Cunningham Avenue

As with many areas of St Albans their boundaries are difficult to fix, and the limits of St Albans' Own East End have always been considered flexible.  But stand in the vicinity of the former Cunningham Hill Farm and walk south-westwards, down the sweep of the open space that was home to many territorial camps in centuries past, we encounter an allotment garden few of us are probably  aware of.  Faded green railings separate us from a quiet road of homes which lead us to the busy London Road.

This is Cunningham Avenue which, before the 1920s was not even a farm track, unlike its immediate neighbour Cunningham Hill Road which had enabled an access to early agricultural shows.  The lower slopes of Cunningham Hill Farm were still being farmed, and   there is an echo of former use in the allotments as a large swathe of sloping ground was in use during the First World War as emergency allotment gardens.  

Building companies, the 1920s versions of which were minnows compared with today's combines, are constantly searching for new opportunities to continue their operations, and a connection seemed to have been made between the land owner, Earl Verulam, and a well-known builder and brick maker at the time, William Bennett.  The result was the acquisition of a parcel of land which became Cunningham Avenue and its attractive homes, all built in the 1920s and with no evidence of later infilling or unsympathetic adaptations or re-building.  

The fact that the road is a cut-de-sac may lead us to suggest fewer local people will have explored the road than would be the case if there were onward connections for vehicles.  But it does make a fruitful circular stroll from the farm, walking along the avenue, the short stretch of London Road and up Cunningham Hill Road returning to the former farm at Cell Barnes Lane.

Whether Bennett constructed each house for a specific owner is uncertain, but it is clear that, although there are features or designs common to many of the homes, each has its distinctive face to the road.  Red brick, tile-covered porches, gable timber facings and other embellishments were incorporated into almost all of the dwellings.  The garages, many of which were probably added later, have been designed to complement the design of the main structure.  The front gardens remain planted and few have been opened to the street by boundary wall removal and covered in tarmac or blocks.

It therefore seems likely a number of covenants remain in place and  the road does benefit from being within a Conservation Area.  Cunningham Avenue is one of this city's delights.

Engaging With Our Locality

Whenever families, individuals, classes at school and visitors to the district, are able to share in some of the history of their home district, the experience is always positive.  More than that, what we discover is quite joyous.

Heritage Open Days have proved the point once more, although other casual meetings throughout the year have a similar effect.  September and October is also the period of time in the school curriculum when children explore their home patch, both the school itself and the shops and homes, where we and our friends live and what we can buy at the shops.  It is therefore a delight to meet the children as they find out how the school day was conducted, how children behaved and the playground games they may have played fifty or a hundred years ago.

Fleetville School playground in the 1930s.

Throughout the year members of Fleetville Diaries carry out deeper explorations in the form of projects.  St Albans had been the home of Frederick Sander and his renowned orchid nurseries in Camp Road, and this formed the basis of a major project last year.  Its culmination was to share our findings in a glorious celebration with members of the Sander and Moon families today (Henry Moon turned Sander's orchids into exquisite watercolours).

This year the organisation has taken Beaumont Avenue as its next subject in the series Right Up Our Street; and to focus on the former hosiery mill, Ballito, which grew on the site now occupied by Morrison's, where thousands of local men and women came to work, both in peacetime and war.  Although largely based on recollections it has been important to understand how the factory came to Fleetville in the first place.

Heritage Open Day on Saturday 14th September was an appropriate occasion to bring people together, to view three exhibitions and chat with the project leaders, to do so in a building (Fleetville Community Centre) first erected in 1942 as a nursery for the young children of women encouraged to work at the Ballito works that had been turned over to making shell casings for the war effort.

Factory managers' houses in Woodstock Road south

It comes as a surprise to many that competitive circumstances dictated the original Fleet Ville did not realise its full potential and which may otherwise have become a good deal larger.  The fact that it did not enabled one of this city's major benefactors, Charles Woollam, to acquire the field left over for the recreation and enjoyment of the people of Fleetville in the form of the Rec, or as many people refer to it these days, Fleetville Park.

Summer view of The Alley.

We then take a short guided walk around early roads; are amazed that Fleetville had a unique cinema – where no-one was fortunate in watching a film there; stood on the spot where several WW2 spies were charged, discover the homes built for the factory employees in one road and those built for its managers in another; and the function of The Alley which most Fleetville folk claim never to have walked along.  There are parts of Fleetville, too, which are more ancient than the Cathedral, and a stream to cross without getting our feet wet!

People love to ask questions and are often amazed by the answers; almost always a conversation ensues.  We are all part of a community and feel a personal responsibility to learn more about it.  And it matters not whether you are a 9-year-old who has already made sense of where he lives, or an adult who has lived here for three times as long and come to realise it's no longer sufficient to take local history for granted.

