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Sportspace - Hemel Hempstead
 
 
Thursday, 9th September 2010

 
THE START

AS the year of 1947 opened the Hemel Hempstead residents had known since the previous July that their town was being considered by the government as the site for one of three new towns around London, but no ‘official’ decision had been made.
So what was Hemel Hempstead vintage 1947 like?
If you were coming into town to do your shopping you would have boarded the bus, perhaps you bicycled - but it’s very unlikely you’d have had a car.
The bus would have taken you to the ternminus in Bury Road, now the bottom stretch of Queensway.
The land now occupied by the college was also a commercial and residential area, including Alma Road.
And the River Gade that flows at the back of the town centre had its watercress beds rather than today’s familiar Water Gardens.
There were shops in Marlowes, but nothing like the numbers of today, and there were plenty of plush houses too, some of which survive as office accommodation today.
Today the ‘Magic Roundabout’ has become something of a Hemel Hempstead symbol. But there was no roundabout of any description in those days....the junction of Marlowes, Two Waters Road, Station Road and Wood Lane was just a crossroads!
Leighton Buzzard Road did not exist, either - if you wanted to bypass Marlowes, Cotterells was your only route.
Your route to St Albans would have been down Lawn Lane and up St Albans Road - now known as St Albans Hill - which was a single carriageway road, not today’s high-speed dual carriageway link.
If you were off to Leighton Buzzard you would have cycled out through Piccotts End. Tere was no road through the Park, which in those days was overlooked by Gadebridge House.
Warners End - then better known as Counters End - Gadebridge, Bennetts End, Highfield, Grovehill, Chaulden were mainly fields and open countryside.
Woodhall Farm was the site of a Brocks firework factory.
Boxmoor, Leverstock Green, Apsley and Piccotts End were already well established, but were regarded in many ways as separate villages.
By far the largest employer in the town was the Dickinson paper and stationery manufacturer, and just about every family had someone or knew someone who worked at the ‘mills.’
For entertainment there was very little in the way of television, of course, but the pictures were popular. In the first week in January 1947 you could have gone to The Luxor (telephone Boxmoor 36 for times) and seen Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in Sunset In Eldorado or to the Princess (Boxmoor 106) and seen Blossoms In The Dust, which featured Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. Both the Princ ess and Luxor were in Marlowes.
If you were going out of town then you had a choice of railway lines. Boxmoor Station, now known as Hemel Hempstead, was the most popular starting point for a trip to London. But the Nicky Line which ran through to Redbourn and connected up with the main line through Luton to London was still in operation and there were quite extensive sidings in the region of Cotterells.
Many people who lived in the town in those days say it was a community in which ‘everyone knew everyone.’
Perhaps - but it may surprise some to know that the population of Hemel Hempstead back in 1947 was still over 20,000, a sizeable town and bigger than today’s Berkhamsted.
±The new town, as we will hear, was mainly about new homes for Londoners. But in Hemel Hempstead itself there was plenty of need for new homes for local people.
As servicemen returned from the war the need for housing grew and grew. Today, the property section of the Gazette runs to many pages - but in 1947 it was just a single quarter page.
A modern semi-detached with three bedrooms in Hemel Hempstead would have cost £1,850 in 1947, well outside the means of most. Typical of the advertisements in the property section was this from the Reay family: “Urgently required, unfirnished house or rooms for married couple with two children.”
There were 1,600 families on the housing waiting list in Hemel Hempstead and the situation was so bad that ‘squatting’ in empty buildings, whilst not openly encouraged, had considerable support from many quarters as in the case of families who moved into disused searchlight huts in Featherbed Lane.
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