Oxhey Place, the estate's first clinic (site)
Drag the round handle to slide between the old map (left) and today (right). On a phone, tap the map once to move it.
Then
The Blackwells' mansion, later known locally as the Big House, was new when the county history described it in 1908. After the London County Council bought the estate, Watford Rural District Council requisitioned the house in April 1946, and part of it became offices for the LCC's surveyors and contractors. The house and a building beside it held the estate's first doctors' surgery and clinic. A county maternity and child welfare clinic used rooms in the old staff quarters, and one account puts the very first surgery in a stable-like building next door. A resident remembers being taken here in the early 1950s to see the doctor and to collect dried milk and cod liver oil. Nissen huts stood beside it in 1953. A new health centre opened on Oxhey Drive in 1957. The district council bought the house in 1958 to make it a social centre, but then decided to build a new social centre instead and pull the house down. Poor But Proud says the house had stood boarded up for about a year when fire gutted most of it on 4 July 1960, and it was demolished that summer.18,58,59,108,118,119,122,126,146,153,165,176,279,281,596,706
Now
The 1960s Ordnance Survey shows an empty plot here. In 2012 Poor But Proud described the site as taken up by the Centre, the leisure centre that opened in Gosforth Lane in 2002, together with houses and flats. The leisure centre still stands in this area today.
Position from old Ordnance Survey maps and OpenStreetMap. See Sources and method.