One way or another we all yearn to become more involved.

Does the shoehorn actually work?

There appear to be two related definitions of the term shoehorn: it is a curved tool to help ease our feet into a tight-fitting shoe, probably an early indicator that a larger shoe size might be appropriate.  Used as a verb, it can also describe forcing something into a space which is really too small.

The north side of Hatfield Road, when first laid out, was a mix of small houses and then increasingly shops.  Living accommodation for the shop owners was in the form of an upstairs flat; house occupiers had a tiny front garden, and both groups enjoyed a small private rear garden.

In time the rear gardens were lost to rear extensions, preparation buildings and stores.  Where possible vehicle access was squeezed in from the side roads.  Even in a nearby residential road a corner property owner has foregone a rear garden in favour of building three accommodations.  Recently, it was revealed that a property in Hatfield Road undergoing alterations was about to add a  similar number of one bed accommodations on the first floor, shoe-horned into  space too awkward and inadequate for the purpose.  And our  residential districts are littered with examples of a jarring streetscape created through unsympathetic and over-sized extensions intended to overfill the plot.

A variety of well-proportioned homes form a backdrop to the open spaces of Clarence Park.

This week St Albans celebrated the publication of a delightful little book about one of the district's foremost architects, Percival Cherry Blow (1873 to 1939).  The book launch was held in one building which he had designed – Thomas Oakley's grocery, now Waterstone's – and followed up with a meal for some at another of his buildings, Ryder's Exhibition Hall, now Cafe Rouge.

A Percival Blow designed house in Clarence Road.

While most of Blow's residential buildings were substantial in size and on good-sized plots, it appears that the architect was as concerned about how the proposed dwelling would sit in the street scene, and so space was as important as the physical structure.

One suspects that if Blow had been called back to add something to  one of his houses he would have given it the same meticulous attention as the original, and would know the limit of what was aesthetically possible on any plot.

Elements of the previous building on the site are captured in the red brick
Rats' Castle public house in Fleetville, designed by Percival Cherry Blow.

In the eastern districts of the city there are examples of his domestic work in Brampton, Blandford and Stanhope roads, and a range of semi-detached and detached houses in Clarence Road.  If such detailing attention is paid to the building elevations themselves it would seem natural to apply the same attention to the street boundaries.  Of course, today this is difficult to achieve as the imperative seems to be to get cars off the road at any cost, a requirement not foreseeable in the period when Blow was practising his profession.

                                                                           SAHAAS

All of us would benefit from a read of the new book, St Albans' Architect Percival Blow, published by St Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural & Archaeological Society.  As we do so we will discover so many more buildings Percival Cherry Blow was commissioned to design; our streetscape is the richer for his endeavour.

Yes, But Is It safe?

The city has many alleys, examples of former countryside public footpaths.  Some are well trodden; others come as a complete surprise when discovered.  They exist because they were rural community ways of getting about.  When a town encroached on the countryside, homes, gardens and residential streets had to be accommodated round the public routes already present.  Most are unnamed, such as the former track between Camp Road east and Ashley Road, between Breakspear Avenue and Vanda Crescent, or between Woodstock Road south and Beaumont Avenue.  Occasionally, as in the path between Marshals Drive and Marshalswick Lane, we find a name, Wickway in this case.


It is rare to find such an urban alley which does not have street lighting.  Sure, these units are not always appropriate for the task they are required to serve – very narrow paths between gardens, and often with dog-legs and blind corners – but at least there is lighting.

Farm Road, formerly "Muddy Alley"

A form of alley, in that it was a farm lane which failed to become a public road, remains unadopted.  It is Farm Road, between Beechwood and Beaumont avenues.  The responsibility for adding lighting is that of the owners of the formerly-named muddy alley, and presumably they feel it is unecessary, although, from memory, I think one householder has fitted a lighting column.

A well-known and lengthy track, Jersey Lane, which provided a link between the drive serving the old Marshals Wick House and one of its farms, had for centuries been unlit, except by the moon; it led to open country. Nowadays it is a recognised walking and cycling route passing through Jersey Farm residential area, and because we expect to remain out and about on occasions during the night-time hours it is equipped with street lighting, especially useful given the extent of tree cover.

Jersey Lane

Another well-used walking and cycling route, one which does not have a history in the same way as Jersey Lane, it being a former branch railway, is Alban Way.  This delightful and well-used route is a hybrid, being neither between the houses, nor beckoning towards the countryside.  Instead it serves as a kind of bypass around parts of the south and east of St Albans, parallels Hatfield Road in the unbuilt distance between Colney Heath Lane and Ellenbrook, before carving its way past the Hatfield residential areas towards its old centre.

