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.