Great Wymondley
Great Wymondley is a village situated near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, England. Despite the names, Great Wymondley is a smaller settlement than Little Wymondley, it is in the civil parish of Wymondley. The village is set in an agricultural landscape, protected within the Green Belt. In the late 19th century Frederic Seebohm studied the village´s field system using detailed maps and concluded that it was laid out in Roman times; this finding has been confirmed by scholars. The dimensions of the fields suggest; the implication is that there was continuity in the way the land was managed after the Anglo-Saxon settlement of this part of Hertfordshire. There are remains of a Roman villa in the parish; the site is near Ninesprings in the valley of the River Purwell. It has been excavated, it is a scheduled monument. The earthworks of a motte-and-bailey castle near the church; the church, Grade I listed, has a Norman nave and chancel. Unusually for a medieval church in Hertfordshire, there is an apse: the church at Little Wymondley had an apsidal east end too.
Delamere House is an elegant Elizabethan building. There are a number of thatched cottages, including a row of terraced cottages each named after one of King Henry VIII's wives. Parishes: Great or Much Wymondley, in A History of the County of Hertford: Volume 3, ed. William Page, pp. 181–185 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/herts/vol3/pp181-185. Media related to Great Wymondley at Wikimedia Commons
Hexton
Hexton is a small village and civil parish in Hertfordshire, about 6 miles west of Hitchin. This parish is a salient of Hertfordshire jutting northwards into Bedfordshire; the southern half of the parish is part of the chalky downs of the Chiltern Hills, which are covered with short turf and plantations of fir trees. The hills close to their foot lies the village of Hexton, it stands among grass fields and orchards at the beginning of a low plain, sloping to the north, becomes merged in the large plain of southern Bedfordshire. The southern boundary of the parish is the grassy Icknield Way. Hexton belonged to the half-hundred of Hitchin, but when it came into the possession of the abbots of St. Albans it was added by them to their hundred of Cashio. Hexton was named Hehstanstuna, Hegestanestone. Much of the parish was owned by George Hodgson, owner of Hexton Hall, a large modernized house standing in an extensive park. There is no regular village street, but most of the houses are near cross roads, which lead north, south and west and connect Hexton with the neighbouring small villages.
Hexton stands in well hilly country adjacent to the Bedfordshire border. The church, dedicated to St Faith, is mediaeval with heavy 19th-century restoration; the Manor House in its extensive park dates from at least the 15th century, although it was altered in 1901. Far older is the Iron Age camp of Ravensburgh Castle, a scheduled ancient monument which straddles a hilltop a mile to the south-west. Limited excavations during the 1960s showed that it was built about 400 BC (See J. Dyer in D. W. Harding Hillforts: Later Prehistoric Earthworks 1976, p. 153ff. and refortified around 50 BC. Rectangular in shape, enclosing nine hectares, it is defended by a double rampart and ditch on the north and south sides, with a more massive rampart on the vulnerable eastern flank. Of its two entrances, that at the northwest corner belongs to the original build, whilst the southeastern entrance was added around 50 BC. A gap halfway along the eastern side is modern, it has been suggested that Ravensburgh might have been the headquarters of the Celtic chieftain Cassivelaunus, attacked in 54 BC.
The excavations showed signs of burning on the eastern rampart. Access to the site is limited. Finds of pottery and a bird-headed weaving comb are in Luton. Hexton Chalk Pit is a nature reserve managed by the Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust. Media related to Hexton at Wikimedia Commons
East of England
The East of England is one of nine official regions of England at the first level of NUTS for statistical purposes. It was created in 1994 and was adopted for statistics from 1999, it includes the ceremonial counties of Bedfordshire, Essex, Hertfordshire and Suffolk. Essex has the highest population in the region, its population at the 2011 census was 5,847,000. Bedford, Basildon, Southend-on-Sea, Ipswich, Colchester and Cambridge are the region's most populous towns; the southern part of the region lies in the London commuter belt. The region has the lowest elevation range in the UK. North Cambridgeshire and the Essex Coast have most of the around 5% of the region, below 10 metres above sea level; the Fens are in North Cambridgeshire, notable for the lowest point in the country in the land of the village of Holme 2.75 metres below mean sea level, once Whittlesey Mere. The highest point is at Clipper Down at 817 ft, in the far south-western corner of the region in the Ivinghoe Hills. Basildon and Harlow, with Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead, were main New Towns in the 1950s and 1960s, with much industry located there.
