Roll Them Out

 It is unusual to re-tell the account of a blog post from years back – in this case twelve years.  Indeed you could say it is quite unnecessary given that blogs have their own timelines and/or indexes to enable its readers to return at ease to any post since 2012 in the same way you would open a favourite book at a favourite chapter.

In this case I have returned to 14th July 2013 and a post titled Keeping it Central.  Not only was this a phrase of exasperation frequently used by a dear friend of mine whenever committee meetings had a tendency to wander – as in "Can we please keep this meeting central" i.e. to the point.  But the title of the post in question Keeping it Central referred to the name of a school, opened in Hatfield Road in 1931.  Named Central School; still there but now after several name changes is identified as Fleetville Junior School.

Students from Central School for girls at their premises in Victoria Street in 1921. 

As a girls school it had begun in the early 1920s in shared accommodation in Victoria Street.  Having the opportunity to move to a modern structure in 1931 you might have thought a new name would have been selected, but the identification for the new building remained Central School, which generated some conversations at the time since the establishment was no longer central to St Albans.  It  did still retain selected girls from across the city for their continuing education when most 13 year olds would have left school.  So it remained a central site in that respect.

The focus of the original post was the first photograph taken in that opening year; serried rows of all children and staff.   Ten years earlier there had been a tenth of that number, and as with any number of class photographs, sometimes with a few recalled names on the back, and still referred to in conversations by grown-up children and grand-children.  As I wrote in 2013 about another revealing style which became popular:

"I am referring to those panorama pictures.  Not easy to handle once you get the photo in your hands.  It often ends up permanently rolled  into a scroll and deposited in a remote cupboard."

That virtually guarantees that the image's subjects will fail to see the light of day, and that the prospect of those names of remembered friends will not be recorded because of the inconvenience of annotating the strip of uniformed faces in tidied rows surrounding the head teacher and teachers.  One suspects such photos were often  arranged to satisfy the ego of the head teacher who, of course, sat at the centre of all he/she controlled.

The five segments of Central's 1931 school photo roll (with overlaps to avoid half-faces) are reproduced in www.stalbansowneastend.org.uk 

If you have not previously explored this website - a partner of this blog - among the topics covered is a section on schools which are  embedded in the east end of St Albans.  Here you will find dozens of class and group photos, thankfully with names recorded in many cases, supplied by their donors.  Of course blog readers have also supplied additional friends or relatives via their comments ("my grandpa's in the third row").  And as a result of a little mis-remembering the occasional correction has been received.  

The site reveals 143 images from the following schools: Fleetville, Verulam, Camp, Francis Bacon (now Samuel Ryder), Skyswood, Oakwood, Central, Marshalswick (now Sandringham), Beaumont, Windermere, Colney Heath, Cunningham, Ss Alban & Stephen, and Wheatfields.

When it comes to the names of people we once knew, we are aware that distance from the event is not our friend, and we are better recording names while we are able; it also assists others struggling to recall the same faces.  If you have an image to share and/or add the names of former pupils you can see, please use the website's email address: saoee@me.com

Minus thirty

 St Albans has grown outwards in all directions, but none more so than in an easterly direction.  Comparing the town as it was in 1835, expansion was deemed essential in 1879, and then again in 1913. and further still in the 1930s.  It made little difference when the Borough and the Rural District were merged in 1974.  The ground area of St Albans has continued to grow.  Of course, not all of the land within new boundaries was built on, although it was population growth which prompted the legal process for what used to be called "taking in" more swathes of the countryside beyond the existing boundaries.

St Albans in 1835; boundary in red.  Mile House and Cunningham are both safely beyond the
town boundary, not being built over for a further hundred years.

While expansion occurred on many of the boundaries – and presumably will continue to do so – this blog is primarily interested in what happens in the eastern districts; after all, that is why our title is St Albans' Own East End.

There have always been a variety of reasons for land not being built over – service uses such as reservoirs, sewerage plants, factories, transport such as road alterations – but by far the greatest acreage has been converted to housing.  During the past month alone announcements made in the press have identified plans for three major residential developments totalling several thousand homes.  Most of these will come from what had until recently been active agricultural sites.  It seems to be an inevitability that the sale price of homes in and around our district will only stabilise once the balance between supply of housing stock exceeds its overall requirement.  It is easy to state the obvious: to construct an appropriate number more homes requires us to buy up and build on farmland and woodland, and that always appears to have been the case.

But what has that actually meant? Since 1900, when the City of St Albans began actively discussing a further movement of the eastern boundary outwards along Hatfield Road from Albion Road (which it had only reached in 1879) all the way to the modest Winches Farm, and finally determined by 1913.

