Until the late nineteenth century Harpenden was still a small, mainly agricultural, village but in the years since then it has greatly expanded in area and population. Until 1859 Harpenden and Wheathampstead formed one ecclesiastical parish (the parish of Wheathampstead) although, from an early date, the parish had been divided for tithing and civil purposes. Separate parish registers were kept from the sixteenth century and in 1656 an unsuccessful attempt was made to formally divide the ecclesiastical parish. In 1898, by an Order in Council under the Local Government Act of 1894, Harpenden was formed into an Urban District and remained so until the reorganisation of Local Government in 1974.
The name Harpenden, spelt Herpedene in the earliest known documentary source (AD1060) relates to the topography of the area, from the Old English harped (or herepath) = a military road or highway and denu = valley. In that document, the name refers to the point on the northern side of the town where a Roman Road which ran from Cheshunt to Dunstable came down into the valley in which the town now stands.
As would be expected so near to Verulamium, a major city, artefacts of Roman date have been found in Harpenden and there are the remains of a Roman shrine on the Rothamsted estate; but we do not know what the pattern of settlement at that time was. In the Saxon and early Norman period, settlement at first consisted of isolated farmsteads outlying from Wheathampstead, some of which later developed into hamlets, in Harpendens case,into a village.
It is uncertain when this development took shape in Harpenden. There is no mention in the Domesday Book of a church here (which does not necessarily mean that there was none) but a chapel of ease dedicated to St. Nicholas existed before 1221, and much Norman work survived in the church until it was substantiallyrebuilt in 1862. The topographic evidence suggests that the earliest settlement was south of the church around a green at the northern end of the great triangular common, which was then much larger than it is today.
Parts of this green were gradually colonised by buildings, producing the pattern we see today between High Street and Leyton Road and (on a smaller scale) around the 'The Silver Cup' Public House. Settlement also spread southwards along both margins of the common so that by the eighteenth century, buildings existed along the western side as far south as Hatching Green, although not as a continuous built-up strip.
Between 1563 and 1603 the population of Harpenden and Wheathampstead rose by over a half, although the rise was much the same in the county as a whole. However, the settlement outline in the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century remained much as it had been for the previous four or five centuries. Harpenden achieved rapid growth not from a naturally increasing population but as the result of immigration from outside.
By the time the Ordnance Survey of 1878 was prepared, Harpenden was expanding rapidly with the coming of the railway age. In 1860, the Great Northern Railway company built the (now-abandoned) Kings Cross to Dunstable line. The main Midland Line arrived in 1868. A branch line was added running north of the town to Hemel Hempstead (known as the Nicky Line) which closed to passenger traffic in 1947. It continued to be used for goods traffic until the 1970's, supplying materials for the Hemelite company in Hemel Hempstead and the track bed is now in use as a cycle path.
Cottages, such as those built in Cravells Road on surplus railway land, were an early result of the arrival of the railway. These modest brick terraces provided homes for the increasing number of builders and tradesmen engaged in serving the growing village. The sale of the Pym and Packe Estate (later St. Nicholas Estate) in 1882, and Church Farm (Park View Estate), Manland Common, and Cooters End Farm facilitated the great railway-based suburban growth that gave Harpenden its present-day character.
By the 1890's, the potential of Harpenden as a base for London commuters had begun to be exploited by developers and local builders. The various avenues west of the parish church were laid out to provide spacious, individually-designed houses set in large, well laid out gardens. The new residential architecture of this period typifies the marriage of vernacular revival design with trees and landscaping which stemmed from the work of Norman Shaw at Bedford Park in West London during the 1870's. A variety of informal designs based on traditional or vernacular architecture set in generously planted gardens was seen as an ideal setting for family life, in reaction to the high-density of London's smoke-filled squares and terraces.
During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Harpenden was enriched by a variety of suburban domestic developments. The fringes of the Common in particular have many fine quality houses, displaying a high degree of craftsmanship in decorative timber-framing, brickwork and moulded joinery, difficult to repeat today.
To service the new middle class inhabitants, the High Street and Station Road were redeveloped, largely in the early 1900's, with shops set below decorative brick elevations, complementary to the surrounding residential areas. This mixture of comfortable residential areas and a homely shopping High Street, which grew up to serve them, set the character of Harpenden which exists today.
