13 Jan 2026
Tim Abbott, chair of Highfield Park Trust, offers a personal view on the green space the organisation oversees…
This year will be a milestone year for Highfield Park Trust as we celebrate our 30th anniversary.
Created in 1996, the Trust is the custodian of Highfield Park, which is the only charity funded and managed park in St Albans. This was a bold and imaginative move by the district council and was clearly not without risk. Hill End and Cell Barnes Hospitals were to close, 800 new homes built on the site and a new publicly accessible green space for St Albans created. But Highfield Park would receive no financial support from the local authority.
St Albans is blessed with several exceptional parks. Clarence Park is a beautiful urban green space, whilst Verulamium Park is much larger and stands on the former site of the
Roman settlement. It is deeply historic, close to the city centre and is a natural attraction for visitors to our wonderful city. A visit to the Cathedral and the Waffle House completes a great day out.
By comparison, Highfield Park is the new kid on the block. Located to the south-east of St Albans, it is perfectly situated for the expected challenges in the years ahead.
There was a lot to do in the early years. Not only did we need to create the park, but we also had to work closely with the developers of the new housing stock and support the building of the new local centre, with its retail units and doctor’s surgery.
The initial priority was to lay down the car parks to avoid later disagreements with the incoming residents and from there the master plan started to emerge. New features were established to supplement the existing arboretum, a stunning legacy from the Edwardian hospital gardeners.
The Village Green, Mediterranean Garden and Millenium Maze were all created. We worked with St Albans City Youth FC to transform the football fields and planted extensive areas of new woodland.
We also developed a Tree Trail, enhancing the fabulous trees that we inherited from our hospital forebears. This now extends to two miles and contains 40 points of interest.
We planted Hither Wood on additional land that we were able to lease from Oaklands College. In total, 7,500 native trees were planted between 2012 and 2013. The last tree was planted by the Duchess of Edinburgh in a very special day for the Trust. Our new wood is thriving and is a wonderful addition to the park.
Visitors often comment on the character of Highfield and the variety of spaces to be enjoyed. In this sense we feel very different from the other green spaces in St Albans.
In 2018 we built our new home, the Highfield Park Visitor Centre. We saw an opportunity to improve both our finances and increase the community benefit that we could deliver. Needless to say, we are all very proud of the finished result. The Visitor Centre has already transformed our work and there is still much more potential waiting to be tapped as we grow in the years ahead.
At the inception of the Trust, our trustees were worried that our resources would not sustain us for the duration of our nominal 150-year life. The financial crisis highlighted the problem and since then we have worked incredibly hard to develop new income generating strategies. We are becoming more resilient and hopefully this trend will continue. In recent times, our efforts have started to be recognised and we have been asked to talk about our achievements to other organisations and charities.
We are determined to make the park the best we can and have recently repaired a significant stretch of footpath through Monks Meadow and Cherry Green. We have invested in new play equipment and we will shortly start replacing notice boards and signage.
There remains a long list of improvements that we want to make. Larger projects include the restoration of Cell Barnes Pond, additional car parking and ultimately, the elusive café.
We operate differently from other parks in the area by employing our own workforce. We believe that this builds a greater sense of community with regular park users who frequently engage with our ground staff or pop into the Visitor Centre for a chat. It is during some of these discussions that we realise just how much the park touches the lives of so many people. It is a special place, where memories are made and wellbeing improved.
Maintaining all green spaces is important and the sense of community that exists in Highfield is something we cherish.
Although we offer several volunteering routes our ‘Highfield Helpers’ make the most difference to our work. The group has been running for 15 years and turn out every Tuesday whatever the weather, fuelled only by tea, cake and banter. We are extremely grateful for all they do.
There can be no doubt that the decision by the local authority to establish Highfield as a charitable trust has been a huge success. St Albans now benefits from a new rural park at no expense to its taxpayers. If we crudely say that it costs £300K a year to run the park, at today’s prices, we have saved the taxpayers of St Albans £9m over the last 30 years. That’s quite an achievement.
But what does the future hold? Our part of Hertfordshire will see significant change in the years ahead. Construction work on the Strategic Rail Freight Interchange has already started.
The A414 is deemed a development corridor and Bowmans Cross, a new garden village to the south of Colney Heath remains firmly on the agenda. In total it is estimated that Hertfordshire will need an additional 100,000 homes and 50 per cent of these could be built along the A414 corridor.
Local government is also being reorganised into unitary authorities. Hertfordshire County Council and St Albans City and District Council will be replaced by a new authority, options for which have been discussed at length in recent weeks. A proposal has now been sent to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, who will have the final say.
Bowmans Cross, should it proceed, will be a significant undertaking and it seems inconceivable that St Albans and Hertsmere would end up in different authorities.
The same is true for St Albans and Dacorum, who are collaborating more closely on the Hemel Garden Communities proposal.
To my mind, should both Bowmans Cross and Hemel Garden Communities proceed, then St Albans, Dacorum and Hertsmere should all come together and the only proposal to do this, will divide Hertfordshire into two unitary councils, East and West Hertfordshire.
Whatever structure is eventually implemented, the new unitary authority will provide services previously shared between the district and county councils.
The district council currently provides housing, planning, bin collections, car parks and leisure services. The county council is responsible for schools, libraries, roads, caring for children and supporting adults who need help with their daily lives.
The financial issues faced in St Albans have been widely reported and it is known that budgets are currently being challenged by an increase in homelessness.
