Spring and summer exhibitions

We get the occasional exhibition devoted to the east end of St Albans; and Fleetville Diaries has annually presented an exhibition as part of its programme.

2014 is different, in that at least three exhibitions may be expected, and all are of fascinating general interest to residents.  While none is yet far advanced, the author is involved in curating all three and so is able to provide readers of this blog with an introduction to what might be expected.

The first to air will be CAMP ROAD by Fleetville Diaries.  This 16-panel display reveals the history of development along what once called Camp Lane, from Camp Hill to Ashley Road.  Beginning with the little community at the top of Camp Hill, it also reveals the difficulties horses encountered, the alternative route, and how it was possible to avoid paying the toll on the Turnpike (Hatfield Road).  The estates on either side of the road grew slowly and the shops came and went.  Of course, allotments flourished in their hundreds, some of them between the houses; and way out east, the lane was eventually intersected by the ring road.  Nearly fifty photos are included, including one of a horse in a trench, and the arrival of the Rubber Works (currently Dexter Close).  It is displayed at Fleetville Festival on Sunday 23rd March at St Paul's, and Larks in the Parks at Fleetville Rec on Sunday 29th June.  There will be other dates, still to be announced.

Kingshill Avenue, Marshalswick © Mike Neighbour

The people of St Leonard's Parish Church are presenting an exhibition celebrating the 900th anniversary of the formation of the parish, formerly part of St Peter's.  The exhibition, THE STORY OF A PARISH, will open at the Museum of St Albans on Friday 25th April for a period of one month.  In addition to telling the story of the parish church, there are sections on the village of Sandridge, its people and occupations over a long period of time;  an explanation of what came to be known as Sandridge New Town, based on the daughter parish of St Saviour; and the thriving and energetic residential estates of Marshalswick and Jersey Farm, together with their daughter church of St Mary.

Difficult-to-reach Smallford Station © Mike Neighbour

Finally, a project, previously mentioned in these blogs: SMALLFORD, THE STORY OF A COMMUNITY AND ITS STATION.  Since preparations are still at a formative stage the title is provisional.  The project group has been meeting regularly at the University, and between times, has carried out wide-ranging research.  The exhibition is part of a longer project related to the renovation of the still-extant Smallford Station.  So, the exhibition will relate the story of the hamlet itself, and its satellites; the construction of the railway between Hatfield and St Albans; the impact of the railway; economic activity which was attracted to the line side; Smallford Station itself; and the goods which were moved along the tracks.  The Smallford Project is an excellent example of collaboration between enthusiastic people with a variety of skills and interests.  The exhibition is slated for sometime this summer, but no further details are yet available.

Here are, therefore, at least three events for you to pencil into your diaries for 2014.

Fill it up

The newest location where you can replenish your tank of petrol is probably Morrison's, and that has been around for some years now.  The oldest still in operation is the Shell filling station at Smallford, begun as an independent by Ralph Pinnock in the early 1930s.  As we will discover below, the number of locations at which we can "fill up" has fallen significantly in the last decade, and if evidence from our east end is anything to go by, the numbers peaked in the post-war years up to c1970.

It seems there are three criteria for survival.  Location, not only along a major road but in a position to be noticed, aided of course by bright and colourful canopies and signs; second, large sites which can accommodate several pumps and the ability to get waiting motorists off the road; those large sites are also expected to serve more than petrol, of course.  Shops for groceries and other general purpose goods are a must.  Third, the retailer's profit on a gallon (or litre) of fuel is counted in a small number of pennies, so a large through-put and ancillary services are important, to keep a business bouyant.

It may be a shame sometimes not to have an attendant on hand to serve us, and perhaps clean the windscreen.  Those were the days.

Part of Grimaldi's Garage photographed in 1964.
Courtesy MoSTA

From the earliest days of motoring Hatfield Road, Fleetville, sported four filling stations on the south side of the road.  First was Mr Tuck (near the Rats' Castle), who would fill you up on the road, by swinging the delivery hose over the pavement.  Then, where Kwik-Fit is now, was A Hobbs who had a couple of pumps by the edge of the pavement.  Further still was Mr Grimaldi, who had the largest and most modern site in the fifties.  Two glazed sculptured pumps stood at the drive-ins, lit internally by night with white, green and blue fluorescent tubes.  Magnet and Topps Tiles are here now.  Finally,  Robb Butler dispensed petrol from a small square site, now houses, at the junction with Cavendish Road.

