Donald Hodson describes his growing family's house-moves within Hatfield.
Gerald Model came to Hatfield to set up a new Chiropody practice. He comments on the changes he saw, living in the Roe Green area of Hatfield after he moved to Hatfield from St Albans in 1959:
“There is a line of houses for Irish men who weren’t married that used to come here just to work on the town”
Gwen Marshall recalls her thoughts on the development of the Hemel Hempstead New Town.
Occupancy rates are calculated on old data and censuses, but people can't be expected to keep living the same way forever.
Because of the war both skills and materials were scarce when the New Town Act was approved, and this caused a long delay in the outset of the project.
The Development Corporation policy was to build prevalently traditional two-storey dwellings. The Government influenced the choice of the technique, pushing toward system building.
Devastated areas and overspill population were an enormous problem after WWII. The construction of New Towns was the easy way out, even if not the better solution probably
This excerpt is about setting up a planning office in Nottingham, but it will give you an idea about how the planning offices were working in the first years.
'...They would say 'look that’s the amount of money you’ve got to build a house' if you like, 'building 600 houses that's the amount of money you’ve got.'...'
First Christmas in a new house in new town Hatfield in 1960
Working on the cleanup operation after the 1957 storm damage