Potters Bar

Built around 1800, the original Oakmere House was destroyed by fire whilst being extended. The new building was occupied in the period leading up to the Great War by the Forbes family; Eileen Baillie recalls old Mrs E M Forbes ‘lying on an elegant couch ... having her beautiful hair dressed by her maid in a silvery crown over her head’. The winters during the Great War were particularly cold, and when the lake froze over Mrs Forbes gave permission for the local people to skate there. In 1916, the L31 Zeppelin was shot down and crashed in the farm estate of Oakmere House. The local people rushed to the house and woke Mrs Forbes, who appeared at the door in her night clothes. The excited people told her what had happened; but annoyed at being woken, she replied, ‘All right, we will see to it in the morning!’ and slammed the door in their faces. Parts of the Zeppelin can be seen in Potters Bar’s fine museum at the Wyllyotts Centre. In the 1980s, Oakmere House was converted to a Beefeater restaurant.
An extract from from"Hertfordshire Living Memories".

This is now a busy junction close to the shopping centre; this photograph gives no clue to the traffic jams that were to become so familiar in the near future. The pedestrians can safely cross the road without special signals - the traffic lights seem almost redundant. The M25 is still a pipe dream in the minds of the planners, but already the town has begun to develop. Local stores such as Barkhams, Kirschels and Walkers (centre and right) will soon be joined by branches of the major supermarket chains.
An extract from from"Hertfordshire Living Memories".

This part 16th-century timber-framed building is named after the Wylyot or Williot family, who held the manor in the mid 1300s as an outlier of the manor of South Mimms. The property was once owned by Alderman James Hickson, a city brewer, who left it to the Brewers’ Company to support six almshouses in South Mimms. In 1966, the complex was wholly occupied as council offices, but today it contains a restaurant and a cinema. Also on the site stands the fine museum of the Potters Bar and District Historical Society which was opened in 1990.
An extract from from"Hertfordshire Living Memories".

In 1922 the Vincentian Spanish fathers acquired a plot of land at Hillside in Barnet Road to provide a training facility for young priests to foreign missions. The new building was completed in 1925, but it was destroyed by a V2 rocket in 1945. Several people were killed, and much damage was done to local property. In 1960 a new church, designed by Felix Velerde, was built at a cost of £40,000 and dedicated to St Vincent de Paul and St Louis de Marillac.
An extract from from"Hertfordshire Living Memories".

What life was like for the unfortunate plait children can be gleaned from a Factory Inspector’s report in 1870. He associated their mothers, the plait women, with ‘vacant minds, dirty cottages and neglected children’. The decline of the plait schools was caused mainly by the deterioration of the plait industry; aided by the fact that from 1891 education was not only compulsory, it was also free. The 19th century was a century of Free Trade and this allowed cheap plait imports from Italy and later from China and Japan. Plaits that were sold for one shilling (10p) a score in 1838, were only fetching 3d (1.5p) in 1893. By the 1870s an experienced plaiter’s earnings had dropped to about four shillings a week. In spite of the hardships, straw plaiting provided a much-needed income for the labouring poor and opportunities for the aged and widows, who otherwise would become a burden on the parish. The craft, the way of life of the plaiters, together with their independent spirit, has endured in local memory. At the other end of the social scale, the arrival in the early 19th century of the gentry in the form of the Cooper family provided a noticeable Tory-Anglican form of interference into local affairs. The people of Hemel Hempstead, who during the Middle Ages were ruled by the rector and monks at Ashridge, now found themselves under the stewardship of the gentry who lived at Gadebridge. Indeed, the Cooper family interfered with life in Hemel Hempstead in a way that the Lords of the Manor, the Halsey family, never did. (Dacorum Heritage Trust Ltd) Gadebridge House and estate was purchased for the town by the Hemel Hempstead Borough Council in 1952. The house became a preparatory school for boys until 1963 and was demolished when Kodak bought the site. When Kodak moved the site was developed for housing.
An extract from from"Hemel Hempstead - A History & Celebration".