Street Plates 2

 Here we are with the second in a collection of indeterminate length, in which we informally let passers by know how many of the roads around our neighbourhoods have specific reasons for their names – rather than random titles from the offices of the council or a private developer.  In case you are late in discovering this series, the street plates shown are for illustrative purposes only and are not part of an actual proposal for the District Council!  Just a different method of highlighting additional information which we might be interested in discovering.

There is no surprise for older readers about the name Hobbs, for Alfred Hobbs launched a motor engineering business in Hatfield Road having taken over from an earlier owner of a similar trade, C M Carter on the same site.  Today Kwik-Fit plys its trade.  Mr Hobbs also joined a partnership to develop an agricultural engineering business known as Tractor Shafts on a site adjacent to Lyon Way at Butterwick.  The company later had another name: Smallford Planters. 

Mr Hobbs created his home along Colney Heath Lane, naturally enough because that is where you will come across Hobbs Close today.  When the Colney Heath site was sold and permission given for housing development it was an easy decision to name the access road from Colney Heath Lane Hobbs Close.  We therefore have a road remembered by today's residents for one of the district's earlier entrepreneurs.

Wider Fleetville – that is houses, and of course, shops built in the first twenty years of the twentieth century between what we now know as The Crown and today's Recreation Ground; this swathe of rural St Peter's having been fields of St Peter's Farm for centuries.  The farmhouse, barns and two cottages were on the lower ground, which we are still familiar with as we walk westwards from the cemetery and descend to the traffic lights.  Behind the farmhouse, in use today by the Conservative Club, the sloping ground which was otherwise difficult to manage, was full of laurel shrubs.  Locals at the dawn of the twentieth century knew this little patch as the laurel bank.

The rear boundary line of the groups of villa houses in Clarence Road did not permit much development space for access in Hatfield Road.  Hence the first side road was very short, a mere nine homes altogether of which four were allowed for on the west side.  It was named Laurel Road because of undergrowth shrubbery of laurels, and this had to be cleared to allow sufficient space for the homes on the west side of the road.

In 1900 there was Woodstock Road (no north or south) beginning at  Sandpit Lane all the way in a straight line to the brand-new Brampton Road.  Then there was Thomas Smith who had laid out a short road for his employees from Hatfield Road to the boundary of the field he owned; this road he named Tess Road (after his own initials).  His field ended where a footpath followed the hedge line; today this footpath is still extant and survives as an alleyway behind nearby houses.  The gap between was a small field which became quickly developed, the linking road being named Princes Road in recognition of the Duke of York's children, Edward, David (to become George VI), Henry, George, and later, John.

These three separate, and separately numbered roads, remained as such until 1948, when Tess Road and Princes Road were combined as Woodstock Road South to follow a single numbering sequence, leaving the significantly longer Woodstock Road to be renamed Woodstock Road North.  At least we know why the suffixes North and South appeared on the street plates, while Princes Road came straight out of the local history books.

Finally in this sequence, the story begins with Wormleighton Road, which looked ok on the developer's map, and provided appropriate acknowledgement to the land owner whose historic family had lived at the early medieval manorial estate of Wormleighton.  Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, the name did not remain popular enough and for long enough for the residents who eventually moved in, though Wormleighton did survive one published version of the Ordnance Survey maps, partly, we suspect because it took so long the open up development along Upper Clarence Road.

We can only suggest that the reason for such a change of mind came because residents of these expensive early homes took a dislike to the name – as a word but not necessarily for its historical context.  Nor are we aware of whose decision it was to steer the name away from the medieval and closer to the more popular; and to be fair the original and the replacement proposal both contained the same number of letters (deliberate or accidental?).  The well-known artist Thomas Gainsborough's death was less than 150 years before a road dedicated to his memory, so more modern than medieval, then!  And the connection? Gainsborough was well revered in the Spencer family.  After all, the reputable artist had produced what was evidently a stunning portrait of the first Earl Spencer.  Naturally, given Spencer's renown in St Albans this was the ideal opportunity to recognise the connection between the medieval Wormleighton and Georgian artistry of Thomas Gainsborough.