In the late 1960s, the Roskill Commission considered Thurleigh in Bedfordshire, Nuthampstead in Hertfordshire and Foulness in Essex as a possible third airport for London. The East of England succeeded the standard statistical region East Anglia; the East of England civil defence region was identical to today's region. England between the Wash and just south of the town of Colchester has since post-Roman times been and continues to be known as East Anglia, including the county traversing the west of this line, Cambridgeshire; the inclusion of Essex as part of East Anglia is open to debate, notably because it was a Saxon kingdom, separate from the kingdom of the East Angles. Essex, despite meaning East-Saxons formed part of the South East England, as did Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, a mixture of definite and debatable Home Counties; the earliest use of the term is from 1695. Charles Davenant, in An essay upon ways and means of supplying the war, wrote, "The Eleven Home Counties, which are thought in Land Taxes to pay more than their proportion..." cited a list including these four.
The term does not appear to have been used in taxation since the 18th century. East Anglia is one of the driest parts of the United Kingdom with average rainfall ranging from 450 mm to 750 mm; this is because low pressure systems and weather fronts from the Atlantic have lost a lot of their moisture over land by the time they reach Eastern England. However the Fens in Cambridgeshire are prone to flooding. Winter is cool but non-prevailing cold easterly winds can affect the area from the continent, these can bring heavy snowfall if the winds interact with a low pressure system over the Atlantic or France. Northerly winds can be cold but are not as cold as easterly winds. Westerly winds bring milder and wetter weather. Southerly winds bring mild air but chill if coming from further east than Spain. Spring is a transitional season that can be chilly to start with but is warm by late-April/May; the weather at this time is changeable and showery. Summer is warm and continental air from mainland Europe or the Azores High leads to at least a few weeks of hot, balmy weather with prolonged warm to hot weather.
The number of summer storms from the Atlantic, such as the remnants of a tropical storm coincides with the location of the jet stream. The East tends to receive much less of their rain than the other regions. Autumn is mild with some days being unsettled and rainy and others warm. At least part of September and early October in the East have warm and settled weather but only in rare years is there an Indian summer where fine weather marks the entire traditional harvest season; the most deprived districts, according to the Indices of deprivation 2007 in the region are, in descending order, Great Yarmouth, Luton and Ipswich. At county level, after Luton and Peterborough, which have a similar level of deprivation, in descending order there is Southend-on-Sea Thurrock; the least deprived districts, in descending order, are South Cambridgeshire, Mid Bedfordshire, East Hertfordshire, St Albans, Rochford, Huntingdonshire, Mid Suffolk, North Hertfordshire, Three Rivers, South Norfolk, East Cambridgeshire and Suffolk Coastal.
At county level, the least deprived areas in the region, in descending order, are Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire, with all three having a similar level of deprivation Essex. The region has the lowest proportion of jobless households in the UK – 0.5%. In March 2011 the region's unemployment claimant count was 3.0%. Inside the region, the highest rate is Great Yarmouth with 6.2%, followed by Peterborough and Southend-on-Sea on 4.7%. In the 2015 general election, there was an overall swing of 0.25% from the Conservatives to Labour, the Liberal Democrats lost 16% of its vote. All of Hertfordshire and Suffolk is now Conservative; the region's electorate voted 49% Conservative, 22% Labour, 16% UKIP, 8% Liberal Democrat and 4% Green. Like other regions, the division of seats favours th
Stevenage
Stevenage is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, 28 miles north of London. Stevenage is east of junctions 7 and 8 of the A1, between Letchworth Garden City to the north and Welwyn Garden City to the south. In 1946, Stevenage was designated the United Kingdom's first New Town under the New Towns Act. Stevenage may derive from Old English stiþen āc / stiðen āc / stithen ac meaning' the stiff oak'; the name was recorded as c. 1060 and Stigenace in 1086 in the Domesday Book. Stevenage lies near the line of the Roman road from Verulamium to Baldock; some Romano-British remains were discovered during the building of the New Town, a hoard of 2,000 silver Roman coins was discovered in 1986 during new house building in the Chells Manor area. The most substantial evidence of activity from Roman times is Six Hills, six tumuli by the side of the old Great North Road – the burial places of a local family. A little to the east of the Roman sites the first Saxon camp was made in a clearing in the woods where the church, manor house and the first village were built.