Pinnock's Garage at Smallford in c1930, operating from a
wooden shed.  Courtesy ANDY LAWRENCE

From  the mid-sixties two filling stations opened opposite each other.  One partly replacing Tuck's and run by the Co-op (now replaced by two blocks of flats), and the other which pre-war had been Currell's Garage, and opened on an enlarged site, the only station on the north side of the road.  Until recently, Milcars had operated from here.

Much has changed today, but the Smallford site is still
a petrol filling station.

Away from Hatfield Road, when The Quadrant first opened the key double unit in the centre was acquired by Mr Cockram, and became Marshalswick Motor Company.  When the corner site in Marshalswick Lane became available, he built a much larger showroom, enabling Bishops Stores to expand in the parade.  By 1966, he sold the business, presumably for a healthy profit.  The purchaser was Gerald Ronson's Heron company, which opened large numbers of filling stations under the family Heron name.  The original Cockram building no longer exists, but it is a highly successful Sainsbury's Local petrol and shop business, trading very much in the Heron mould, relying on high through-put to keep the price of fuel at the low end of the market.

A hundred years ago

Following several years of debate,  even bickering, by members of the City Council of the time, late in 1913 the city's boundary was moved outwards, particularly to the east.  From 1879 the limit was at what later became known as The Crown.  The added areas would now take it as far as Newgates, Winches and Hill End.  It was at one of these council meetings that Cllr Ernest Townson used the phrase "down in St Albans' own east end" to describe the rather chaotic assemblage of miscellaneous buildings in unfinished muddy and unlit roads in the Fleetville and Camp districts.

So, when the good folks of St Albans' own east end woke up on January 1st 1914, were their lives any different as a result of the change of concil?  Probably not.  Although undoubtedly building in their minds a vision of the future, they will have envied the residents within the old limits for the piped drainage system and sewage farm which had improved  their health prospects and made life more convenient for over 10,000 city people.  But if the eastenders hoped they would get 'some of the same' they would have a great deal of time to wait.

Hatfield Road was certainly improved, kerbed and drained, and with a pavement for most of the way, at least on the north side.  The number of shops being converted from the houses and cottages which lined that side, was slowly increasing.  T E Smith's printing works had just experienced its most successful trading year yet, and small workshops gave a few more people some useful employment.  Commuter housing spread on the western roads. The electricity generating station recently completed was able to sell energy for lighting a few homes, and the odd street lamp.  And the recently completed St Paul's parish church energetically pursued it mission in Fleetville.

Card from New York Christmas 1913.
Courtesy HALFWAY BROOK

However, two issues held the east end back from the improvements desperately needed.  Transfer from St Peter Rural Council to St Albans City Council meant an significant increase in the rates payable by home owners.  Since most Camp and Fleetville homes were rented, the landlords passed on some of the increase they bore onto the rents of their tenants – if they could without losing those tenants – reclaiming the rest by not making improvements to those same tenants' homes, by not negotiating with the electricity company for cables to be laid to supply houses, and not having the roads made up and lit.  All made more complicated by the complexity of having many absentee owners in a given street.

The greatest impact of all, would not become obvious until the autumn of 1914, when young men were exhorted to volunteer to join the yeomanry and infantry in what became known as the Great War.  Any hopes locals may have had for an improved local area and better opportunities were placed on hold for at least a decade.  The next few years would be grim for most families.  The year which may have dawned with great hope would certainly end with increasing gloom.

One hundred years later, here's wishing you all a happy new year for 2014.

Hello Marshalswick and Jersey Farm

Long forgotten in the mists of time, the parish of St Peter encompassed the village of Sandridge and surrounding farms, and that included Marshalswick and Jersey Farm; in fact, everything north-east of Sandpit Lane.  St Peter was a vast parish, and clearly too huge to effectively manage.

The spire of St Mary's
Parish Church

Which is why c1114, nine hundred years ago, a new parish was created.  The former modest chapel became the new parish church of St Leonard, Sandridge.  St Leonard's continued to minister to the needs of everyone north-east of Sandpit Lane until residential development on a large scale became evident on Marshalswick Farm, adding to what was already partly complete at old Marshalswick.  Later this would include Jersey Farm.  A daughter parish was created based on St Mary's Church.

In 2014 the significant anniversary of 900 (whether or not it is precise to the year) will be celebrated under the banner of Sandridge 900+.

Among the events planned is an exhibition to be held in May at the Museum of St Albans, following the life of the parish over 900 years.  Part of our brief is to celebrate the role played by the former Marshalls Wick House, for part of which time the home of the Marten family.