Since 1900 our East End has lost over thirty farming units; mostly complete farms although included were a number of fields owned by landowners whose main centres were in other parts of the district.  And the total does depend on where we choose to draw the informal boundary of "our East End".

Beastneys Farm at the eastern end of Camp Road.  It became part of Hill End Hospital from
1899, yet some of its acres continued to be farmed on an organised scale even down to
the 1930s.

St Peter's Farm, which became Clarence Park and estates between Brampton and Hatfield roads all the way to Harlesden Road, was among the first in 1899. Dell Farm, an outlier unit of Heath Farm, had lost viable land in company with St Peter's Farm and others in c1860 when the Midland Railway was laid.  When Marshals Wick House and its estate was sold in 1927 a substantial swathe between Sandpit Lane and Marshals Drive was built on.  As was Ninefields, land belonging to the Spencer estate.

Cunningham Hill Farm, in the middle of the Camp district, is surrounded by the 
London Road estate (Mile House district).  Many of the farm homesteads survive.

The diminutive Newgates Farm survived until mid-century on the north side Sandpit Lane, but was added to the extensive developments at Marshalswick on the home units of the Marten family at Marshalswick Farm and Dellfield Sandridge Road; then there was the more recent Jersey Farm, and only the more distant Nashe (Nash) in this group has survived.  Oak Farm has survived but much of Beech Farm was, is and may continue to be used to provide the region with gravel.

The above mentioned Winches, though small, was subsumed by homes and shops in the growing location of Oaklands, whose mansion and its later College has continued to lose Oaklands Farm and Beaumonts Farm, the latter whose fields began to be nibbled from 1899 behind the north side of Hatfield Road, while Hill End Farm provided homes and a huge hospital.

Here is a farm, and its homestead, along Coopers Green Lane.  Oak Farm was the site of
Hertfordshire County Show in 1954 and is fortunate not to have been built over.

The designation of Hatfield as a postwar New Town encroached on the farms close to former Bishops Hatfield, over-spilling into the further-most land of the parish of St Peter.  So, to continue where we left off, Popefield Farm was just one of the farming units which gave way to an airfield, then an aircraft making factory, and a recent conversion to university, residential student and business zone, also absorbing Harpsfield Farm.  On the south side of Hatfield Road Wilkins Green Farm fortunately retains open ground, still resisting some development, partly as a result of the 1944 Greater London Plan (Sir Patrick Abercrombie) to retain the rural gap between St Albans and the future planned New Town.  However, the former Great Nast Hyde Farm closed and its fields grew homes, university accommodation and car parking.  Meanwhile Little Nast Hyde Farm has not been lost.

Little Cell Barnes Farm.  Now a part of the London Road estate near the eastern side of Drakes
Drive, it includes both community and business activity.

Further farms on the historical list include the pair of units Roe Green Farms north and south, Roehyde Farm, Redhouse Farm, Hollybush Farm and Smallford Farm.  Nearer to St Albans the demand for houses, work places and retail has intensified on Newhouse Park Farm, Great Cell Barnes Farm, Little Cell Barnes Farm, Beastneys Farm, Little Hill End Farm, Cunningham Hill Farm. The post-war London Road estate, partly for London re-housing, benefited by the closure of three of the farms, and a number of fill-in plots such as the former Sander's Nursery, endless corner sites and the Gaol Field, which in the early thirties produced the Breakspear estate.

It is a rare opportunity to witness the demolition of a former farm homestead, here at
Butterwick.  Following a life winning gravel from the ground it still cannot be given a
future lease of life having been used for waste filling once the gravel had gone.

If there is a farm you don't see above it may remain a producing unit, even if it is temporary grazing.  Or perhaps I have just accidentally  missed it out!  Nevertheless, the fact that we have managed to lose this number of farms must have something to do with the gradual increase in agricultural efficiency across the nation.  Fortunately, if many of the above former farm names (in bold) are familiar to you it will probably be because of the survival in thriving estate names, streets and public buildings.  Perhaps in former times as public house names.

The process of enlargement around St Albans continues.

Grid Plan

 

The Beaumonts estate road layout as originally proposed.

The Beaumonts Farm estate in its present form.
COURTESY STREET MAP CONTRIBUTORS

Preparation is underway to update the content of a number of website pages – www.stalbansowneastend.org.uk – one of which is Beaumonts. A number of readers have conjectured on the road layout designed for the estate in the late 1920s. The remainder of the Farm formerly in the care of the Kinder trustees and subsequently taken over by Oaklands estates, was acquired for onward development by Watford Land, and it was the latter which was responsible for the layout of the dormant and temporary fallow fields for new housing in 1929.

