marshalswick.