Comfort Break

Very many communities – district councils as well as local bodies responsible for areas of public interest – have been concerned for almost decades how the funds they spend on behalf of their residents are spent.  None seems to be raising the ire of constituents and visitors alike than the provision of public toilets.  It matters not where you are, the local authority has serious spending issues brought about during the past fifteen years or so or so by the twin constraints of tightened government grants and greater social responsibilities forced on them and draining funding which were not there previously.

For most it is a question of arm-behind-their-collective-backs spending restrictions limited to what authorities are required to undertake by law. Anything else they might only be able to include in the budget as long as there are a few coppers left over.

Modern experience has taught the authority public toilets are relatively expensive to provide, partly because of the costs of locking up, general maintenance and cleaning, and the apparently expensive, though irregular costs of repairing vandalism.  Why, oh why can't everyone treat their local public toilets as they would the bathrooms in their own homes?

Built for the Council when there was a certain pride in providing public toilets close to other
public facilities.  The Crown Toilets are long since closed and are converted into a restaurant/cafe.
COURTESY ST ALBANS MUSEUM+GALLERY

If you knew it was there you might use a toilet near the back of the Cricket Pavilion, at the
left of the above photograph.  No-one has mentioned that facility for years so it may no
longer be available.

Protect Clarence Park continues to be concerned about toilet provision in the Park.  Not surprising really; a family resource requires to have toilets which children should be comfortable using (in fact, all of us) safely and pleasantly when required, but facilities have barely changed in the past 75 years.  In fact, the Park's facilities are now less generous today because the Crown Toilets have long been converted into a restaurant. The Crown toilets, of course, were never within the Park anyway, but it is supposed they were built as an attraction for visitors to the Crown public house and hotel in its heyday as well as pedestrians to and from the city centre and to major events at the park, including its weekly football.

An old-fashioned men's urinal stood to the rear of the Cricket Pavilion.  It's not been there for
decades, but a similar structure still exists near the riverside at Twickenham.

The football area toilets, today are shared with the recreation zone.  Not well known are those near the bowls section, and of course at the cricket pavilion, while fortunately the men's distinctive urinal next to the fence behind the cricket pavilion, was fortunately lost in the fifties.  None can be blessed with a pleasant ambience and modern standards.

This building was constructed shortly before World War Two, on the edge of Fleetville
Recreation Ground (Fleetville Park). Closed, of course, and now converted into the
Beech Tree Cafe, although this image was taken a few years ago.

The toilets at Fleetville Park (Recreation Ground) facility, first opening in 1938, also long ago closed up and was converted to become the Beech Tree coffee shop.  The expectation being that those in need of relief would be able to use the supermarket – well done Morrisons! Those in the know pop into the Community Centre on another pretext and take the opportunity while there.

Much the same applied to the facilities at a more remote location in the East End; Cunningham Fields.

Sandridge Parish Council was sufficiently supportive to fund a toilet block at The Quadrant, but again, the quality of the facility is poor by modern standards.  One of the earliest locations, for men, used to be at the back of the Rats' Castle.

Young boys were sometimes given permission to make use of a customers' toilet at the back 
of the Rats' Castle, but this was an informal arrangement not known to have had a life beyond
the 1950s!

As far as I am aware there is no community provision anywhere in St Albans, and particularly, especially in or close to the centre and facilities signposted for visitors.  You may know of a favourite site, such as the Library, the Museum, Arena, Cathedral, swimming pool.  Other locations are difficult to get to even if they are open, and certainly not if they are now permanently closed.

We will hope for pleasanter times in the future so that we are not forced to plan our comfort visits before we leave the house!

Plugging Us In

 Before phones and electricity arrived in the East End of St Albans life was much simpler.  For a start housing had only just begun to creep past the railway and no building of any kind existed beyond what would later become The Rats' Castle.  Even street lights – which were manufactured in Campfield Road – were not lit on moonlit nights, assuming any had been installed!   We weren't even writing dates beginning with 19...  The first consumers of electricity were our Fleetville factories but there were no handy cables to plug into.  But there was, though, a railway line which brought coal almost to the door.  Inside the building a handy little generator the size of a domestic living room converted the coal into "electric" for light and to power machines.

Behind Camp Hill were the furnaces which burned the rubbish which
St Albans people created in the early years of the twentieth century.

... and at the rear of this building the early generators provided the energy early users of the
magic power we needed anywhere between the city centre and parts of Fleetville, for those
who could afford it.

The Council, forever searching for places to dump our rubbish, was one of the earlier authorities to burn it in an out-of-the-way location in Campfields and do away with most of the coal.  Individual generators were gradually replaced by larger equipment doing the same thing, and really big cables were laid under the footpaths – they're still doing that of course – to big metal boxes so that users of electric power could  connect up near to their properties.

