Hertfordshire Power Flushing

 

We Power Flush heating systems in these Hertfordshire towns:

Watford
Hemel Hempstead
Stevenage
St Albans
Welwyn Garden City
Cheshunt
Hoddesdon
Bishop’s Stortford
Hatfield
Borehamwood
Hitchin
Letchworth
Harpenden
Hertford
Bushey
Radlett

 

 

Hertfordshire (audio speaker iconlisten); often abbreviated Herts) is a home county in southern England. It is bounded to the north by Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, to the east by Essex, to the south by Greater London, and to the west by Buckinghamshire. It is classified as part of the East of England region by the government.

Hertfordshire has an area of 634.366 square miles (1,643.00 km2). It gets its name from a hart (stag) and a ford, which are depicted on the county’s coat of arms and on the flag. Hertfordshire County Council is headquartered in Hertford, which was once the county’s main market town and is now the county seat. Watford is the largest settlement.

Letchworth has served as the prototype garden city since 1903, and Stevenage was the first town to expand under postwar Britain’s New Towns Act of 1946.

Hertfordshire had a population of approximately 1,140,700 people in 2013, with Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage, Watford, and St Albans (the county’s only city) each having between 50,000 and 100,000 people.

With around 47,000 residents, Welwyn Garden City, Hoddesdon, and Cheshunt are close behind.

Elevations rise in the north and west, reaching over 800 feet (240 meters) in the Chilterns near Tring. The county is centered on the headwaters and upper valleys of the rivers Lea and Colne, both of which flow south and are accompanied by canals. The undeveloped land in Hertfordshire is mostly agricultural, with much of it protected by green-belt policies. Services have grown to be the most important sector of the country’s economy. Hertfordshire is well-connected by motorways and railways to London, the Midlands, and the North.

For more information on local places and districts, see the List of places in Hertfordshire and List of settlements in Hertfordshire by population articles.

 

HISTORY

The county’s landmarks span centuries, from the Six Hills in Stevenage built by locals during the Roman period to Leavesden Film Studios. The volume of intact medieval and Tudor buildings exceeds that of London in places, particularly in well-preserved conservation areas such as St Albans, which includes the remains of the Roman town of Verulamium.

Hertfordshire was assigned to a fortress built at Hertford during the reign of Edward the Elder in 913. Hertford comes from the Anglo-Saxon heort ford, which means “deer crossing” (of a watercourse). The name Hertfordshire appears for the first time in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1011. Many county emblems include deer. Many of the current settlements’ names date back to the Anglo-Saxon period, with many featuring standard Anglo-Saxon placename suffixes: “ford”, “ton”, “den”, “bourn”, “ley”, “stead”, “ing”, “lett”, “wood”, and “worth” are represented in this county by Hertford, Royston, Harpenden, Redbourn, Cuffley, Wheathampstead, Tring, Radlett, Borehamwood and Rickman

Hertfordshire has evidence of human life dating back to the Mesolithic period. It was first farmed during the Neolithic period, and permanent settlements appeared at the start of the Bronze Age. During the Iron Age, tribes settled in the area, and this was followed by tribes settling in the area.

Following the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, the aboriginal Catuvellauni quickly submitted and adapted to Roman life, resulting in the establishment of several new towns, including Verulamium (St Albans), where the first recorded British martyrdom is traditionally thought to have occurred in c. 293. Saint Alban, a Romano-British soldier, was beheaded on Holywell Hill in place of a Christian priest. His martyr’s cross of a yellow saltire on a blue field is reflected in Hertfordshire’s flag and coat of arms as the yellow field to the county’s stag or Hart. He is Hertfordshire’s patron saint.

After the Roman Legions withdrew in the early fifth century, the now-unprotected territory was invaded and colonized by the Anglo-Saxons. The majority of the modern county was part of the East Saxon kingdom by the 6th century. This relatively short-lived kingdom fell apart in the 9th century, ceding control of Hertfordshire to the West Anglians of Mercia. After the merger of the West Saxon and Mercian kingdoms in the 10th century, the region became an English shire.

