About
This website serves Smallford residents and provides information about Smallford’s past, present and future. Smallford and its surrounding areas are steeped in history, including the aerodrome at Hatfield, De Havilland’s airplane manufacture, the world’s first jet airliner (the Comet) and much more.
Station Project
Welcome to the Smallford Station & Alban Way Heritage Society homepage. On this site you will find all the latest information about the society, workshops and associated activities in one handy place. If you’d like to get involved or find out more, click the button below!
SRA
Smallford Residents’ Association (incorporating Sleapshyde) announcements and information will be posted on this website. Please check it frequently for important news and updates. Here, you will find information about planning proposals, objections, and much more that concern the local community.
We are thrilled to have received the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and are confident the project will support many local people in following and developing their interests in a wide range of areas – e.g. researching, interviewing, creating videos, designing exhibitions, developing a website, writing stories. We are particularly excited at the thought of finding people who recall the station and branch line when they were operating and capturing their memories for posterity!
Jeff LewisLatest Smallford News
Latest news for the local community of Smallford
The new road attracts
The Trust of the turnpike road, which came into use in the 1760s, felt there was a need to establish a toll gate at the cross roads, and a corner-facing brick-built tollkeeper’s house was constructed.The toll gate encouraged the siting of a public house – the Three...
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Smallford and the Four Wants
This map was drawn by Dury and Andrews in 1766, and was surveyed a few years before the Reading and Hatfield Turnpike Trust arrived to toll the Hatfield road (the west-east road in the top third of the map below). To the left is the hamlet of Smallford, named Small...
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Where is Smallford here?
This map, made by William Kip and printed a full two centuries before the first Ordnance Survey map (1834), helps us to understand why all maps are not the same. On the Kip map Smallford is not even marked and named, but that is not to say there was no farm or...
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A stream to ford
The topography suggests that, between them, Boggy Mead Spring and Butterwick Brook, both of which are still viable streams, could have been referred to in the name Smallford. The ford was across the lower end of Colney Heath Lane, which, today, has been culverted, and...
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Down at the small ford
Small rural hamlets are always vulnerable to population changes, resulting from land-owner needs, epidemic diseases, extreme poverty, the impulse to move on, and shifts in agricultural practices. But there seems to be little doubt that this was the earliest community...
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Original Settlement of Smallford
Our understanding is that the original location of this hamlet was around Smallford Farm at the lower end of Colney Heath Lane. The farm homestead lies back from the north-east side of the road, and today is close to the A414 St Albans Bypass (North Orbital). The...
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