Settlements sprang up in Chells and Shephall. In the Domesday Book the Lord of the Manor was the Abbot of Westminster Abbey; the settlement had moved down to the Great North Road and in 1281 it was granted a Royal Charter to hold a weekly market and annual fair. The earliest part of St Nicholas' Church dates from the 12th century but it was a site of worship much earlier; the known list of priests or rectors is complete from 1213. The remains of a medieval moated homestead in Whomerley Wood is an 80-yard-square trench 5 feet wide in parts, it was the home of Ralph de Homle, both Roman and pottery has been found there. Around 1500 the Church was much improved, with the addition of a clerestory. In 1558 Thomas Alleyne, a rector of the town, founded a free grammar school for boys, Alleyne's Grammar School, despite becoming a boys' comprehensive school in 1967, had an unbroken existence until 1989 when it merged with Stevenage Girls' School to become the Thomas Alleyne School. Francis Cammaerts was headmaster of Alleyne's Grammar School from 1952 to 1961.
The school, since 1989 a mixed comprehensive school and is now an Academy as of 2013, still exists on its original site at the north end of the High Street. It was intended to move the school to Great Ashby, but the Coalition government proposed scrapping the move owing to budget cuts. Stevenage's prosperity came in part from the North Road, turnpiked in the early 18th century. Many inns in the High Street served the stage coaches, 21 of which passed through Stevenage each day in 1800. In 1857 the Great Northern Railway was constructed, the era of the stage coach had ended. Stevenage grew only throughout the 19th century and a second church was constructed at the south end of the High Street. In 1861 Dickens commented, "The village street was like most other village streets: wide for its height, silent for its size, drowsy in the dullest degree; the quietest little dwellings with the largest of window-shutters to shut up nothing as if it were the Mint or the Bank of England." In 1928 Philip Vincent bought the HRD Motorcycle Co Ltd out of receivership moving it to Stevenage and renaming it the Vincent HRD Motorcycle Co Ltd.
He produced the legendary motorcycles, including the Black Shadow and Black Lightning, in the town until 1955. Slow growth in Stevenage continued until just after the Second World War, when the Abercrombie Plan called for the establishment of a ring of new towns around London. On 1 August 1946, Stevenage was designated the first New Town under the New Towns Act; the plan was not popular and local people protested at a meeting held in the town hall before Lewis Silkin, minister in the Labour Government of Clement Attlee. As Lewis Silkin arrived at the railway station for this meeting, some local people had changed the signs'Stevenage' to'Silkingrad'. Silkin was obstinate at the meeting, telling a crowd of 3,000 people outside the town hall: "It's no good your jeering, it's going to be done." Despite the hostile reaction to Silkin and a referendum that showed 52%'entirely against' the expansion, the plan went ahead. Although the Commission for the New Towns declared the Old Town would not be touched, the first significant building to be demolished to make way for a gyratory system was indeed the Old Town Hall, in which the opposition had been expressed.
In 1949 the radical town planner Dr Monica Felton became Chairman of the Stevenage Development Corporation but she was sacked within two years. There were a number of reasons for her dismissal by the government but a lack of hands-on town planning leadership and her opposition to the Korean War sullied her reputation. Felton was replaced first by Allan Duff and Thomas Bennett, who carried the project to completion. Gordon Stephenson was the planner, Peter Shepheard the architect, Eric Claxton the engineer. Claxton took the attitude that the new town should separate bicycles from the automobile as much as possible. In keeping with the sociological outlook of the day, the town was planned with six self-contained neighbourhoods; the first two of these to be occupied were the Stoney Hall and Monks Wood'Estates', in 1951. The Twin Foxes pub, on the Monks
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire is one of the home counties in the south east of England. It is bordered by Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, Buckinghamshire to the west. For government statistical purposes, it is placed in the East of England region. In 2013, the county had a population of 1,140,700 in an area of 634 square miles; the four towns that have between 50,000 and 100,000 residents are Hemel Hempstead, Watford and St Albans. Hertford, once the main market town for the medieval agricultural county, derives its name from a hart and a ford, used as the components of the county's coat of arms and flag. Elevations are high for the region in the west; these reach over 800 feet in the western projection around Tring, in the Chilterns. The county's borders are the watersheds of the Colne and Lea. Hertfordshire's undeveloped land is agricultural and much is protected by green belt; the county's landmarks span many centuries, ranging from the Six Hills in the new town of Stevenage built by local inhabitants during the Roman period, to Leavesden Film Studios.
