Bushey
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Template:Infobox England place with map Bushey (population 24,000) is a town in the Hertsmere borough of Hertfordshire in the East of England. Bushey is near the town of Watford and is part of the London commuter belt. This article covers both Bushey and the neighbouring town of Bushey Heath.
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History
The first written record of Bushey is an account in the Domesday Book, which describes a small agricultural village named 'Bissei' (which later became ‘Biss(h)e’ and then ‘Bisheye’ during the twelfth century) . However, chance archaeological findings of Stone Age tools provide evidence that the area was inhabited as far back as the Palaeolithic period. The town also has links to the Roman occupation of Britain, with the main road running through it being Roman; sites of possible Roman villas being unearthed in the area; and a Roman tessellated pavement was discovered near the road 'Chiltern Avenue'.
The origin of the town’s name ‘Bissei’ is not fully known. An early theory in Reverend J.B. Johnstone’s book 'The Place-Names of England and Wales' states that it may have meant ‘Byssa’s Isle’, and that it started life as a lake-village surrounded by marshes, streams and lakes. However, a more modern theory is that it is simply derived from the Old English word bysce and Old French boisseie, meaning a ‘place covered with wood’. The latter theory could prove more apt, as the town is located on the border of the Chiltern Valleys, which were once covered in dense forests of oak, elm, ash, hazel and juniper.
Bushey Heath’s story begins in the Napoleonic Wars during a large food shortage. To help solve the problem, the government awarded the waste land to the east of Bushey to Bushey landowners to be used as farming; this land was more generally known as Bushey Common. It is doubtful that any of it was actually used to produce food due to the poor, clayey soil conditions, but being 500 feet above the sea and having beautiful and broad views was to give birth to the attractive neighbourhood we know today.
The 19th and 20th Centuries marked the time of most change in Bushey, especially between the years 1860 and 1960. The population rose 28-fold within 200 years, from 856 in 1801, to just under 24,000 today. This expansion was due to many reasons; one of the main being due to the boom in industry caused by the railway in the early 20th century. A result of this was that many new jobs were created in and around Watford, and in the early 1920s Bushey's first council houses were built. More housing was later built for the service families working in defence organisations in Stanmore and Northwood. The expansion eventually died down, due to much of the land in and around Bushey being protected under the green belt after the Second World War.
This same green belt legislation was also partly responsible for the abandonment of the pre-war Edgware to Bushey Heath extension as part of the Northern Heights program of the Northern Line underground railway. The green belt put great restrictions on new development, and the plan was to use the new railway to stimulate new housing around the new route; without the new housing the route was deemed no longer viable. However, as work was advanced at the onset of war the depot was completed for use as bomber manufacture, and following the Second World War and green belt coming into force it was converted into the Aldenham bus depot (of Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday fame), which it remained until 1985, when it became derelict. It was redeveloped in 1996 and is now the Centennial Park[1] industrial estate. Bushey Heath station would have been located at the intersection[2] of the 'Elstree road' and 'Northwestern Avenue'. Conceptual plans existed in the 1903 act of Parliament for an Edgware to Watford railway that would have seen the railway extended at a later date though Bushey village and on to Watford market, though even less came of this than the partially completed Edgware to Bushey Heath stretch.
Stories, legends and folklore
The lack of farming in Bushey Heath meant that it was a heavily wooded area up to the 18th century, and this, added to the lack of street lighting and police, meant that Bushey Heath’s history is full of tales of thieves, highwaymen, and even murder.
According to H. G. Wells' book The War of the Worlds, Bushey Heath was the site where the fourth of ten missiles fired at Earth from Mars landed.
Modern day
Being located near several film studios, Bushey and Bushey Heath frequently feature as backdrops for many film and TV shows. Most notable is a bus scene in the Canon and Ball film (you can see 'Balfour News' as they get off the bus- since taken over by 'Co-op'). Several historic buildings in Bushey, notably the old masonic school, have been used in films such as Nuns on the Run and also the comedy series Little Britain.
Bushey Meads School located in Coldharbour Lane has also been used in the filming of BBC's Grange Hill.
Bushey Heath is known to nearby places for its duck pond (Warren Lake), the Hyundai garage and the sheer number of Estate Agents it houses.
Local heroes
A man who definitely deserves a mention in the history of Bushey was Hubert Herkomer, a poor immigrant from Bavaria who arrived in Bushey in 1874, and ended life in 1914 as Sir Hubert von Herkomer RA CVO. Herkomer visited a friend who lived in Bushey in 1873, fell in love with the nearby Bushey Village, then rented a pair of cottages and a studio near Melbourne Road. With his artistic talents, he founded Herkomer’s Art School at Bushey in 1883, which, in its 21 year life, attracted some 500 students to the area. He is sometimes referred to as having founded Bushey, giving it an artistic reputation and leaving us with the many paintings by his pupils of past life in the town, a lot of which are on display in the Bushey Museum.
At around 1888, he built Lululaund, a Bavarian ‘castle’, which was named after his second wife Lulu Griffiths. Unfortunately, after being married only for a year, she died saving a small child from being run over by a carriage. Lululaund dominated the Bushey skyline until 1939 when it was demolished; although it is said that it was demolished in fear of the running cost, there is speculation as to whether it was destroyed in a fit of anti-German rage at the start of the Second World War. Only the brick arched portal remains today; a lot of the building was used as hardcore for Bovingdon Airfield, and much of the grand carvings inside the castle were burnt. The inhabitants of Bushey have been bitter about the demolition of the castle ever since; not only is it a beautiful building lost, but it would have stood as a symbol of Bushey’s artistic past.
More recently, Bushey was the hometown of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. Bushey is also the hometown of poker player John Gale. The Middlesex, Surrey and England cricketer Mark Ramprakash was also born here.
See also
Phil Gillies, onetime Canadian Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister, was also born in Bushey. Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel, wife of Canadian newspaper baron Conrad Black, is also a Bushey native.