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

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.

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.

Late Victorian/early 20th century terraced housing.

Seen here in Fleetville at its junction with Royal Road. For close up of the milepost in the centre of the photo, see Image

Close up of the cast iron milepost in Fleetville (see Image). Modern roads do not give an obvious reason for showing Hatfield and Reading as destinations on the same post, but the explanation is historical. It is said that the Marquis of Salisbury, who lived at Hatfield House, wanted a route to the Great West Road avoiding central London, for onward travel to the spa towns of Bath and Cheltenham where, as a sufferer of gout, he habitually took the waters. He with others (including the Earl of Essex, who suffered from a similar affliction, and who lived at Cassiobury House near Watford) therefore sponsored an Act of Parliament passed in 1757 for the building of a road from Hatfield to Reading, with the Reading and Hatfield Turnpike Trust set up by a further Act passed in 1768, to improve the route between the two towns so he could be spared the discomfort and congestion of London's cobbled streets. It ran via St Albans, Watford, Rickmansworth, Amersham, High Wycombe and Marlow, with two alternative routes from there, one to Knowl Hill (on the Great West Road between Maidenhead and Reading) and the other to Reading itself via Henley-on-Thames. The Trust lasted until 1881, and at the latter date was one of the last surviving Turnpike Trusts in the country. For many years the route was known as the Gout Track, given its reputed raison-d'etre. Ignoring short sections of other modern day road numbers and stretches where the original has now been bypassed, its route is now represented by the current A1057, A412 and A404 (and A4155 for the alternative route via Henley-on-Thames). The original mile markers were milestones but the lettering quickly eroded and as a result they were replaced in around 1820 by new mileposts made of cast iron by Wilders & Sons of Reading, as here. Grade II listed - for listing particulars see www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1103008.