St John’s Church, Heronsgate In 1838, a People’s Charter was drawn up which had six demands: universal manhood suffrage, secret ballot voting, abolition of property qualifications for MPs, payment of MPs, equal electoral districts, and annual elections. The Charter was presented to the House of Commons the following year, having gained over 1.25 million signatures. […]Read Post ›

The First World War ended on 11th November 1918 and within three days the Rickmansworth Urban District Council were seeking ways to commemorate the dead. The routine Council meeting took place on 14th and there was immediate, extraordinary business because the local benefactor (2nd) Lord Ebury had died a day earlier. A letter of condolence […]Read Post ›

Henry Wood was born on 3 March 1869 in Oxford Street, London, a short distance east of Oxford Circus, where his father ran a jeweller’s business. He took piano and organ lessons from an early age and enrolled as a 17-year-old student at the Royal Academy of Music in 1886. He began to build a […]Read Post ›

BUT the only Englishman to attain the Ecclesiastical Heights – Pope Adrian IV Nicholas Breakspear was born c.1100 at Breakspear Farm in the hamlet of Bedmond in the Parish of Abbots Langley.  His father had become a monk in St Albans Abbey possibly to escape poverty farming in Bedmond.   Nicholas’ father must to have had […]Read Post ›

The early days of any business more than a century old are always difficult to trace. The founders were too busy trying to make money to have time to record how and when they began their enterprise. Although Salter’s brewery provided beer to dozens of pubs in and around Rickmansworth for more than 170 years, […]Read Post ›

The Orchard – Voysey family home in Chorleywood Charles Voysey has rightly been called “An Architect of Individuality”. He was also one whose influence on the development of domestic architecture in this country is quite remarkable. His legacy is strong and lasting despite the relatively small number of buildings he produced during his career. Charles […]Read Post ›

The Grove Entrance Today, the Grove is a luxury hotel and spa, where you can escape the pressures of everyday life with a massage or a spot of golf. However, the history of the Grove goes back many centuries, and it’s full of tales of ghosts and lavish royal parties. During the reign of Queen […]Read Post ›

Abbots Langley, shown here in the 1950s, has three links to the Whitechapel Murders In the late Victorian era, London was rocked by a series of murders. The perpetrator would never be caught, but he would achieve worldwide infamy under the name Jack the Ripper. This moniker came from a letter addressed to the police, written […]Read Post ›

Airfield Buildings at Warner Brother Studios Now home to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour, the 80 hectare site of Leavesden studios was once occupied by an aircraft factory and airfield. When the de Havilland company entered into a contract with the Ministry of Defence, a new site was required in which to produce the planes […]Read Post ›