8 Obstacles in the Road part 2

 RESCUE MISSION 8

Obstacles in the Road 2

Last month I featured a church, St Pauls, which began as a temporary building,  then moved on, while the permanent building in Blandford Road was made permanent and grew in size.  I then extended the survey to other buildings of various sizes which remained temporary structures and on the whole had extensive lives.

This month I am searching for temporary structures which necessarily retained short lives because they had been built for temporary war time usage and were intended to defend routes across country especially on the approaches to towns and cities, and were manned by the Civil Defence in the form of the Home Guard, also known as "Dads' Army".

We will follow Hatfield Road as an example from the junction at Smallford crossroads – as it was then.  On the St Albans side of the junction was a series of concrete road blocks; most were large blocks of concrete which which blocked much of the road width and concrete pillars for protecting the footpath space while still permitting pedestrians to pass.  A shelter of some kind, perhaps a concrete pill box, housing a gun emplacement preventing enemy passage onto the road towards St Albans.

We are left, we think, with no photographic evidence of this installation, but we do have a brief description that the emplacement also protected  large water and oil tanks for the purpose of supplying Nielson's nurseries which lay alongside Station Road.

A road block prevented access from Hatfield Road over the original Ashley Road railway bridge and along Hedley Road.

At Crown Corner, a complex and strategic road block arrangement was set up on Hatfield Road east of Cavendish Road, across Granville Road, across Clarence Park Road and opposite the cinema in Stanhope Road.  But oddly the top of Camp Road did not appear to have been protected.  This complex was manned by a detachment whose base was inside The Crown Public House, which was most convenient.

A similar blockage protected St Peter's Street and Catherine Street, where the duties were based at The Blacksmith's Arms Public House.

Although we have no evidence of manned road blockages at Beaumont Avenue/Beechwood Avenue and at Sutton Road, there were police telephones at these two locations and references to a box at these locations.  Blocks would have been removed promptly at the end of the war or even before it, and deposited at one or more locations unknown.

You may find yourself sitting on or leaning against a concrete block.  I regularly passed
a former block with short lengths of rail poke out from the top and sides.  Not defended for
85 years.  They can still be located if we know where to look.

During the lifetimes of the installations no photographs appear to have been taken, but not because it would have been for security reasons impossible, because such photos were taken at other locations; but presumably no-one thought to do so. Newspapers would have been prohibited from publishing such images, and in any case space for text would have been considered far more important than for photographs when both ink and paper were in short supply.

Road blocks would also have been removed as soon as practically possible and to relieve the Home Guard which was disbanded during 1944.  Opportunities for taking a photograph were therefore not there for the taking, and I doubt whether most people owning cameras when film stocks were in short supply would have thought of clicking a road block "for history's sake" or "for the archives".

But the odd concrete block is occasionally located in a hedgerow or near a field gate, simply because it is still useful.  That does not, however, mean no photographs of local road blocks were taken and still survive.