The volume of intact medieval and Tudor buildings surpasses London, in places in well-preserved conservation areas in St Albans which includes some remains of Verulamium, the town where in the 3rd century an early recorded British martyrdom took place. Saint Alban, a Romano-British soldier, took the place of a Christian priest and was beheaded on Holywell Hill, his martyr's cross of a yellow saltire on a blue field is reflected in the flag and coat of arms of Hertfordshire. Hertfordshire is well-served with railways, providing good access to London; the largest sector of the economy of the county is in services. Hertfordshire was the area assigned to a fortress constructed at Hertford under the rule of Edward the Elder in 913. Hertford is derived from meaning deer crossing; the name Hertfordshire is first recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1011. Deer feature in many county emblems. There is evidence of humans living in Hertfordshire from the Mesolithic period, it was first farmed during the Neolithic period and permanent habitation appeared at the beginning of the Bronze Age.
This was followed by tribes settling in the area during the Iron Age. Following the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, the aboriginal Catuvellauni submitted and adapted to the Roman life. Saint Alban, a Romano-British soldier, took the place of a Christian priest and was beheaded on Holywell Hill, his martyr's cross of a yellow saltire on a blue field is reflected in the flag and coat of arms of Hertfordshire as the yellow field to the stag or Hart representing the county. He is the Patron Saint of Hertfordshire. With the departure of the Roman Legions in the early 5th century, the now unprotected territory was invaded and colonised by the Anglo-Saxons. By the 6th century the majority of the modern county was part of the East Saxon kingdom; this short lived kingdom collapsed in the 9th century, ceding the territory of Hertfordshire to the control of the West Anglians of Mercia. The region became an English shire in the 10th century, on the merger of the West Saxon and Mercian kingdoms. A century William of Normandy received the surrender of the surviving senior English Lords and Clergy at Berkhamsted, resulting in a new Anglicised title of William the Conqueror before embarking on an uncontested entry into London and his coronation at Westminster.
Hertfordshire was used for some of the new Norman castles at Bishop's Stortford, at King's Langley, a staging post between London and the royal residence of Berkhamsted. The Domesday Book recorded the county as having nine hundreds. Tring and Danais became one—Dacorum—from Danis Corum or Danish rule harking back to a Viking not Saxon past; the other seven were Braughing, Cashio, Hertford and Odsey. The first shooting-down of a zeppelin over Great Britain during WW1 happened in Cuffley; as London grew, Hertfordshire became conveniently close to the English capital. However, the greatest boost to Hertfordshire came during the Industrial Revolution, after which the population rose dramatically. In 1903, Letchworth became the world's first garden city and Stevenage became the first town to redevelop under the New Towns Act 1946. From the 1920s until the late 1980s, the town of Borehamwood was home to one of the major British film studio complexes, including the MGM-British Studios. Many well-known films were made here including the first three Star Wars movies.
The studios used the name of Elstree. American director Stanley Kubrick not only used to shoot in those studios but lived in the area until his death. Big Brother UK and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? have been filmed there. EastEnders is filmed at Elstree. Hertfordshire has seen development at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden. On 17 October 2000, the Hatfield rail crash killed four people with over 70 injured; the crash exposed the shortcomings of Railtrack, which saw speed restrictions and major track replacement. On 10 May 2002, the second of the Potters Bar rail accidents occurred killing seven people.