Alban Way may be one of the busiest tracks of its type in the district and is certainly enjoyed.  But there are users who do feel unsafe; their experiences of walking along it tells them so.  There are others who presume it to be unsafe at times because others have told them so.  It does not help that the local press describes the Way as "the notorious crime-ridden pathway," even though anyone who has been a victim of verbal or physical attack will likely concur with the newspaper's headline sentiment.  There will undoubtedly be statistics to demonstrate the frequency and severity of incidents – it is probably for the newspaper to justify the accuracy of the wording used.

Alban Way east

However, it seems a precedent exists for whether or not tracks such as these are, or should be, lit.  Closed circuit television is another matter, but once the principle has been established, we also have to justify the spending of required funds on the basis of need and whether other paths have been similarly funded.  Where we go from here is another matter, but it would be a shame if we are genuinely put off from making use of this gem of an open space because we feel uneasy about being there.

Idyllic Dell

The Sandpit Lane boundary of the former St Peter's Farm remained much as it had done for centuries until the sale of the farm in the 1890s.  One imagines a hedge beside the lane between what today is Clarence Road and Woodstock Road north.  There were fields for grazing cattle, but one little area was always fenced against cattle intrusion and as early as the 1841 tithe map this pocket-sized copse was named The Dell, an apt label given that it was a depression in the landscape.  Today it is a fully mature circular area of mixed woodland.

Might it have been a growing medieval pit for sand extraction?  Or – and this will surely be on your mind – the result of a sink hole?  Whatever its cause, once trees had begun to grow a distinct ecosystem thrived.  There are sporadic reports that access by the public might have been granted to appreciate what had clearly been acknowledged as a very special environment.

Following the sale of the farm it did not take long before Thomas Grimwood purchased a substantial plot of land between the road and The Dell to build himself a house, appropriately named The Dell.  Whether or not Mr Grimwood realised at the time this was the one location along Sandpit Lane where the Wastes were absent with no additional permissions required to gain access to his plot of land.  The plot was in a commanding position right on the edge of the heath.

Before the 1930s Sear & Carter used the lower part of the plot beyond the house and gardens as one of their trial grounds supporting the Ninefields Nursery, now St Paul's Place.

Before and after the First World War others constructed their homes along this part of the lane.  Mr Grimwood sold The Dell  to Mr Fletcher, and he in turn passed it onto Mr Sykes.

Housing had crept closer to The Dell in the 1930s, but not from the lane.  Jennings Road and Churchill Road had been laid out, and eventually the rear gardens of a few of the resulting homes touched the edge of The Dell from the south and west.

But something different occurred in 1965.  The Dell and The Dell became a development opportunity.  Michael Meacher & Partners, architects, and Watford's Kebbell Developments produced plans for groups of flats and houses on the site.  There was never any intention to develop The Dell itself or its approaches.  This may have been for the laudable reason of open space protection in an environmentally special part of the site, but it was also convenient that The Dell was somewhat below the level of the district's sewer and drainage network, with the practicalities of making homes work in those part of the site difficult, if not impossible.


A later phase consisted of two ranges of two-storey homes, although three storey houses had been originally planned.  So the three-bed flats fronting the lane are the only three storey accommodations.

The two open areas are the treescape which can be seen along Sandpit Lane, and The Dell itself, although buildings press hard against its boundary.

Naturally, many nearby residents formally objected to the development scheme.  Perhaps they imagined something hideous, noisy, unsightly or unsuitable for the location.  Certainly the site, as with almost everywhere else in this part of the city, is far more intensively used than when Mr Grimwood was in residence, The Dell is in tact, and therefore the habitat enjoyed. by birds and mammals.  Just as in the centuries when it was part of a farm.

Right of Way

A few followers of St Albans' Own East End may recall reading of an application to St Albans Council around 1900 to divert part of  the footpath between Princes Road (Woodstock Road South) and Brampton Road so that homes could be built in Burnham Road.  This was agreed to since walkers would have a network of paths they could use on the new road network.

A current footpath through what remains of Chandlers
Grove wood

T F Nash, the company which developed Marshalswick Estate, encountered a similar problem, imposing a new road network on an existing network of public footpaths and tracks, which is why gaps between homes have produced St Mary's Walk and an un-named path between Pondfield Crescent and Queen's Crescent, which had previously been part of the edge of Chandlers Grove.  The narrow band of woodland accommodating a right of way footpath is also preserved parallel to Chiltern Road before it forms the boundary between Malvern Close and Sandringham School.