Equally, adult social care costs dominate the existing HCC budget. Five years ago, adult social care costs in Hertfordshire were £339m or 36 per cent of the total
spend. Today the spend is £512m or 44 per cent of the total. Through a Freedom of Information request, HCC confirmed that they expect these costs to rise by another 22 per cent by the 2029/30 financial year. At the same time, the economy is not expected to grow by more than two per cent a year. This is clearly not a sustainable situation and something has to change.
By design the new unitary councils will have more scope to find savings. As a consequence, there must be a risk that the other services we currently enjoy will start coming under even greater pressure. Local authorities do not have a statutory duty to provide green spaces and given the choice between providing life enhancing care or maintaining a green space, where would you make the cut?
In St Albans it would appear that a new central parish council could also be established. This process is being managed through another Community Governance Review led by SADC. The need to protect green spaces and historic assets have been identified as being key reasons for the creation of such a body.
Highfield demonstrates that alternative approaches are possible and Hemel Garden Communities, an aspirational new development programme, has a ‘stewardship’ working group exploring such options. As the cash runs dry, the stewardship principles of Ebenezer Howard and the original garden city movement are starting to resurface.
Although we operate with financial independence from the local authority, we rely on it to make timely decisions to support our day-to-day operations. It is really important that the services we rely on are not degraded. These include management of tree protection orders to enable works, TENS licences to hold events, licences to be able to let our properties and to a lesser extent planning related matters.
Richard Roberts, the former leader of Hertfordshire County Council warned against Hertfordshire becoming another Middlesex at the 2024 Building Futures Conference. There is clear and present danger, and the reintroduction of top-down housing targets has probably exasperated the situation. Hertsmere is being forced to reevaluate their Local Plan and the Bowmans Cross website is currently being refreshed.
Of course, the contrary argument is that people need somewhere to live and we should never forget this.
But if we assume that this development will occur, how do we ensure that our green space is suitably protected? We must not become part of Greater London.
The Trust has another 120 years left on its lease, which is a good starting point. The park is also perfectly situated to buffer St Albans from the development risk to the south.
In 2023, in response to the Local Plan consultation, we provided a bold vision of what an enlarged Highfield Park could look like in 2075.
The land in question sits between the park and the A414. It is predominantly owned by Hertfordshire County Council, although Oaklands College is also a significant landowner.
The thought process with the county council was relatively straight-forward; to offset the land lost to Green Belt development, the Trust could lease this land, enabling the park to be enlarged and St Albans protected.
This can only occur after the existing farm tenancies have ended and the Trust would not wish to do anything to adversely affect our farming neighbours. We would also need to ensure that Oaklands see value in any change of use with their land. If we are to be successful, we must create win-win scenarios and importantly, the Trust has to be match-fit to take on these additional responsibilities.
We started to identify what an enlarged park might look like, and we now need to explore these ideas in more detail. A lot of the area is safeguarded under the minerals plan, at least until the existing farm tenancies end. But if in the medium-term minerals are to be extracted, could a new lake be created? In London Colney, the lakes created by Tarmac have become a brilliant new asset. Ultimately, the Trust would like to link up with Knights Wood, also owned by HCC, which is immediately adjacent to the A414. This would allow us to create a wildlife corridor to the main park, at the very least.
The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. Buglife reported a 60 per cent reduction in flying insects between 2004 and 2021. The 2023 State of Nature Report reveals that the species of animals and plants found in the UK have declined, on average, by 19 per cent since monitoring began in the 1970s and that 16 per centof wildlife species are threatened with extinction from Great Britain. These are truly shocking statistics and something clearly needs to change.
Officers at Hertfordshire have worked hard to create a new Local Nature Recovery Strategy, which has just been published. The strategy is not a fixed blueprint, it is an enabling framework with identified priorities such as woodland expansion, wetland restoration, and pollinator-friendly landscapes. The strategy also highlights the importance of traditional orchards, of which Highfield has two.
Striking the correct balance between the needs of mother nature and an increasing population will not be an easy balance to strike. It never is. But it is important to recognise that people also need to have access to green space for recreational activities and wellbeing.
In the coming months the Trust will reach out to individuals and organisations with a view to creating a masterplan of what could be achieved, if all stakeholders can work together. We would appear to be limited only by our imagination. A wild belt around St Albans would be a fantastic aspiration. We can start by considering the area south of Highfield.
Many of these thoughts are not new and they were first discussed in the Watling Chase Community Forest Plan in the 1990s. Watling Chase fell out of favour when central government funding ceased, and Hertfordshire County Council focused on countryside management instead. Hertfordshire has a dearth of country parks compared to Essex, although the creation of new parks appears to be back in vogue. One has to be created at the Strategic Rail Freight Interchange and another forms part of the Hemel Garden Communities proposal.
In a huge touch of irony, a potential name for the new country park on the site of the Rail Freight Depot is Watling Chase Country Park. Somebody understands what could have been.
Since Hertfordshire County Council will no longer exist, the new unitary authorities will need to decide their countryside policies. As may be expected, I am an advocate of country parks and community forests. They would also boost green tourism, a cherished objective of Visit Herts, before its recent demise.
The stage is beginning to be set. A new Hertfordshire will emerge and we need to ensure that the generations who follow us do not look back on the events of the next 50 years and wonder on our stupidity.
An enlarged Highfield Park would be perfectly positioned to buffer St Albans from the expected development to the south of our beautiful city. There is an opportunity to create something very special.
We have to seize the moment whilst we can.
