ESSEX LIBRARIES - INGATESTONE BBC “HANDS ON HISTORY” “TURN-BACK-TIME” – INGATESTONE HIGH STREET – 1900 to 2010 6 NOVEMBER 2010 – 3 DECEMBER 2010
I was asked if I could prepare some photos and documents for the library to tie in with the other Essex Libraries events planned for November - December 2010 which in turn are linked to the current BBC History programmes on the High Street from Victorian times through to the 1970s. As this exhibition, which was originally planned for the public on 6 November and has run through to December, is now showing during the Ingatestone Victorian Christmas Evening, one would expect some Victorian content, but it follows on from that time up to the present day and I will explain why this is so. On being asked to prepare this exhibition, I realised that as I had several relevant photographs and documents from the 1900s through to the 1990s which would probably be unknown to residents I would concentrate on this period and bring things up to date by taking photographs of the same scenes today for comparison purposes, and indeed, the composite “then and now” photos were suggested as part of the BBC Turn-Back-Time project and it has been fun to do these. On choosing this time frame it became apparent that several specific dates in the history of the village and particularly the High Street were important to its development, outside those of the Great Wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the coming of the “Welfare State” and general post-war rising affluence. I would suggest that these dates are: 1. 1959 with the opening of the A12 bypass and the secondary school in Willow Green. 2. 1969 and the completion of the Market Place development and the designation of the High Street as one of the first Conservation Areas in Essex. 3. 1974 with the re-organisation of local government when we moved from the Chelmsford council area and Parliamentary Constituency into Brentwood. Without the bypass most development in the Ingatestone “village envelope”, as it physically became, could not have taken place and quite apart from the electrification of the railway in 1956, this and the demolition of several large old houses for building land and the dramatic rise in private car use for work and pleasure, changed the village enormously and continues to impact on it today. The Market Place alterations meant a new village centre for shops, offices, accommodation and improved parking with better access to Fairfield Recreation Ground and the railway station. The comments of Pevsner on the new buildings fails to take into account the drabness of the area before this re-build. Local government and Parliamentary boundary changes altered the village’s spheres of influence and reference and some would claim we have never really adjusted to these. However, the various architectural losses and socio-political changes are but nothing compared to the ecological and environmental losses and changes since the Second World War in and around the villages of Ingatestone and Fryerning of which many are only now becoming fully aware. That however, is another much larger and complex issue, and indeed, another discussion and exhibition entirely. Robert W Fletcher – Ingatestone, Essex - 3 December 2010.