Hertfordshire was on the front lines of much of the fighting during the Norse invasions. In his reconquest of Norse-held lands in what was to become England, King Edward the Elder established a “burh” or fort in Hertford to quell Norse activity in the area. His father, King Alfred the Great, established the River Lea as a boundary between his kingdom and that of the Norse lord Guthrum, with the county’s north and east falling within the Danelaw. However, there is little evidence of Norse placenames in this region, and many Anglo-Saxon features have survived to this day. However, the county was subjected to renewed Norse raids from the late 10th to early 11th centuries, as armies led by Danish kings Swein Forkbeard and Cnut the Great harried the country in their attempts to undermine and overthrow English king Athelred the Unready.

A century later, at Berkhamsted, William of Normandy received the surrender of the remaining senior English Lords and Clergy, resulting in the new Anglicised title of William the Conqueror, before entering London unopposed and being crowned at Westminster. Some of the new Norman castles in Hertfordshire were built at Bishop’s Stortford and King’s Langley, a staging post between London and the royal residence of Berkhamsted.

The county was listed in the Domesday Book as having nine hundreds. Tring and Danais merged to form Dacorum, a name derived from Danis Corum, or Danish rule, which harkened back to a Viking, rather than a Saxon, past. Braughing, Broadwater, Cashio, Edwinstree, Hertford, Hitchin, and Odsey were the other seven.

St. Albans Abbey was an early drafting location for what would become the Magna Carta during the Plantagenet period. St. Albans was also the site of two major battles between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists during the later Wars of the Roses.

Hatfield House was frequently visited by Queen Elizabeth I during the Tudor period. Stuart King James I used the location for hunting and facilitated the construction of a waterway, the New River, which supplied drinking water to London.

As London grew in importance, Hertfordshire became conveniently close to the English capital; much of the area was owned by the nobility and aristocracy, and this patronage aided the local economy. The greatest boost to Hertfordshire, however, came during the Industrial Revolution, when the population increased dramatically. In 1903, Letchworth became the world’s first garden city and Stevenage became the first town to redevelop under the New Towns Act 1946.

Cuffley was the site of the first zeppelin crash over the United Kingdom during WWI.

Borehamwood was home to one of the major British film studio complexes, including the MGM-British Studios, from the 1920s until the late 1980s. Many well-known films, including the first three Star Wars films, were made here (IV, V, & VI). The name Elstree was commonly used by the studios. Stanley Kubrick, an American director, not only used to shoot in those studios but also lived in the area until his death. There have been episodes of Big Brother UK and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire filmed there. Elstree is where EastEnders is filmed. Hertfordshire has seen development at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden, where the Harry Potter series and the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye were filmed. 

The Hatfield rail crash killed four people and injured over 70 others on October 17, 2000.

The crash exposed Railtrack’s flaws, resulting in speed restrictions and major track replacement. The second of the Potters Bar rail accidents occurred on May 10, 2002, killing seven people; the train was traveling at high speed when it derailed and flipped into the air when one of the carriages slid along the platform and came to rest.

The 2005 Hemel Hempstead fuel depot explosions occurred at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal in early December 2005.

 

GEOGRAPHY

Hertfordshire is the county to the north of London, and it is part of the East of England region, which is primarily a statistical unit.

Essex is to the east, Buckinghamshire is to the west, and Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire are to the north. A sizable proportion of the population in all districts commutes to Central London.

The county’s boundaries were roughly fixed by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844, which abolished exclaves; amended in 1965 by the London Government Act 1963, when East Barnet Urban District and Barnet Urban District were abolished, their area was transferred to form part of the present-day London Borough of Barnet and the Potters Bar Urban District of Middlesex was transferred to Hertfordshire.

The county’s highest point is located on the Ridgeway long distance national path, on the border of Hastoe near Tring and Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire, at 244 m (801 ft) (AOD).