Path between homes from Pondfield Crescent
and Queen's Crescent

So, it is unsurprising that a public right of way issue has arisen once more on the site of Sandringham School.  For the roots of the story we must wind the clock back to the days before the school existed and a network of paths linked the farms and other rural habitations on the substantial Marten estate focusing on the former  Marshals Wick House.  One such path linked St Albans Road, Sandridge at St Helier Road and Jersey Farm; another branched southwards towards the House from Sirdane, a dwelling seemingly in the middle of nowhere but which came to be at the T junction of these two paths.

When the County Council purchased land for the Marshalswick Boys' School it clearly understood the problem as the north-south footpath, which had been allowed for by Nash on the south side of The Ridgeway, becoming St Mary's Walk, intersected the new school site.  The path was therefore diverted west-east along the northern boundary of the school before joining the path mentioned above near Malvern Close.  Walkers could then use The Ridgeway and pick up the  St Mary's Walk path.  

Later, when Sandringham Crescent was driven through, the County acquired more land for the school (only half of the school had been constructed in 1959 due to a restriction of cost availability), it had neglected to adjust the footpath to the new boundary further north.  Hence today's problem as the school plans for new facilities on the north side of its site.

Marshalswick Boys' School when new, fronting The Ridgeway.  The newly-posted fence forms the northern boundary of the school and the diverted footpath.  Previously the path had followed a
route from the house known as Sirdane (background left) towards The Ridgeway (foreground left).
The future Chiltern Road is the neck of woodland to the right of the playgrounds.  Sandringham Crescent, also in the future, will cross the light coloured field northof the original
school boundary.
 PHOTO COURTESY ANDY LAWRENCE.

But it does pose an interesting question.  What does the current path through the school grounds provide which the alternative – the original west-east extension of Helier Road towards Chiltern Road – does not?  One seems to be a duplication of the other for a few hundred metres.  If you were going to choose which path to follow, surely you would walk the path on the north side of Sandringham Crescent, where there are alternatives within Jersey Farm Woodland Park.  What would be the benefit of using the straight-line path along an educational establishment's boundary – or rather inside it – other than because the law allows us to.  Which is not a very strong argument on its own for so short a distance.

Of course, a precedent had already been set at the site of Samuel Ryder Academy, formerly Francis Bacon School, where extensions to the original boundary enveloped the lower end of Hill End Lane on its way to London Road.  At one time it had been a traffic route, but the lane had been allowed to "re-wild" along its edges and became a footpath, but as this passed inside the boundary of the school a risk was perceived to exist.  The authority therefore stopped up the path and authorised a diversion via Drakes Drive.  Drakes Drive had, after all, been constructed to replace Hill End Lane.

The Orchid King

It is possible that you have joined one of the groups attending Hatfield Road Cemetery on one of the popular Laid to Rest story walks, organised by the local history group Fleetville Diaries.  If so you will have seen, because we have told the story of the families Sander and Moon, a rather forlorn and overgrown family plot.  Brambles and Buddleia are not really representative of one of the country's foremost orchid hybridisers of the 19th century!

Henry G Moon, artist

If you now take a walk in the cemetery you will discover an impressive plot; the offending brambles and other invasive plants have been coaxed out of the ground, the granite stonework has been cleaned, restored and re-set, fresh topsoil and weed inhibiting matting laid – and there is now fresh green grass growing inside the kerbing.  The grave is along a curved path from the main avenue opposite the chapel, leading towards the Cemetery Manager's office.

Orchid Laelia Goldiana

The work was undertaken by a team from Fleetville Diaries, having become temporary guardians under the Adopt-a-Grave process, and of course with the full blessing of today's members of the Sander and Moon families.  J J Burgess carried out much of the stonework.

Frederick Sander, informally known as the Orchid King, had his nurseries in Camp Road from the 1880s, and in-law and artist Henry Moon produced slightly under two hundred stunning paintings of orchids.  So, there are members of both families buried in the plot.  The full story of the Orchid King can be found on the Frederick Sander & Henry Moon Tribute section of www.fleetvillediaries.org   During the course of the project it was discovered that Moon had also undertaken similar paintings for Peter Barr, a daffodil hybridiser in Streatham.  Peter, rather appropriately, had been known as the Daffodil King.  So representatives of Barr's Streatham research group also joined the Tribute Day.

Before the restoration project began

On a very hot day this week Fleetville Diaries invited some eighty guests, including the current generations of the Sander and Moon families to a special Tribute Day, firstly around the grave in Hatfield Road Cemetery, and then to refreshments and an exhibition at St Paul's Church.  This was an occasion for some members of these two impressive families to meet each other for the very first time, and it is clear that they were overwhelmed by the recognition bestowed on them by the occasion.

The project on completion