Town in Hertfordshire, England
Hemel Hempstead
Hemel Hempstead has a Magic Roundabout, a Jellicoe water garden, a Henry VIII charter and one of Britain's biggest peacetime explosions. Quite the résumé for a new town.
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Key information
- County
- Hertfordshire
- Nation
- England
- Population
- around 90,000 (2021 Census)
- Known for
- Post-war new town, Jellicoe's Water Gardens, the Magic Roundabout, the 2005 Buncefield explosion, John Dickinson's paper mills
- Famous people
- John Dickinson, Geoffrey Jellicoe, Henry VIII (who gave the town its charter)
- Football clubs
- Hemel Hempstead Town (the Tudors)
About Hemel Hempstead
A Tudor market town that became a post-war experiment
Hemel Hempstead is a split personality. The Old Town, with its Norman church and a high street running down towards the River Gade, was granted a charter by Henry VIII in 1539. That Tudor link is why the local football club are known as the Tudors. Then, in 1947, the place was picked as one of the first of the new towns built to take families out of bombed London. A market town of around 20,000 people was rapidly expanded into a planned town several times that size, with neighbourhoods, a new centre and new industry laid out on the drawing board.
The garden designer who gave a town centre a river
The landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe drew up the master plan. His big idea was to use the Gade valley as the heart of the new town, rather than building over it. The result is the Water Gardens, a long ribbon of pools, fountains, bridges and lawns running through the town centre. Created in the 1950s and 60s, they are a striking piece of post-war design, and people who know their landscape history travel to see them.
Why Hemel's Magic Roundabout is one of the scariest on the map
Swindon gets most of the credit, but Hemel Hempstead has its own Magic Roundabout at the Plough. It is a ring of mini-roundabouts wrapped around a larger central one, built in the 1970s. It is one of those junctions that sends visiting drivers into a mild panic and locals through without a second thought. It is also the town's best-known piece of road folklore.
The paper machine that started at Apsley
Long before the new town, Hemel's valley ran on water power and paper. John Dickinson set up at Apsley and Nash Mills, and in 1809 he patented a cylinder mould machine that changed how paper was made. The Dickinson mills stretched along the Gade and the Grand Union Canal, and later the firm was behind stationery names such as Basildon Bond. The canal and the early railway at Boxmoor tell the same story: this was a place for moving goods towards London. In the new-town era, the company that put Hemel on the map was Kodak, whose big UK base was here.
The morning the sky went off
On 11 December 2005 a series of explosions tore through the Buncefield oil depot on the edge of town. It registered 2.4 on the Richter scale and is one of Britain's largest peacetime industrial explosions. It was felt and heard across much of southern England. The fire sent up an enormous black plume, visible from space, and burned for days. Remarkably, nobody was killed, because it happened before the working week began. The disaster led to tighter safety rules for fuel storage across the country.
Roman baths, commons and a football club
Gadebridge Park hides a Roman secret: the remains of a villa, with an impressive bath house, excavated in the 1960s. A short walk away, Boxmoor's common land is still managed by a trust with ancient roots, which keeps a swathe of green open beside the canal and railway. On match days the town's sporting identity is Hemel Hempstead Town, the Tudors, who grew out of the old Apsley club of 1885. The Hemel Stags carry the town's name in rugby league.