Help Sitemap Home Skip Navigation Contact Us Disability Statement

Sportspace - Hemel Hempstead
 
 
Thursday, 9th September 2010

 
FIRST SHOPS READY

THE SQUARE ON THE WAY UP
EARLY in 1951 the newly appointed chairman of Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation, Mr Henry Wells, attended the first of what was described as a regular “get together and clear the air” meeting with Hemel Hempstead Borough councillors.
Mr Wells was clearly sensitive to the anti-new town feeling that still existed in Hemel Hempstead and he told the assembled councillors: “I deprecate the expression ‘new town’ - what is happening at Adeyfield is as much a part of Hemel Hempstead as is anything else that is happening in the borough.”
He then went on to say that since the mayor had laid the foundation stone of the first house 21 months earlier, the development corporation had placed contracts for 886 houses, of which nearly 200 were complete and 150 occupied.
He hoped by the end of the year 1,000 houses would be completed. He said that he hoped work on the town centre would start by the next autumn and warned that one of the first jobs would be to dig up Marlowes to provide adequate surface water drainage - flooding in Marlowes, particularly at the southern end, had long been a problem.
The first new town shops did open in 1951, at Adeyfield, but it appears that finding shopkeepers to take them on was not easy.

In the summer 14 shops in The Square - later to become Queen’s Square - had been completed, but only four had definitely been taken.
In its Talking Point column the Gazette said the shops had first been offered to traders in Marlowes between Hillfield Road and the viaduct who would be displaced by redevelopment, but the response had been negative as had later response from other traders in the town.
Traders from outside the area had then been offered the shops, but again there had been little response and one Willesden butcher had blamed the high rents. A fishmonger had been turned down because he wanted to store his empty fish boxes at the back of the shop and another butcher had turned down a shop because the walls were made of pre-cast concrete, and he couldn’t fix his meat hooks to them!

But tenants were found and the first shops opened in September. By the end of the year they reported that trade was “really quite good” and formed themselves into the Adeyfield Traders Association.
Their first decision was that early-closing in Adeyfield should be on a Thursday, which was not a good idea for old town/new town relations - the rest of the town closed early on a Wednesday and had done so for many years.
Established traders were not best pleased a stiff letter was despatched from the Chamber of Commerce - who presumably thought the newcomers would pinch their trade on Wednesday afternoons - suggesting the Adeyfield traders should change their minds and threatening that there might be “an official directive.”
A little earlier in the year, the chamber of commerce held their annual meeting and addressing it the mayor of the time Councillor P. J. White, who had his own shop in the High Street, said he believed the traders in Apsley and St Johns Road “had nothing to fear from the new town.”

1951 was a general election year and the poll saw the defeat of the Labour post-war government, blamed by some for the imposition of a new town on Hemel Hempstead.
Lady Davidson , Hemel Hempstead’s long-serving Conservative MP, won again, and spoke at an eve of poll meeting at the new Maylands School in Adeyfield. The Gazette described it as a ‘noisy new town meeting” and said that while Lady Davidson was speaking there were a lot of “unnecessary interruptions from Labour and Communist elements present which amounted to a lot more than ordinary heckling.”

Again as this year, education was a major issue. Maylands School was a junior school, but there was clearly a need for a new town secondary school and one was being built in Adeyfield, but the end of 1951 saw something of a bombshell hit the local education scene - segregating the sexes!
At Hemel Hempstead Grammar School’s annual parents day the headmaster Mr N. Screeton - who was to retire at the end of the term - revealed that he had been informed of a proposal that the grammar school should be for one sex and the new school at Adeyfield for the other. This caused widespread alarm .
Within a couple of weeks parents had organised a meeting which was packed and at which a resolution was passed expressing opposition to any plans to split the school. Nothing was to come of the plan and there seems no trace of any suggestions as to which sex it was planned to send to Adeyfield!

This year too, the future of Bovingdon airfield is under the microscope and as Hemel Hempstead was a new town for Londonners, it’s interesting that in those early days Bovingdon was one of London’s airports!
The Gazette of the early 1950s frequently carried photos of the famous arriving at or departing from Bovingdon. For instance, in May 1951 Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell landed at Bovingdon from Germany where they had been entertaining American troops.
After they had enjoyed an excellent lunch at the Bull Inn, where Bob dashed off a postcard to Bing Crosby, it was back to the airport to catch a flight to Porthcawl for the Amateur Golf Championships. View older pages
 
 

Sister Newspapers:
Press Complaints Commission

This website and its associated newspaper adheres to the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice. If you have a complaint about editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then contact the Editor by clicking here.

If you remain dissatisfied with the response provided then you can contact the PCC by clicking here.