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Sportspace - Hemel Hempstead
 
 
Monday, 6th September 2010

 
PART 4, STEEL HOUSES

BELWAINS FARM IN THE 1930S
ALTHOUGH not a brick was to be laid for the actual new town for some time, new homes were being built by the Hemel Hempstead Borough Council.
The first of these were what was known as the steel houses in Adeyfiewld.
They were prefabricated so they could be put up quickly, and they still stand today.
The council was also continuing with its Belswains farm Estate - Hobbs Hill and Oliver Roads.
IT was on Monday, September 29, 1947 that the first plan of the new town of Hemel Hempstead was unveiled to the public at an exhibition in the ballroom of the Town Hall in the High Street.
Opening the exhibition, Lord Reith - who was chairman of the Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation - said: “It is not just another exhibition, another scheme. The development corporation look on it as the beginning of a great experiment in social enterprise, the first of such to be presented in this way.”
He stressed that the exhibition, which included a huge scale model of the proposals which had taken two months to make, was “here to be seen, examined, discussed, criticised and improved.
“It is, as it were, the opening remark in a discussion.”

The man behind the plan, architect and town planneR Mr G. A. Jellicoe, was also at the opening and said lessons had been learned from the earlier new town of Welwyn Garden City - his view of Hemel Hempstead, he said, was “not a city in a garden, but a city in a park.” He said that the model was designed to give an impression of the town in 50 years time.
So what did that first plan consist of?
There was the central area, the industrial area largely in the vicinity of Cupid Green, and seven residential areas based on Hammerfield, Counters End, Warners End, Grovehill, Adeyfield, Leverstock Green and Apsley.
Much emphasis was placed on open spaces.
In the central area, the High Street would be retained, but Marlowes was to be totally redeveloped - it was envisaged by Mr Jellicoe as a sort of modern promenade, after the fashion of Cheltenham or Princes Street, Edinburgh - and the area to the east was to be totally redeveloped in secluded architectural squares and terraces.

Looking at what we now know as the Marlowes area, a new civic centre, with council offices and assembly hall, was to be built at the Gadebridge Park end. Together with a large lake behind it, it would take up a goodish chunk of Gadebridge Park.
At the other end of Marlowes a boating lake adjacent to Heath Park was planned. Between this and the Civic Centre would be the Water Gardens with the Gade winding backwards and forwards, splitting the gardens into sections.
At each end of the gardens would be a car park, one of which would later be used as a helicopter landing strip.

Cultural buildings, including two theatres, a library, art gallery and restaurant would be spaced out in the gardens.
The shopping centre would be along a new Marlowes which would only be open to buses, with pedestrian access from the Water Gardens by means of underpasses.
The hospital was to become a market square with the hospital either moving out of town or to another site in the town.
The western slopes of the valley overlooking the town centre would contain lines of terraces in the manner of those at Clifton and Bath.
Away from the central area, Boxmoor and Apsley railway stations would be closed down and a new station built at Two Waters.
There would be an inner circular road and an outer bypass.
The exhibition was open to the public for two weeks and on the first day 350 people came to look round.
So how did this first vision of the future of Hemel Hempstead go down?
The new town opponents, the Gazette prominent among them, were not impressed.
‘Hemeltopia or Myopia?’ screamed a front page editorial. “To most residents of this historic borough it may seem a colossal planned nightmare from some fevered imagination, but who could possibly grudge the erection of a suitable monument to a party (clearly a big dig at the Labour government of the time) which seems so determined to immolate itself on the altars of planned long-term imbecility?”

Argument over the plan was to go on for more than a year, before revisions were made public, and it was only very slowly that the new town began to make itself really felt.
It was not until December that the development corporation issued a statement on the criticisms and suggestions that had been received from those hundreds who had gone along and viewed the proposals.
The statement said that Mr Jellicoe’s plan “necessarily” went beyond both the scope of the development corporation’s activities and the period during which it is likely that they will be undertaken.
It was intended as a “framework”, and the next stage would be the development plans showing the actual proposals for development to be undertaken by the development corporation.
A ll the comments were being “carefully considered,” said the statement.

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