Holwell, Hertfordshire
Holwell is a small village and a civil parish two miles north of Hitchin in Hertfordshire, near the Bedfordshire border. At the 2011 Census the population of the village was 362; the church is unusual and, although rebuilt, retains some Perpendicular features and an interesting brass to Richard Wodehouse. The school and rectory are all in a similar Tudor style erected in the 1830s, but are no longer in use and have been converted into housing. Fragments of early wall paintings and wooden mullioned windows have been discovered in the mediaeval timber-framed Church Farmhouse, it is not to be confused with Holwell Court, near Essendon in Hertfordshire, or "Hole-well". Media related to Holwell, Hertfordshire at Wikimedia Commons
Letchworth
Letchworth Garden City known as Letchworth, is a town in Hertfordshire, with a population of 33,600. It is a former civil parish; the town's name is taken from one of the three villages it surrounded – all of which featured in the Domesday Book. The land used was purchased by Quakers who had intended to farm the area and build a Quaker community; the town was laid out by Raymond Unwin as a demonstration of the principles established by Ebenezer Howard who sought to create an alternative to the industrial city by combining the best of town and country living. It is home to the United Kingdom's first roundabout, built in 1909; as one of the world's first new towns and the first garden city it had great influence on future town planning and the New towns movement. There is a link to town planning in Stalingrad through the architect V. N. Semionov and an account of Lenin visiting the town when he visited England for a congress of the Russian Bolshevik party banned in Russia. Letchworth was one of the ancient parishes of Hertfordshire.
The parish church of St Mary the Virgin was built in the 12th or 13th Century. The village was located along the road now called Letchworth Lane, stretching from St Mary's and the adjoining medieval manor house up to the crossroads of Letchworth Lane, Hitchin Road, Baldock Road and Spring Road, where there was a post office. Letchworth was a small parish, having a population in 1801 of 67, rising to 96 by 1901. In 1898, the social reformer Ebenezer Howard wrote a book entitled To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, in which he advocated the construction of a new kind of town, summed up in his three magnets diagram as combining the advantages of cities and the countryside while eliminating their disadvantages. Industry would be kept separate from residential areas—such zoning was a new idea at the time—and trees and open spaces would prevail everywhere, his ideas were mocked in the press but struck a chord with many members of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Quakers. According to the book the term "garden city" derived from the image of a city being situated within a belt of open countryside, not, as is cited, to a principle that every house in the city should have a garden.
The concept outlined in the book is not one of urban planning, but included a system of community management. For example, the Garden City project would be financed through a system that Howard called "Rate-Rent", which combined financing for community services with a return for those who had invested in the development of the city; the book advocated a rudimentary form of competitive tendering, whereby the municipality would purchase services, such as water, waste disposal, etc. from commercial providers. These systems were never implemented, in Letchworth, Welwyn or their numerous imitators. A competition was held to find a town design which could translate Howard's ideas into reality, September 1903 the company "First Garden City Ltd." was formed, Richard Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin were appointed architects, 6 square miles of land outside Hitchin were purchased for building. In keeping with the ideals only one tree was felled during the entire initial construction phase of the town, an area devoted to agriculture surrounding the town was included in the plan – the first "Green Belt".
In 1905, again in 1907, the company held the Cheap Cottages Exhibitions, contests to build inexpensive housing, which attracted some 60,000 visitors and had a significant effect on planning and urban design in the UK, pioneering and popularising such concepts as pre-fabrication, the use of new building materials, front and back gardens. The exhibitions were sponsored by the Daily Mail, their popularity was significant in the development of that newspaper's launching of the Ideal Home Exhibition – the first of which took place the year after the second Cheap Cottages Exhibition. A railway station was opened in 1903 a few hundred yards west of its current position and railway companies ran excursions to the town, bringing people to marvel at the social experiment and sometimes to mock it: Letchworth's founding citizens, attracted by the promise of a better life, were caricatured by outsiders as idealistic and otherworldly. John Betjeman in his poems Group Life: Letchworth and Huxley Hall painted Letchworth people as earnest health freaks.
One commonly-cited example of this is the ban, most unusual for a British town, on selling alcohol in public premises. This did not stop the town having a "pub" however – the Skittles Inn or the "pub with no beer" which opened as early as 1907. Despite the ban it is not true to say that there were no pubs in the Garden City. Pubs that had existed from before the foundation of the Garden City continued – including the Three Horseshoes in Norton, The George IV on the borders with Baldock, the Three Horseshoes and The Fox in Willian – continued to operate, undoubtedly benefited from the lack of alcohol to be had in the centre of the town, as did the pubs in neighbouring Hitchin and Baldock. New inns sprang up on the borders of the town, one such example being the Wilbury Hotel, just outside the town's border; this ban was lifted after a referendum in 1958, which resulted i