The only photo known of the unmade Marshalswick Lane.

More than that, the creation of the residential estates of old Marshalswick (on the old House estate grounds); new Marshalswick (on the former Marshalswick Farm); and Jersey Farm, will feature boldly.

To that end we are searching for a number of new photographs of the new districts from their beginnings to recent times.  Please do search through your shoeboxes and albums, especially for the unfinished estates in the 1950s and 1960s – or even in pre-WW2 days.   It would be great to see once more lanes, field gates and ponds which no longer exist; even pictures of the former farm homesteads.  Maybe your own home as it was being built or in the early days family members trying to tame the garden.  At school, concert performances, parents contributions to building a small swimming pool or garden.  If photos need to be scanned we will willingly do so; you only need to be willing to share them with others!

If you have programmes or other documents related to community events, to school happenings, sports teams, early meetings pressing for the youth club and community centre, meetings about bus services or phone boxes, do please consider sharing them.

We still have not identified this family
or where the Marshalswick area picnic
was.  A still from a 1950s home movie.

Finally, if you are able to relate recollections of moving to and living in this district of St Albans and can jot down a few notes, emailing them to Mike at saoee@me.com



, we would like to include as much as can be collected in the exhibition.

From next week there will be a new page on the website St Albans Own East End, devoted to Marshalswick and Jersey Farm, including any new material which is sent in.

So, let's get searching and remembering ...

Fire, fire!

The work currently in hand to bring to life, once more, the photos which had previously appeared in the Herts Advertiser, has reached the 1920s.  Anyone needing to read, for research, issues from that time can only do so via the microfilm reels at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) or St Albans Central Library.  While it is possible to read the stories themselves, the photographs which accompany them are extremely dense or appear as black rectangles.

The houses behind are those in Hill End Lane, near its
junction with Colney Heath Lane.  HERTS ADVERTISER

The re-photographing project has enabled the original pictures, as printed, to be restored.  In reaching December 1928, the story of a serious fire at a brickworks was published.  Separately, on the back page, were two photos, now clearly revealed, of the devastation the conflagration caused.

There were two brickworks in close proximity.  One belonged to Owen's, a Wheathampstead company, on a site now occupied by an industrial estate in Ashley Road.  The other, a smaller business, fronted on to Hill End Lane, near the former railway branch line crossing at the double bend in the lane; and was known as the Hill End Brickworks.

Both were created to supplied bricks for local building needs, but the smaller yard was not profitable and was taken over by Owen's in the early 1920s, although its original name was retained.

In the knowledge that small ventures such as these have a limited life, many of its buildings were of timber construction.  Given that fires were also required nearby for the kilns, there must always have been a risk to the temporary buildings on the site.

The photos demonstrate how complete the destruction was.
HERTS ADVERTISER

The site then appeared to remain derelict for some time, and a former resident recalls, as a child, walking from Hixberry Lane, across the railway crossing and taking a path skirting around the old buildings to Hatfield Road.  The path would have followed the route we now know as Longacres; and when redeveloped it became the site of Marconi Instruments Ltd.  Now that further redevelopment has taken place, the houses of Marconi Way occupy this space between Fleetville and Oaklands.

There is one conundrum to the brickworks fire.  The report indicates that hoses were laid from a hydrant in Hatfield Road, across a back garden on that road, and across the railway.  But the railway track is beyond this brickworks site, although the Owen's brickworks are, from Hatfield Road, beyond the tracks.  Did the newspaper reporter muddle his facts.  Surely the fire engine did attend the correct site!  So, where did the description of laying hoses across the railway come from, unless the supply was taken from the Hospital instead of, or as well as, Hatfield Road.

What shall we do about Hatfield Road?

We can only imagine what Hatfield Road was like in the seventeenth century, but by the mid-eighteenth sufficient angst had built up to warrant improvements by making it a toll road.  Unfortunately, tolls there were but how much improvement was made to the highway cannot be ascertained as detailed accounts from 1868 to 1881 no longer exist.

Then came the early local authority period.  Still a narrow road with passing places.  Some of that narrowness exists today near the Crown.  The road was subsequently widened to become the double-lane size it still is today; although still unmade until the teen years of the twentieth century.

As the number of motor vehicles increased, and in recognition of it being a shopping street with direct access to the city centre, the thirties brought some welcome relief when the bypass road from Roe Green to the Watford road encouraged traffic with no business in St Albans to miss it out altogether.

