Street Plates 12

 And so we come to the final post in this series of monthly articles about the backgrounds of a number of east end street names and why they were so called – or were probably named.  For the most part I can be certain, but occasionally – as you will read in this post – there has been a certain amount of guess-work, and if readers have an alternative view do let me know.

Many decades passed in the twentieth century with estates and other development areas only partly complete.  Temporary usage was made of dormant land – temporary buildings, allotment gardens, stock-piling ground and, in the years before mains drainage, the dumping of the contents of cess pits  A business partnership trading in Fleetville for over fifty years, Frank Sear and Thomas Carter, ran a nursery and florist, from premises adjacent to St Paul's Church, now called St Paul's Place.  

Sear & Carter's florist shop; behind were several glasshouses.  Today the whole is the
location of St Paul's Place.

Houses today line the Salisbury Avenue junction with Garden Close.

Sear and Carter carried out extensive trials on temporarily acquired land in and around Fleetville, one of these sites being between Woodstock Road north and Beaumont Avenue & Salisbury Avenue. There, shrubs and other garden plants were grown on.  The company also undertook contract work on behalf of residents, businesses and the city council.  The site opened onto the road adjacent to where Gleave Close is today.  At the other end, access was gained from Salisbury Avenue.  The business transferred from Hatfield Road in 1960 to their country trial ground and nursery at Smallford, a site long since occupied by Notcutt's Garden Centre. The small trial sites had closed and were sold for development, including the Woodstock Road trial ground, where the Beaumont Avenue access road became Garden Close; a rather appropriate name considering the location's previous usage.

Take a walk along the short closes which make up much of today's Jersey Farm and you may come across Cromwell Close.  This is yet another road which had been named by its developer after a London link.  Many of the others took their references from squares in the Capital, but, apart from Cromwell Road there appears to be only one more, Cromwell Crescent – but not a Square.  Perhaps it is not a London connection we should be looking for, but a reference to the 1640's Civil War.  Oliver Cromwell was a Parliamentarian; St Albans was mainly Parliamentarian in approach, and the town was a major collecting centre for Parliamentary forces during this period.  Thomas Cromwell also had connections with nearby Beaumonts.

Above and top: junctions of Lincoln's Close and Cromwell Close and their connecting
roads.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREET VIEW

Nearby another road is named Lincoln's Close.  Lincoln was also a frontier town during the Civil War and also became a Parliamentary collection point at this turbulent time, and so could be considered to have an appropriate connection with St Albans.  However, an intriguing twist is the styling of the name, for it is called Lincoln's Close (inviting the comical riposte, "Is it? are you sure?)  So this is the first of today's uncertain explanations.  It is therefore left for readers to help clarify the road name's origin.

In the late 19th century an apparently rather unattractive and damp  track linked the foot of Camp Hill and the boundary track of Beaumonts Farm, now known as Sutton Road. It traversed two fields traditionally managed for dairying.  A builder who had developed a number of homes in St Albans was Ernest Stevens, acquired what was known as the Twelve Acre Estate, essentially these two fields, in the early 1930s.  Several building companies were beginning to assemble packets of land for selling plots and arranging for purchasers to build their own homes, or acquiring houses which the developing companies had constructed in a limited number of designs.  Ernest Stevens was aware that this would leave out aspiring residents who were unable to afford this method of obtaining their own home.  Stevens therefore, laid out his houses, retaining the ownership and making them available for rent at the lowest practical level.  The main through road took its name from the Camp Hill end, then named The Camp Fields, and so became Campfield Road.  A cul-de-sac he named Valerie Close and a road linking Camp Road he named Roland Street.

Above and top: Valerie Close at its junction with Campfield Road, and Roland Street
at its junction with Camp Road.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREETVIEW

Thus far all was straight-forward, and we assume that the names Valerie and Roland, having been selected by Stevens himself, were two family members.  So here is my second assumption of the day, because I cannot be sure.  If a blog reader can assist we will, I am sure, be delighted.

In most cases a street name consists of a root and a suffix, the latter being the name, Road, Drive, Crescent, Green, Square and so on. So, in this case we have a road named Dymoke Green, but searching for a suffix is quite unnecessary.  Charles Green, or to give him his full name, Charles Dymoke Green, had been the owner of Oaklands Mansion, but on marriage into the Marten family became a constituent and final generation member living in Marshalswick House.  We'll leave aside his early occupation as a distiller; for us in Hertfordshire it was his role in establishing the methodology for a new youth organisation, the brainwave of Baden Powell, and brought to life in 1908.  The Scouts, as the organisation came to be known, came alive first in Hertfordshire, one of the first adopting counties, thanks to Green's ideas, working with his own sons and with Powell.  Indeed some of the earliest outdoor activities were trialled within the grounds – his own "back garden", as it were – of Marshals Wick House.

An early outdoor activity in the grounds of Marshals Wick House.
COURTESY HERTFORDSHIRE SCOUTS

When St Albans City Council developed a residential estate adjacent to Marshalswick Lane in the 1950s, it decided to recognise the spirit, experience and creativity of Charles Dymoke Green and his family.  Rather than labelling it Dymoke Green Close or Dymoke Green Drive, the name was left to stand on its own as Dymoke Green.

The name Thomas Edison, the international inventor of electrical, well, electrical anything, is not expected to be closely associated with St Albans.  After all, he spent all of his life in his birth country, the United States.  But his reputation and inventiveness could be claimed universally,

At the turn of the twentieth century the young local authorities possessed equally proud young ambitions, especially in health and welfare, and so there was a steady growth in the development of  civic buildings including hospitals. Many authorities sought to work with specialist architects of the day and to become or employ the inventors of ideas to run successfully these new institutions.

A surviving ward block of the former Hill End Hospital.

As a result, land was acquired at Hill End and farms were purchased.  Aspiring architects sought to bring ambitious electric lighting to Hill End  They ensured that the new complex installation would be built into the hospital buildings as they came out of the ground.  Not only would this be the most efficient methodology, it would be cheaper and less time-consuming.  Hill End was proud of its new installation and was even more proud to announce it was fully supported by Thomas Edison whose name and reputation was already internationally known.

Highfield today therefore has two roads who side-by-side have earned recognition in this corner of our district.  Thomas Edison is one; the other being Alexander Graham Bell (Bell View).  Not coincidentally, both men and their roads are within a stone's throw of a post World War Two company, Marconi Instruments, who would, as well, have honoured them.