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Smallford grew up around a railway station that no longer exists, and the old line it once served is now one of the nicest cycling and walking routes between St Albans and Hatfield.
Smallford sits quietly between Hatfield and St Albans, a small settlement that has spent most of its history defined less by grand landmarks than by the roads and railway that ran through it. It falls within the parishes of St Peter and St Stephen, and for a long time was known simply as a hamlet, three miles east of St Albans, unremarkable in the way that suits a village perfectly well.
The railway arrived here in February 1866, when a station opened as part of the Great Northern Railway's branch line from Hatfield to St Albans. It was originally named Springfield, but on the 1st of October 1879 it was renamed Smallford, giving the settlement around it the identity it's kept ever since. The station closed to passengers in October 1951 and shut completely in January 1969, one more small casualty of the mid-century contraction of Britain's branch line network.
A village can outlive the thing that made it famous. Smallford's station is long gone, but the name it gave the place never left.
What happened next is arguably Smallford's best modern story. The old Hatfield and St Albans Railway line, once carrying steam trains through the village, was converted into the Alban Way, a traffic-free cycling and walking path that now runs along much of the old route. Where trains once rattled through, walkers and cyclists now follow the same corridor at a rather more leisurely pace.
Smallford's station history hasn't been forgotten. A heritage project, "Bringing the History of Smallford Station to Life," received funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund in November 2012 specifically to document the station's history and its impact on the local community, a genuinely thoughtful piece of local preservation for a station that most visitors today would never know had existed.
Smallford doesn't ask for much attention, and that's rather the point of visiting it. It's the kind of place best experienced on foot or by bike, following the Alban Way through and pausing to notice the quiet evidence of a railway history that shaped the whole village even after the trains stopped running.
Come and walk or cycle the Alban Way through Smallford, and you'll be tracing a route that carried passengers for nearly a century before being handed over to walkers and cyclists instead. It's a small village with a genuinely satisfying story, if you take the time to look for it.
The Social Martini is proud to connect the people and stories that make Smallford special. 🍸