Development
During the early part of the 20th Century Great Baddow grew through ribbon development towards Chelmsford and Galleywood. In 1936 Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company opened the Marconi Research Laboratory in Great Baddow (now BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre), bringing together their various radio, television and telephony research teams in a single location. As the electronics industry developed the campus expanded during the 1940s and 1950s to include research into radar, general physics, high voltage, vacuum physics and semiconductors. Great Baddow expanded considerably in the 1950s with the construction of Rothmans Estate, which provided housing for workers at Marconi's and English Electric Valve Company in Chelmsford. The village has continued to expand over subsequent years.
The Vinyards, located in the centre of the old village, was once a fine Georgian house set in attractive wooded grounds which later became a hotel. It was demolished in the 1960s prior to the advent of conservation legislation, to make way for the construction of the Vinyards shopping centre and the Marrable House office block, both constructed with a 'scale, form, layout and architecture' that Chelmsford Council now considers to 'jar with its historic surroundings'. Despite this the shopping centre continues to thrive and, since refurbishment in the 2000s, the flats above are highly regarded and sought after properties. It is expected that Marrable House, described at the time of its construction as 'one of the worst examples of town and country planning in the country' and subsequently once voted as one of England's ugliest buildings, will be demolished and replaced with a more sympathetic mixed use development. A corner of the grounds of the former Vinyards mansion were retained and form a green area to the west of the Vinyards development. A library was also opened on the western edge of the development in September 1981, replacing the former building in Bell Street.
In 1967 a fire station was opened in Great Baddow to replace the former station which occupied a converted hut in Brewery Fields, Galleywood, once part of the Galleywood race course complex.
Great Baddow has five pubs – The White Horse, The Blue Lion, The Kings Head, The Beehive and The Star. The former Baddow Brewery, owned by the Baddow Brewery Co Ltd, built in 1868 and extended in 1878 by George Scamell, is now a Grade II building. Great Baddow is also home to the Pontlands Park Country Hotel and the Baddow Antique Centre.
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Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
—Gail Sheehy (20th century)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)