IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Montague Close, Hatfield Road, ST. ALBANS, AL1 4FN

Bike sales and service centre on a triangular corner site.

The main road east out of St Albans to the next town along. A picture at the mini roundabout by the junction with Sutton Road

The Rats Castle is on Hatfield Road at its junction with Sutton Road from which this image was taken. The Rats Castle is not a unique name for a pub, a Google search revealing another in Guildford, and a restaurant in Faringdon in Oxfordshire. The alignment of the gable end walls in the photo appears to show some distortion in the photograph, but this is the true arrangement, the flank wall visible to the right being parallel with the Hatfield Road frontage out of sight around the corner in the distance.

Hatfield Road in the Fleetville area of St Albans. On the left is Morrison's Supermarket, built on the site of what was from the 1920s to 1967 the works of Ballito Hosiery and then for a while a factory of Marconi Instruments, eventually part of the electrical and engineering conglomerate GEC.

Fleetville is a district on the east side of St Albans between Marshalswick and The Camp. The post office is on Hatfield Road along with similar small shops and businesses.

1950s apartments on Hatfield Road.

Taken from the Alban Way crossing

A stub of Salisbury Avenue where it merges into Eaton Road. Eaton Road consists of late Victorian, early 20th century terraced housing - the exception is nos 17/19, the building on the right of the road in the centre of the photo, with the tall chimney, which was destroyed in an air raid in the Autumn of 1940 and was later rebuilt. Old maps show a sharp edge to development that point, with the semi detached and detached houses of Salisbury Avenue being built in the late 1920s or 1930s.

The Hatfield and St Albans Railway was completed in 1865 and was taken over by the Great Northern Railway in 1883. It was a very early casualty of British Railways' days being closed to passenger traffic in 1951. Freight services lingered on until 1964. This is the point at which the railway crossed Sutton Road with the raised grassy bank on the right being on the former track bed. The trackbed itself is now a public path known as the Alban Way and it also forms a section of National Cycle Network Route 61 as the sign on the right bears witness.