The Avenue as a gated private lane; the scene from the northern Sandpit Lane end.
COURTESY ST ALBANS MUSEUMS

Beaumont Avenue as a modern public highway.

Today the layout pattern would be very different with perhaps a single through road and a number of short stubs with no satisfactory  description to explain the pattern.  Perhaps such layouts are described as "informal".  But in the early twentieth century developers were determined to keep to the simpler and more efficient grid methodology, and so it was that Beaumonts Farm estate followed the same formal pattern.  So we should ask the question, was the grid just a grid, or was there a reason for the outcome distances between the north-south and west-east highways within the grid?

The original lane to the farm house, originally intended to be metalled and named Central
Drive.  Now a private section of road and named Farm Road.

In other words, was there a pre-existing series of land features or structures available to guide the planners?  Let's begin with Beaumont Avenue, the ancient trackway between Sandpit Lane and Hatfield Road with just one connecting road – the historic farm driveway to the former manor and farm homestead.  The first line on the development plan would therefore have been the west/east Central Drive (although the first part of this road remained unconnected and was later transferred as a private road  as Farm Road when attempts were made to complete the development after the Second World War. Central Drive extended eastwards and would have terminated close to Beaumonts Wood had the land not been purchased c1934 for educational use.  Nevertheless a trackway already followed this line and a water pipeline laid beside it which carried water to the farmhouse from the pumped water supply at Oaklands.

One of the north-south grid roads, Woodland Drive north, typical of the estate's layout.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREET VIEW

There was also a pre-existing track from near the junction of Beaumont Avenue with Hatfield Road, and Sandpit Lane.   This was historically a key pedestrian access to the iron house and gave convenient access to the farm homestead as an alternative to the Beaumont Avenue private roadway until the early twentieth century, an alternative public road was built and named Beechwood Avenue. Straighter than the trackway it became its direct replacement.

There are two reasons why a third line was pencilled onto the plan   and became Woodland Drive.  The north end had also pre-existed as a trackway from the farm drive (Central Drive) to enable farm vehicles, pedestrians, animals to the farmhouse garden and well, the barns surrounding the farm yard, and access to a house and storage building north-west of the farm.

Woodland Drive extends from top to bottom and Central Drive crosses from
left to right.  The former moat, coloured blue, was built over roadways and
gardens – with one exception, which the author is unable to explain!

There were also two even better reasons for extending the proposed Woodland Drive southwards of Central Drive, for this was the location of the former moat surrounding the first manor house, the water being fed from a spring nearer to (Elm Drive).  It would have been essential to avoid house construction on the moat itself and on the former surface stream.  Woodland Drive would therefore have been laid out as a single straight line from Elm Drive to Chestnut Drive.

Chestnut Drive itself was also laid on a pre-existing track to service the storage Nissen building which remained on the corner with Beechwood Avenue thoughout the 1950s, having been taken over by T&B Builders until their contracts were complete.

A second road to match Beechwood Avenue and also link Hatfield Road with Sandpit Lane, was Oakwood Drive.  The latter reached Central Drive, but war intervened and the onward section to Sandpit Lane was cancelled – which also meant Chestnut Drive was no longer to be a through road and was curtailed after Hazelwood Drive.

The location of Elm Drive was to avoid too many junctions between the estate and Hatfield Road.

A further road, proposed but not added to the grid, would have been parallel to Oakwood Drive and connected with an extension to Elm Drive on the south,  Central Drive in the middle and Chestnut Drive in the north.  The Elm and Chestnut extensions would also have had an arc of homes outside their sections of the grid.  This abortion was removed entirely from the programme,  resulting from the County Council's acquisition of land for Beaumont Schools, a future primary school and playing fields for what was The Boys' Grammar School (now Verulam).  The latter might instead have been for senior schools for the proposed Marshalswick housing development.  But that's another story!

So, in the case of Beaumonts estate, it may just have been laid out in a simple grid,  but each of the contributory elements appeared to have a specific reason for being exactly where they are.

The only other adjustment, necessary in the mid forties, resulted from the St Albans City Council buying the thus-far unbuilt plots from the former Watford Land and adjusting the Hazelwood Drive (north) layout to provide public open space under new Town and Country regulations.  There had been no provision for public open space, so open space was provided.  Public open space which would preclude informal ball games, that is!

The post-war road re-design of Hazelwood Drive north by St Albans City Council, which included
public open space.