IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Station Road, ARLESEY, SG15 6RG

The site closed as a hospital in 1999.

For a variety of reasons we didn't. This is typical of the houses in Arlesey. Note the light coloured brick. This is made from clay dug locally and turned into bricks by a (largely) italian immigrant workforce near to the village.

Small independent fuel retailers find it difficult to compete against the oil giants and the supermarkets and the small garage here has lost its forecourt dispensing pumps some time ago.

Just one motor vehicle on a normally busy mud track. Previously known as Paradise Row. The home in the foreground to the left was The Stag Public House which opened in 1868 and closed in 1926.

The Great Northern Railway was completed through here in 1850 and a station, called Arlesey Siding and named because of the sidings to the nearby brick works, was built here in 1866. With the expansion of the nearby Three Counties Lunatic Asylum the station was renamed Three Counties in 1886. It closed in 1959. Looking at old maps the actual site of the station was about two thirds of the way towards the distant Mill Lane road bridge. This was the site of a fatal railway accident in 1876 when a northbound express passenger train collided with a derailed luggage train.

Opened in 1866 by the Great Northern Railway, the station closed to passengers in 1959. For the first 20 years of its existence, it was called 'Arlesey Siding'. Presumably the Victorian marketing people eventually decided that didn't sound very attractive!

Nigel Cox has already recounted the event of the 1876 accident at the former Three Counties Station Image (then called Arlesey Sidings) on the Great Northern Railway, the site of which is in this view. The accident occurred on the 23rd of December. There were five immediate deaths (including the driver and fireman of the northbound express) and amongst the seriously injured were Mr. and Mrs. Burbidge who were travelling to spend Christmas with relatives in Nottingham. Mr. Burbidge was taken to the Three Counties Asylum (which later became Fairfield Hospital and is now converted to flats and called Fairfield Hall) where he died on the 18th of January 1877. Several doctors prognosed that Mrs. Burbidge would not survive and she was taken to the nearby Lamb Inn (now long-gone) but she laid there for three years. It was then decided that she should be taken to Nottingham but she was so ill and weak that the journey was abandoned. A house was acquired for her in Walsworth Road Hitchin, where she stayed in continuous pain until her death in 1909, nearly 33 years after the accident, never again having left the house or, indeed, her bed. Another more fortunate casualty of the accident was Mr. J. F. Welsh who was seriously injured and laid in Hitchin Hospital for two years. He did eventually recover and resumed his studies at Oxford. He was ordained and became Bishop of Trinidad in 1905. Information Source: Lawson Thompson Scrapbooks, Hitchin Museum.