At Smallford some further widening took place, and the bend at the rec was shaved to provide a better sightline.  Otherwise, the road today is the same as it was in the 1960s.  It is not that there was no ambition on the part of the County Council.  Two proposals from that time may linger in some people's memories.  The first, and most radical, was to bulldoze the "straggle of shops" out of existence, replacing them with clusters of shops and residences further from the road.

The second was to make the street into a local road, and divert through traffic on its own mini bypass as a dual carriageway on the route of the former branch railway between Camp Road and Smallford.  The report did not state whether there would be access junctions at, say Sutton Road, Ashley Road and Hill End; nor did it acknowledge that a four lane highway is rather wider than the railway, even though there was sufficient width for two tracks.

Neither of these schemes, as we know, went anywhere, and since then a further fifty years have passed with its inexorable increase in traffic and parking demand.  But at least Morrison's has provided some additional parking.  What is surprising is that, as new buildings have sprung up on the south side through Fleetville, no allowance was made in the planning applications for future widening.  And at the worst section of all, no additional lane was provided for buses outside Morrison's.  What were the authorities (not) thinking of?

Smallford, towards Hatfield.  The tollhouse on the left (where the paddock
is today), with the Four Horseshoes beyond.  On the right, the cottages are
no more.  But the road IS wider.

Whose error?

Last week I posted details of some confusion over a field at Beaumonts Farm which the farmer, Mr William Moores, had been instructed to plough up near the end of WW1.  I will not repeat the details here, since the blog entry can be referred to directly.

During the course of the week I took the opportunity to view the original file of documents – mainly copies of letters between the County War Agricultural Committee and Mr Moores.  As a result I have to make a couple of corrections.  One of the errors was, regrettably, mine!  I had understood the name Fleetville Field to mean a specific field.  In fact the email I received referred to "a Fleetville Field"; not the same thing at all!  So Home Meadow, between Beaumont Avenue and the present Beechwood Avenue south of Farm Road, was probably still named as such; and we can ignore all references to the Grammar School Field next to Hatfield Road Cemetery.

But there was some incompetence on the part of the Committee.  There was, in the end, only one instruction: to plough up one field.  The Committee knew which one, since someone had presumably made a field inspection, but they just couldn't get it right when corresponding with Mr Moores.

The first letter from the Committee detailed the pair of field numbers (included in which he was also asked to grub up the trees in the intervening hedge).  Mr Moores replied in a carefully worded letter, that he was not responsible for those fields.  The Committee admitted that these were part of Mr Titmuss' land at Winches Farm (between Beaumonts and Oaklands).  I noted there was no sign of apology in the Committee's response.    The Committee then sent another letter instructing that Mr Moores plough up another field which actually was part of Beaumonts Farm.  It was known as Heath Field, fronting onto Beaumont Avenue and Sandpit Lane.  This time Mr Moores had to tell the Committee this field was already being cultivated.  Again no hint of apology, but the Committee then made another attempt to correct itself.  This time it was the field 821 (Home Meadow) mentioned in my last blog, where the farmer was unable to plough because of the number of people using it for recreational purposes.  There is no further correspondence, but a short while later the work of the Committee was transferred to the County Council.  As we often say in texts when we have made a mistake over a rather trivial matter: oops.

Cemetery wall
At the time the Hatfield Road cemetery was created one of the proposed construction elements was a boundary wall, but since no early photo of the cemetery from Hatfield Road exists, except for the ornate entrance, it is not possible to illustrate the rest of the boundary to its extremities as it was for around half a century.

In the 1930s Hatfield Road was widened at this point and the Herts Advertiser stated that the front wall was moved back 12 feet and rebuilt.  So the question has always been, what happened to the outer sections of wall (assuming they had been built in the first place)?  Did the Council sell the rest of the stone, replacing it with less expensive railings?

A file of documents at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) reveals that a contract was awarded to Mr Charles Chamberlain of Bedford Road, St Albans for the construction of a boundary wall at the cemetery, 600 feet long and 6 feet high,   with piers, 1 foot 6 inches square, placed every ten feet.  Materials were to be “good, hard, well-burned grey stocks of the neighbourhood.”  I take that to mean that it is a brick wall.  The contract price was £142 and was signed off in December 1883.

This is the first evidence that a wall the full length of the Hatfield Road frontage was constructed.  The reason why the wall was not reconstructed when the road widening took place in the 1930s, was undoubtedly the cost of reconstructing a wall in brick.  In any case, by that time there was a significant shrub and tree screen.  Today, the railings are not the dominant feature; instead, we enjoy walking beside a rather attractive mature hedge.