The supply cable to businesses, factories and a few homes was connected here. Today
these boxes are still seen (this one is at The Crown).  Their modern-day  equivalents are
usually called kiosks.

By the 1930s houses pre-built with an electricity plug-in installation were big business. In fact, 
the Breakspear estate was known as the "Electric Estate" when first marketed from 1929.

Many small electrical businesses thrived on what they believed
would be a never-ending programme of conversion work as well 
as contract work for local house builders.

Home owners were proud to, rather inelegantly, wire their homes, to replace gas mantles, oil lamps and candles, intended to reduce the risk of fire.  A few householders took advantage of plugging a new-fangled electric toaster or even an electric heater into a room's dangling electric light socket.  That is how my grandmother made her breakfasts in her brand-new 1930 house.  Ours, built a decade later in a fast expanding East End, was far more advanced.  Not only did we have a light in the middle of each room, but there was a large two-pin plug in the two living rooms and kitchen.  Just in case, perhaps for the electric vacuum cleaner, any powered item was needed in the bedrooms, the builders fitted a socket in the least convenient location, on the landing.

If today's plethora of devices was forced to use pre-war supply sockets and their charging requirements we would still be in a pickle.  After the war a new arrangement of earthed three square pin sockets with their "ring mains" was invented, but it took an eternity to bring existing homes up to date.  In fact, many of today's new homes still come fitted with a bare minimum number of sockets. Hence the healthy sales figures for pre-wrapped 4-in-one trailing sockets.

But we are just beginning to make a return to how this electric game began.  An increasing number of householders are generating their own juice.  They are not, of course, buying in coal, but covering their roofs with solar panels and finding space for storage batteries.  Well, that's a whole lot better than great-grandpa's trip along the road to the motor garage to charge up the accumulator.  Nobody told me how heavy they were when you offered to help out for the first time!

Coal and generators at the beginning of the electricity story have now made way for fields of
solar panels and wind turbines so that our homes can be lit and heated, our devices charged 
and in some cases our car batteries topped up.

Today, many people who were born in the earlier decades of the last century, have lived through the entire history of domestic electricity supply and consumption and are now looking forward to the next local step forward – planting fields of solar panels at Smallford.  They are already to be discovered as we journey by train to places of interest. They are the latest crop on the landscape. And we have already stopped being excited by the necessity of buying 40, 60 or 100 watt "hot" lamps in favour of LEDs.  "Bought that one years ago and not needed to replace it yet".  Nothing stands still.

Street plates 1

 We have previously run a few items about the age and character of streets in the East End district.  The features have been irregular, very occasional and quite detailed.  This year we will return to the topic and identify a number of the district's roads, but in a briefer form – sufficiently short that we all may stand a chance of actually remembering the key information.  For example, last year a street plate was created on screen – this one; you may remember it:

The style does not appear on any actual street plate in St Albans, but is increasingly appearing in a number of locations, particularly where new suburbs are being developed, or redeveloped, nearby formerly historically important roads and/or properties.  Very often postcodes are added and perhaps geographic labelling  to inform about the boundaries of present local communities.  The street plates which appear in these regular, monthly blogs are more inventive than actual.  But the target has been for a road, once identified, to have its context explained in no more than two lines occupied by the sign as it might have appeared at each end of the road.  So, the example above was one you have seen previously.  Below begins the new series.

A residential street off Camp Road was developed in the 1930s on land previously owned by Friederick (to use the original Germanic spelling) Sander, the "Orchid King". Vanda Crescent, and other roads nearby, are named after varieties of orchid which the nursery bred and sold.  Comfortably within two lines of print.

People's names are more difficult to recall.  A small Oaklands cul-de-sac from the 1970s feels quite homely to its residents.  The rest of us may struggle to place a context to the name, but Michael Gresford Jones spent twenty years as the sixth Bishop of St Albans.  This sign also squeezes in a little additional phrase telling us what Bishop Gresford Jones went on to do in his retirement.

Hedley Road is a not very straight street between Sutton Road and Ashley Road.  It was laid out on land once owned by an industrial manufacturer of overcoats. Alfred Nicholson also wanted to attract other manufacturers to his plots of spare land nearby.  It was his prerogative after all, as the land owner, to name the road after his son – keep it in the family!

 

As with the orchids earlier a theme can be used to link more than one road; as is the case on the London Road estate where a former Admiral George Rodney is named on one road and the location of a key historical event he was associated with – Cape St Vincent –  nearby. The theme is Admirals of the Fleet, but individual persons don't necessarily have a connection with St Albans.

More street plates coming up in February.