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Sportspace - Hemel Hempstead
 
 
Monday, 6th September 2010

 
A HOSTILE RECEPTION
IT was in July 1946 that the post war Labour government first announced that it was considering Hemel Hempstead as the site of a new town - Satellite Town No 3 - in accordance with the government’s “policy for the de-centralisation of persons and industry from London.”
Until then plans for a new town in this area had focused on Redbourn in the Abercrombie Greater London Plan. Hemel Hempstead Borough Council had objected to the Redbourn proposal because it feared that Hemel Hempstead would be swallowed up as over a quarter of the Redbourn site was in fact in Hemel Hempstead.
The council had itself come up with its own proposals earlier in 1946 to expand the town to a population of 50,000. It’s likely this proposal had more than a little to do with the Minister of Town and Country Planning’s July announcement.
Initially the reaction locally to the minister’s proposals did not appear hostile. Councillor Horace Dive, chairman of the town council’s planning committee, said the council accepted the decision and recorded its willingness to cooperate to the fullest extent possible.
But things quickly went sour locally as people realised that if the new town proposal was confirmed it would be carried out by a Government appointed development corporation, not the town’s own council, and that existing homes and businesses could well find themselves compulsorily purchased to make way for new developments.
By the autumn of 46 opposition was mounting. Anti new town candidates stood and were elected in the council elections, and a Hemel Hempstead Protection Association was formed, with Alderman H. Fletcher as its chairman, at a private meeting in St John’s Hall to oppose the new town and to brief counsel to appear at a public inquiry into the proposal in December.
And the Gazette made its own position on the new town very clear - it was totally opposed to it. The following, from October 1946, is just one of many similar page one editorials that the Gazette carried over the coming three years:
‘The new town plan, which if proceeded with will irrecoverably alter the character of Hemel Hempstead from a semi rural township to a series of ungainly industrial sprawls overflowing from one valley to the other, looms large on our immediate horizon.
We added: ‘This paper has already pointed out some of the evils which might well result from this ill-considered and totally undemocratic scheme which seeks to saddle the existing community, whose interests incidentally are supposed to be safeguarded by the town council, with a dictatorial body or corporation which will be armed with almost unlimited powers of compulsory purchase and which can also, if the whim takes it, demolish homes and properties regardless either of expense or the convenience of the residents.’
The Gazette then queried where the millions to pay for the new town would come from and perhaps whether the money would run out. ‘It is not difficult then to visualise Hemel Hempstead part pulled down and part rebuilt with, perhaps, a considerable additional population, submerged by a wave of post-war depression.’
That feelings were beginning to run high, and that the town council wasn’t the flavour of the times is best summed up by the last bitter paragraph of the Gazette’s editorial: ‘All those who see in the scheme a threat to their democratic rights and object to the high-handed action of the council in offering our ancient town over the heads of the electors, as a municipal guinea pig for vivesectional experiment, are urged to lodge their written objections.’
To try and cool local feeling Mr G. A. Jellicoe who had been appointed by the minister to prepare the outline plan for Hemel Hempstead spoke to the council. He said his concept of the new town was of it being comparable to Worcester, Lincoln and “not far short of Bath.”
His efforts failed and the council finally voted to oppose the new town.
A couple of weeks later Mr Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, came to Hemel Hempstead to speak at a public meeting held at the Guildhhouse (John Dickinson’s canteen building) in Apsley. In those days it had by far the largest capacity of any building locally and had hosted visits by radio programmes such as Workers’ Playtime.
The minister’s visit attracted an attendance of 1,500, some of whom no doubt had been encouraged by a loudspeaker car hired by the Hemel Hempstead Protection Association to tour the town, urging people to attend and state their opposition.
The minister spoke for 85 minutes and then answered some pretty hostile questions.
Mr Silkin explained that between the wars there had been a big drift of people to the big towns - London, Birmingham, Manchester and the like. In many cases the populations of those towns had doubled and Greater London in particular had become “a very unpleasant place to live in.”
In 1939 the Conservative government had, he said, set up a Royal Commission under Sir Montague Barlow and its report in 1940 said it was undesirable that large towns, particularly London should be allowed to grow for three main reasons - economically, socially and strategically as two or three atom bombs could destroy London!”
He pointed out that the proposed new town population of 60,000 was very similar to the town council’s own proposed expansion to 50,000.
The minister then faced some fiery questions, particularly on the question of compulsory purchase of land, which would be the greater part of the existing town. Mr Silkin explained that in many cases the development corporation would purchase at 1939 prices plus sixty per cent.
The inquiry into the new town proposals opened on December 2, 1946 and in its last issue before the big day the Gazette carried an outspoken front page comment:
‘December 2 could stand out as the blackest day in Hemel Hempstead’s history. It could set the seal on one of the greatest blows in the name of tyranny to have been struck since the days of the Star Chamber.’

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