According to the 2011 census, East Hertfordshire had the lowest population density (290 people per km2) and Watford had the highest (4210 per km2). Hertfordshire lacks large towns or cities on the scale of Luton or Milton Keynes, whose populations exceed 200,000, but its overall population (approximately 1 million) is greater than those of the two aforementioned counties.

The River Lea near Harpenden flows through Wheathampstead, Welwyn Garden City, Hertford, Ware, and Broxbourne before joining the River Thames at Cheshunt. The Chiltern Hills, which surround Tring, Berkhamsted, and the Ashridge estate, are the most hilly in the county. This Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty stretches from near Hitchin in the north to Berkshire and Oxfordshire in the south.

Watford, Hemel Hempstead, Kings Langley, Rickmansworth, St. Albans, Harpenden, Radlett, Borehamwood, Potters Bar, Stevenage, Hatfield, Welwyn and Welwyn Garden City, Hitchin, Letchworth, and Baldock are among the county’s major settlements. These are all small to medium-sized towns, with a mix of post-World War II new towns and older/more historical settings. The city of St. Albans is an example of a historical settlement, as its cathedral and abbey date from the Norman period, and ruins from the Roman settlement of Verulamium can be found near the current city center. Stevenage is a mix of post-World War II new town planning and its previous life as a smaller town. Stevenage’s Old Town represents this historic core, with many shops and buildings reflecting its pre-WWII heritage. Hitchin also has a historic center, with many Tudor and Stuart-era buildings mixed in with more modern structures.

The eastern regions of Hertfordshire are predominantly rural and arable, with villages and small to medium-sized towns interspersed. In this regard, Royston, Buntingford, and Bishops Stortford, as well as Ware and the county town of Hertford, are important settlements. Eastern Hertfordshire’s physical geography is less elevated than that of the far west, with lower rising hills and prominent rivers such as the Stort. This river begins in Essex and ends near Ware at a confluence with the Lea. Aside from the Lea and Stort, the River Colne is the county’s main watercourse in the west. This runs near Watford and Radlett, with a complex system/drainage area that extends south into both Greater London and Buckinghamshire.

The Pasqueflower, a purple star-shaped flower with yellow stamens, has an unofficial status as one of the county’s endemic flowers.

 

ECONOMY

This is a table of trends in Hertfordshire’s regional gross value added at current basic prices, with figures in millions of British Pounds Sterling.

Some very large employers have their main operational and/or headquarters UK site in Hertfordshire. From north to south, clockwise:

MBDA develops missiles in Stevenage (a subsidiary of BAE Systems, Airbus, and Finmeccanica). Airbus (Defence & Space Division) manufactures satellites in the same town.

De Havilland developed the first commercial jet liner, the Comet, at Hatfield. The site is now a business park and the University of Hertfordshire’s new campus. This major job site is notable for hosting EE, Computacenter, and Ocado grocery and other goods e-commerce.

Welwyn Garden City is home to Tesco’s UK headquarters, the UK Cereal Partners factory, and Roche UK’s pharmaceutical headquarters (subsidiary of the Swiss Hoffman-La Roche). GlaxoSmithKline has manufacturing facilities in Ware and Stevenage.

Dixons Carphone has a large presence in Hemel Hempstead.

St Albans is home to the National Pharmacy Association (NPA), the trade association for UK pharmacies.

Pure’s plant in Kings Langley manufactures DAB digital radios.

National corporations headquartered in Watford include JD Wetherspoon, Camelot Group, Bathstore, and Caversham Finance (BrightHouse). It is also the UK headquarters of multinational corporations such as Hilton Worldwide, Total Oil, TK Maxx, Costco, JJ Kavanagh and Sons, Vinci, and Beko. The Grove hotel hosted the 2006 World Golf Championship as well as the 2013 Bilderberg Conference. Warner Bros. has owned and operated its main UK base, Warner Studios, in Leavesden, Watford, since the 2000s.

Skanska is staying in Rickmansworth.