I spent my childhood just west of Ware across the Hertford road from Chadwell, the ‘source’ of the New River that fills London taps. The large deep brick-lined well is named after St Chad, the apostle of St Augustine who converted the local Saxons that dwelt in and around the ancient town. We lived in a tall house looking out over Ware Mead right opposite the waterworks pumping station that manages the canal reservoir's depth and flow. Just visible out beyond the railway tracks down the centre of the valley were the ‘Manifold Ditch', a sewage outflow, plus the main River Lea right before it flows by Ware’s famous waterside gazebos. Just below the Ware Locks a ford once existed that had been the site of a battle between the advancing Roman legions of Julius Caesar and the local British Trinovantes tribe. Its excavation was an exciting time for a small boy, what with the period shields, swords and spears that came to light.
My father managed the historic Ware factory of Allen & Hanburys, now a GlaxoSmithKline building (William Allen founded the Pharmaceutical Society, the world’s oldest, and the Hanburys, whose grand house was above us up the chalk escarpment, were the local squires). To enable Dad to take the best short cut to his workplace at times when the water meadows were not flooded, he had obtained a giant key that fitted all the water authority’s gates along the meads. We kids used it to trespass widely throughout the canal system. My brother and I never lost that key; it was huge, being designed to fit gates dating back to the making of the New River in the C18th!
I recall in the Fifties the cobblestone barge paths along our stretch of the Lee Navigation were still well used by the horses of bargee families who plied up and down the river. Ware was the capital of the East Anglian malting trade, one reason why Allenburys had their plant there. For many years barley from the Fen Country to the North came by water down the Stort and into the Lea to Ware and Hertford. I believe the McMullen’s family brewery in Hertford is still an active brewing and tied house independent. There were once 200 pubs in Ware, down to 80 in my youth. The local presence of breweries facilitated Ware as a major coaching stop for lodging and refreshment on the Great Cambridge Road north from London. John Gilpin, made famous by William Cowper’s comic ballad, The Diverting History of John Gilpin, ended up there when his runaway horse finally collapsed after his storied 1782 ride up from Edmonton.
I am delighted when I occasionally return to Hertfordshire to travel in the now-landscaped and naturalised Lee Valley Park down towards London. The park was used for water events in the 2012 Summer Olympics as the colourful and cluttered old industrial landscape of the upper Lea Valley is mostly gone. This last winter a pair of sheepskin gloves made decades ago by a small Ware factory finally gave up the ghost on me after many long years of service – how about that for local quality manufacture the likes of which won't be possible again in this globalized world of cheap offshore production !
