A County of Small Towns extract

Taken from Chapter 12: The establishment and development of Watford

It is one of the later editions of Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, that of 1778, which tells us how large: ‘upon the river is a large silk manufactory, which is three storeys high and has 33 sash windows on each side; it employs an hundred persons’. This included paupers from the parish workhouse, although Defoe does not mention that. Manufacturing industry had come to Watford.

The silk manufactory was built of brick, as was the three-storey workhouse that was built in the churchyard in 1721. To what extent the rest of the town’s buildings at this period were also of brick is difficult to judge. Brayley and Britton, in their Beauties of England and Wales, describe Watford as ‘a large, populous, and busy town; the houses are principally of brick; many of them are respectable and handsome buildings’. Among these would have been Frogmore House, a three storey house of 1716 (grade II* listed) built, unusually for a gentleman’s residence, at the lower, river, end of the town. Originally it had extensive grounds which stretched from the main highway to the river. Two other large houses higher up the High Street were also built in the eighteenth century: Benskin House, of 1775, another three-storey building which survives as Watford’s museum (grade II listed); and Sedgwick House, the home of another brewing family and once equally grand, which was demolished for widening of the High Street. Watford House, once another gentleman’s residence, was demolished even earlier, in the 1890s, for the development of shops.

Two other handsome buildings which might have caught the visitor’s eye were Watford Place, the third house of this name, built in about 1797 in the midst of large grounds to the west of the High Street (grade II listed, now in King Street) and Elizabeth Fuller’s Free School of 1704 in the churchyard (grade II* listed, with, like Frogmore House, some of its original interior fittings). The Free School was the result of another charitable bequest and was established to educate sixty poor boys and girls. Mrs Fuller and her three husbands can be seen as examples of the new kind of people who might choose to live in Watford: professional people or wealthy merchants whose working life was spent in London but who saw Watford as a suitable place for a country house.62 Her first husband, Thomas Hobson, was a barrister of the Inner Temple, but he came from Bushey and bought Watford Place as a country home. Her second husband was also a London lawyer but he too was happy to spend some time in Watford. Her third husband, Edward Fuller, lived near her London home and as a Freeman of the City of London and Master of the Livery Company of Joiners he, too, spent much of his time in London, but the Fullers kept on Watford Place and, towards the end of her life, Mrs Fuller spent most of her time in Watford, where she was able to keep a close eye on her school.